I don't have any pictures from the one weird weekend I spent in Christine's actual company; I don't even know if any were taken, but if they were they got lost in any number of the shuffles that we've all gone through between then and now.
But I can tell you these two hopefully relevant and entirely contradictory things:
1. Any space she inhabited felt like her home, like she built it, decorated it, and fed people in it, and those spaces felt smaller once she had left them.
And.
2. The lady drove like a madwoman when she had a drink or three in her, and no matter how many times we ended up circling DC on the beltway that weekend, one car behind and trying desperately not to let her slip in the flow of traffic, we clung to our seats like she was our luck; we clung to our seats as if we knew that to lose her was to lose our tenuous connection to something beyond where we were sleeping that night.
Christine inhabited that weird little home in Bethesda (Bethesda? I think Bethesda) for the summer, but she also inhabits this place, and our memories, and the lives of the people who knew her better and loved her more than me.
The world feels smaller now that she's left it, and I've lost that tenuous connection.
And I'm so sorry.