Revel in the sweet ...

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Bear with me.

We are all riveted by this Taylor Behl story, which gets crazier and curiouser by the day. I will not even attempt to weigh in on the facts, because what we are getting from the news, I'm sure, is bits and pieces of the puzzle. I admit that out of perhaps a shameful morbid curiosity, I have checked out Taylor's page at myspace.com, the one on which she uses the name "Bitter."

Bitter.

Her mother has described her as a good kid and from everything I've read so far she seems to be a typical, well-adjusted kid. But she may also be a good kid who has gotten in over her head with some shady people and a lifestyle that courts darkness more than light. If you read the list of her favorite music it's like a struggle between the dark and the light: Marilyn Manson and Edith Piaf. Rammstein and the Corrs. Movies: The Crow and When Harry Met Sally.

Bittersweet, is more like it. And my guess would be with an emphasis on the sweet. The kid is loved. The list of messages, short and sweet, begging for her return are made more heartbreaking by the names and pictures of the friends who posted them. They have world-weary sneers and squints peering out from behind greasy bangs and platinum mohawks and they use screennames like bitchface and I Smoke Tampons and Chaos and i'll have the HEARSE follow the ambulance. But they post words like: "My prayers are with you." From someone called my "heart is black as coal," this: tay tay :*(

A guy calling himself "for some the soul is mortal" writes, "ok how about this? you come home, and i'll start sleeping and eating the way i used to. deal? not an hour goes by where i'm not worried sick about you."

These kids are terrified and crazed with worry for their friend. And it all seems so much more poignant because of this image they try to project, way beyond just coolness or detached irony but of black-hole darkness and the notion that death is cool. I could be way off base, but I look at the pictures of these kids and those ridiculous names they give themselves and I see just that — kids trying on identities like ill-fitting suits. We've all done that when we were younger but, still, why go into the depths of darkness?

One of Taylor's friends on the page, a guy named Bobby, wrote her this poem:

"Bitter? Well...
Looking through the window pane,
she caught her skewed reflection,
a face deprived of color,
she screamed with shrill inflection;
... and in the glassy ruin,
that crashed atop her feet,
she subjugated her bitterness
and reveled in the sweet."

May Taylor and her friends have many, many chances to revel in the sweet.