I had this totally weird and worrisome phone call yesterday afternoon.

It was about 3, and I was at my desk at work when my cell phone rang. The reception sucks in the concrete bunker that pretends to be my office, so I went out in the hall to take the call. It was a woman. No wrong number, as she knew my name. I thought she said "Hi, it's Eli", a friend of mine, but as she started to talk I didn't really recognize the voice, plus she sounded strange and kind of fucked up. I had just decided it definately wasn't Eli, and I'm sure my voice sounded weird because I was all confused, and I was just about to ask again who it was, when she hung up.

I puzzled over it on and off all day. Stupidly, I have no call display on my phone, and I couldn't *69, so I had no way of knowing who it was, but I started to think it might be an old friend of mine, Sally. Sure enough, when I got home there was a message on my home phone, just brief, and no phone number to call her back.

All morning, it lurked in the back of my head, bothering me. You see, I haven't talked to Sally in almost 2 years. She used to be my very best friend. We lived together all through University and for 2 years past that. We got into all kinds of troubles and adventures together. She was such as smart, beautiful, feisty, but troubled young woman. She always felt sort of lost because I, and almost all of our other friends, were in theatre, and all knew what we wanted to do when we left school, and she had all this potential, but she just floated around, never knowing what she wanted to do with her life. And it didn't help that he older brother was also an actor, and kind of a golden boy.

Anyhow, a year or two after graduation, she met this guy. He was a few years older than her and very intense, and he was the rock & roll critic/writer for the major paper. He always seemed like he lived the high-life, and he liked to party a lot. He was married at the time he met her, and they had this instant and powerful attraction, and it was kind of like two speeding trains on a certain collission course. He left his wife, they moved in together, and then they got married and bought a beautiful old house. Sal really didn't do much of anything, but James made lots of money and they seemed fine. They kept partying, harder and harder as time went on. I remember being upstairs at their house on their wedding day, helping Sally do her hair, and James came up stairs with some heroin for them to smoke. That was the first time I realized what they had really gotten in to.

Flash foward a couple of years. Sally's brother died of aids and she (of course) took it really hard. She said things to me like it should have been her who died, not him, since he had all this promise and she was just a screw up. She was high all the time, and a pretty hard-core alcoholic. She had an incident where she got "mugged" and broke her jaw and collar bone, and was in the hospital for several days, but she told me later that she was pretty sure she had really just been so drunk she'd falled down and did it to herself. She tried to go to rehab once, but she didn't last, and James wouldn't quit drinking around her.

Eventually, about 2 years ago, James lost his job. The paper agreed to send him to rehab, but he wouldn't go, so they fired him. They lost touch with everyone who wasn't part of that particular world. He started selling heroin. The last time I saw Sally, we were supposed to go for lunch, and she was supposedly not drinking, but she skipped the food and went straight to the booze and she was so screwed up after drinking 3 beers that I had to call T to help me get her home. After we dropped her off, I just cried and cried, realizing I was watching a dear friend die and there was nothing I could do about it.

Last year, on my birthday, she called and I didn't call her back. I just couldn't. In September, I ran into an old friend of theirs, who I see from time to time. She has also completely lost touch with them, for the same reasons, and she said to me "You know we're going to be attending one of their funerals in the next year or two." What a thought.

So ... I couldn't help but worry about why she would be calling me out of the blue. I spent an hour when I got home, calling people that I thought might have their phone number (they've changed it several times in the last few years), and trying to see if anyone had spoken to her. I finally called my friend Sherry. She and Sally and I all lived together for a couple of years in school. They grew up together in this northern crappy oil town, Fort McMurray. I couldn't talk to Sherry, as it turns out she just went in to the hospital last night for brain surgery this morning (she's terribly epileptic and they're doing that surgery where they try to shut down the part of your brain that causes the seizures). But her husband told me that Sal had indeed called Sherry yesterday too. It seems she was trying to find somewhere to go to get away from James. I guess she tried some shelters, but because she wouldn't say that James was physically abusing her, just mentally, they wouldn't take her. And I guess she was pretty messed up, drunk or high or some combination of the two. But I can't help but think they suck for turning her away. Anyhow, she was looking for somewhere to go. Sherry and Brendan couldn't help her, as they were on their way to check Sherry into the hospital.

So now, I'm still trying to track down some way to reach her. Brendan said he didn't think she was at home. I guess that's good. I've phoned her folks in Victoria and left a message to see if they have a number for her.

I don't have a clue what to do, and I don't know what I would do if I found her. She's such a total wreck. She needs so much help and she hasn't, so far, seemed able or willing to get it. But I feel like I suck shit as a friend for not being more able to deal with this. There must be something? I don't want her to die, and I know the fact that she called me means she's really in trouble.

Fuck.