Trying to Understand

I can’t sleep, so I’m going over what I know. I’m not sure why I’m still trying to play amateur detective. She’s dead, I can’t help her. But I guess that’s how I am- I have to keep poking at something, turning it around until I understand it. I can’t believe I can write about this. It’s only been a week. I’m going to her funeral tomorrow, driving down in the morning, and hopefully I can get some sleep before then. It all feels so far away.

I keep going over past entries in my blog. It’s ironic that I spent all this time wondering why I kept updating, only to turn to it constantly for reference and information. In hindsight, I’m glad I kept writing.

Jill was found in Texas. Assuming that’s where the woman got hold of her, she was heading east-ish. So she was definitely lying about where she was on her twitter, and probably to Pete Biggs (the guy from The World That Never Was who has commented a few times). I can’t see a reason for her to do that, other than fear that she be traced, but it’s very strange that she should lie to Pete as well. As far as I know he wasn’t interested in tracking her down. (If you were, and have any info, can you please email me, Pete?)

The way that her body was found is similar to how slenderman victims are found in stories. In fact it’s almost the same, except without the black plastic bags that seem so prevalent…so she either told her killer about her delusion or the killer was also a believer in the slenderman myth, and was trying to make it seem real.

There are at least three people involved in this thing. There's Jill, the woman on the phone who may or may not be the killer, and whoever burned the posters around my house. This last person may or may not be the guy in the blue scarf, and I'm not sure if what's been happening in Tucson is directly related to what happened to Jill, but it seems logical, right?

I've been talking to Jill's mom on the phone pretty frequently. Even though she's dealing with her own grief, she's been kind enough to keep me updated on what the police are doing. Apparently the flowers she got were bought from a grocery store near her house, and the police haven't been able to find any fingerprints or any way of tracing them, really...so that implicates yet another person in this crime, or else it's Tucson Guy again, and he made a day trip up to Tempe.

The thing that really gets me about this is that, if Tucson Guy is actually behind all the stuff in Arizona, why is he doing it? It makes me wonder (and I'd never consider this if it weren't so late) if this Slender Man myth isn't something darker, something a bunch of crazies have latched onto and are using to justify...no, that's really stupid. But something about this whole thing just bothers me, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like there's something I'm missing, some vital piece of the puzzle that I've dismissed as unimportant.

But that's absolute hubris, that comes from reading too much Agatha Christie. Real life isn't as tidy as a mystery novel, and in real life I won't solve this crime, the police will. Or maybe no one will. And that's the thing that I'm afraid of- that we're all missing that puzzle piece and it'll never be found, and the killer will get away free and kill again. Real life is messy, it's filled with dangling plot threads. That's why I like writing fiction so much, that's why I love design- because I'm in control of what happens, and if a line doesn't go where I want it to or a loose end isn't resolved, I can erase and put that line in the right place, tie that loose end back up. I can't do that in real life.

I'm rambling. This entry's going nowhere, and I'm getting a headache from looking at the screen in the dark. And I haven't figured out anything at all.