Watching

I wasn’t really following Mischa Barton by the time the news broke. The O.C. had ended years before, and she’d drifted into that strange zone where actors you used to see everywhere just quietly disappear. Bad movies, failed pilots, that slow fade the industry does so well. Then the story landed—attempted suicide—and I felt that helpless sting you get when celebrity makes you aware of someone’s real suffering from a distance you can’t cross.

There’s nothing to do with knowledge like that. You’re not her friend. I’d watched her perform a character on television when I was younger. The gap between that and actually mattering in someone’s life is almost total. But you sit with it anyway because she’s a real person and something terrible happened and you used to know her name, so now you know her pain too, and there’s no equation that lets you do anything with it.

I don’t think about her much anymore. The news cycle carried on. Sometimes you contemplate people and what happens to them and then you forget, and that forgetting feels like a small betrayal of the caring, except caring from outside was never real anyway. It was always just watching.