monique

i have a sieve for a brain so i can't be sure i even remember this girl's name properly, but all i know is that whenever i think of monique i get a sad and troubled feeling.
it was my first year of university and i was still a child, only 16 and always trying to turn female friends into my mother. monique was a couple of years older, small, slender and cute, and played pool better than any of the boys at the uni bar. she smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and listened to great music, introducing me to neil young (i must have known "heart of gold" but i'd never heard "down by the river" and in her little white car on the way to the beach it was a revelation), donovan (not quite so cool but still cool) and ed kuepper.
she lived just a few houses away from campus so i took to inviting myself over and sometimes staying the night. i was still living at home in the suburbs at that point, so staying over at a friend's house was an act of freedom for me. also, one of her housemates was good friends with a boy i had a crush on, so in my mind i was killing two birds with one stone, although nothing came of that.
after a while of putting up with me, monique said "guy, i think we'd get on better if you didn't come over to my house so often". i was hurt but i loved her for it.
despite her air of assurance, her great dancing and her skill at pool, the thing was that monique had no confidence. she thought no boy would ever look at her and didn't realise whenever one did, which was often. maybe that's why she stuck with the first guy who made his intentions unavoidably clear, a slightly creepy guy i think i met once at a party, who got monique into heavier drugs than pot or acid. everyone at uni was doing those except me - i hated pot and was too scared to try anything stronger in case i exposed something unacceptable about myself.
for the last year or two of uni i didn't see too much of monique, she finished (dropped out or graduated i'm no longer sure) and i have a feeling that i was a little worried about her, although that might just be hindsight. in 1996 i graduated and moved away to melbourne, but in perth for a holiday a short time later i heard that monique had gone to cambodia with her boyfriend and there died of a heroin overdose.