What I Was
Heidi Haru (1980-2047)The president of something. The president of everything.
Somebody’s cool aunt.
A gay parade – fun, funny, flamboyant, and a little unsettling.
A writer’s writer.
The dean.
A pair of pants that make you feel incredibly cool. These pants add weight when you’re feeling skinny and take it off when you’re feeling fat. These pants have special pockets for a knife and a book. These pants have area codes behind the fly zipper.
All of these describe Heidi Haru who is presumed dead after disappearing Tuesday before last while on a winter’s walk; speculation has been directed at a “lady-sized hole” in the ice on the lake.
Heidi Haru was an ambitious, unrelenting, but generally well-liked writer whose human impact is arguably greater than her literary one. In public, Heidi tended towards periods of solitude while she wrote. One friend commented, “She was often really difficult to get a hold of for long stretches of time.” However, when she was accessible, Heidi was “like an escape of sorts – sometimes a realistic one, sometimes a dream-like one.”
Friends and family seem to have a convergence on a melee of adjectives – brilliant, arrogant, hurtful, generous, hilarious, insincere, driven – all equally contradictory and accurate. A close friend remarked, “[Heidi] was like the small principality between chaos and stability. Something like Punkrockistan, but not cliché and stupid.”
Heidi loved English Breakfast tea with milk, singing, and the sounds of traffic outside her loft window. She first fell in love at fifteen. She last fell in love at sixty. Heidi was prone to fits of uncontrollable tears prompted simply by recalling tender moments from favorite films. This, evidentially, was a family tradition, the entire family often rendering waitstaff mute and helpless as they wept and recounted heartbreaking movie magic.
These emotional outbursts earned Heidi a reputation of being something of “an earthquake-tidal wave-hurricane-flood.” She was particularly fond of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre.
Though unanimously described as a professional success, there appears to be some confusion as to what it is that Heidi Haru actually did professionally. This perhaps contributes to the fact that few of Heidi’s friends were able to accurately name the city of her last residence.
Some noted that she was like Los Angeles: hip, glamorous, creative, hyper, sometimes insincere, inclusive with contrasts. Yet others claimed she was really most like New York: too much volume to easily quantify, but too hard edged to be LA. There were calls for Las Vegas: loud, unashamed, full of sex. There were calls for poets’ favorite spots in Paris: sensitive and lovely.
But most cited the rough parts of Chicago: stairs that lead up to an apartment and an open closet, the smallness of it, crammed full of her stuff, her own small kitchen and bed.
Whatever it is that Heidi actually did all day, there is unanimous agreement that it was directed. “The sheer force of her determination was overwhelming,” a close friend reminisced. “Heidi would say, ‘I want this to happen’ and woe for anyone in her way!”
Heidi excelled in academia, paying her way through all manners of post-secondary education with scholarships and grants. Heidi enjoyed a short tenure as a professional taiko player in Phoenix. She travelled to Gallaudet University to study deaf cultural stories; she was fluent in ASL. She played rugby for the University of New South Wales, Australia. She wrote plays, poems, and stories – all of which were relatively well received and composed.
“Heidi was unapologetic and uncompromising about her pursuits,” said a friend, sometimes to her detriment. Heidi’s penchant for near-instant success in a variety of fields made her well-liked often before she was well-known. A valued colleague remarked, “When I knew Heidi (though I never felt I knew her well), she was one of my favorite people.”
Heidi’s sense of adventure and daring were infectious, often verging on the pathological. At the drop of a hat she might decide to abandon a career, move to a new city, shave off her hair. A quiet night at Stanford might easily become a balmy night wandering the steam tunnels of Palo Alto. A simple visit might become a week’s tryst into a multimedia sloth extravaganza, complete with fulfilling the dreams of friends who could never order that perfect combination of pizza toppings. A longing for her sister would become a plane ticket to Paris without so much as a consultation with finances. “Heidi was capable of getting stuck for some of the right reasons and maybe some of the wrong ones.”
Though she could be incandescent and a delight to be around, if even for a brief period, Heidi was guilty of not applying her phenomenal determination sometimes when she should have. She was unaccustomed to failure and met it fully without aid from grace or style. After leaving a prestigious doctoral program at the University of Chicago, Heidi allowed herself to fully stagnate for several years before reemerging as an unstoppable force.
“At her worst, Heidi could be isolated and stalled,” reflected a friend. “She was wonderfully confident yet beautifully insecure all at the same time.” Heidi could spend half an hour in the soda aisle of grocery stores, debating a three dollar purchase, immediately after blowing through hundreds of dollars in DVDs and books.
Born in Los Angeles and straight into a blood transfusion, Heidi grew up in the plots of novels and films she loved, though apparently splitting her childhood between L.A. and Phoenix. As an adult, she was really, amazingly, extraordinarily messy, some sort of cross between Pat Robertson, Bukowski, and Bono, with a bit of Margaret Cho and Salvador Dali thrown in to taste.
“Heidi was like no one else I know, thank God,” said a close friend. “For the present purpose I can only say that I’m pretty sure she wasn’t a liquid. A commissioned vessel will not give her a shape.” Heidi delighted in asking people, especially the newly acquainted, difficult and personal questions, always equally willing to answer them herself. Her favorite emotion to experience was bittersweet.
In all, Heidi was the family home she grew up in – freedom, creation, comfort, love, and kindness.
Or maybe that house on fire.
