Some people experience significant moments in their life. A moment when their total existence and being changes into a different and sometimes unreal form, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst. It happens to the best of us and at different stages of our lives. I thought I was immune to drastic and radical changes in my life, but my youthful enthusiasm for life and my supposed emotional immortality couldn’t stand up to the test of one particular summer. One that I’ll never forget, even if I desperately want to.

It was a muggy summer, the kind you just want to be over and done with so you could escape from the oppressive heat and moisture. It was only just two weeks into the school holidays and I was already beginning to wallow in the boredom that comes after all the Christmas cheer and New Year celebrations. Most of my friends had gone away with their parents for the holidays, leaving me with me, myself and I for company. As fun as that sounded, I still needed something to do and someone to do it with. And that someone was Anna.

She was my next door neighbor. She was ‘quirky’, for lack of a better word and she sometimes bordered on outright weird. She was able to change her moods quicker that you could say split personality. She swapped from being friendly and bubbly one minute to being withdrawn and solemn the next. I figured she would be as bored as I was because I never saw her with any other friends. Her parents were friends with mine so I had no trouble convincing her to spend time with me to ease my boredom.

During the rest of the school holidays we went everywhere together. We were almost like twins. We liked the same TV shows, the same foods, the same guys. Anna was reckless, often daring me to go swimming in the dam where three kids had drowned a few summers before and other crazy things that escalated to stealing my parents car to go joyriding. Things that every so often threatened our lives. But towards the end of the summer she started getting more and more dangerous. She was a risk to herself and to me. She started talking about death and pain and ways of killing people. I wasn’t too worried because I thought it was just one of her mood swings, a random group of thoughts that would pass and she’d soon be the extrovert she usually was.

I later found out that Anna had been through a lot at school. Her teachers hated her. Her peers hated her, hell even the dorm cat had it in for her. She was just too weird. She didn’t fit in and everybody made sure she knew it. I also didn’t know she had eating problems, and was diagnosed with anorexia and severe depression a couple of months previous. But I didn’t know. She never told me anything and when I quizzed her about why she didn’t eat she just said she wasn’t feeling well. I realised now I was being naïve. I guess it was my inability to read her properly, I couldn’t see past myself and I cant help thinking I could have helped her, maybe to stop a tragedy, maybe to stop my guilt.

On the last day of the school holidays I went over to her place and knocked on her door. I can remember the dull throb of the heat and the stink of rubber and exhaust from the road. Everything is so clear in my mind, so vivid. I can remember Anna’s mother telling me that Anna was upstairs and I should feel free to go and get her. I can remember my slow, almost lethargic walk up the stairs, and I can remember myself opening her bedroom door. I can also remember Anna hanging from the ceiling by a rope.

A while ago if someone told me I could be changed by one single moment in my life, I would have laughed at them. Nothing has changed. The physical world is still the same. The sky isn’t purple and the sun still rises and sets, but to me, in my mind and my own private world, nothing will ever be the same again.