On Carly Henley's would-be 27th birthday...

I don't suppose many people can imagine Carly Henley at age 27...

A little more life experience garnered right during the window of time where opportunities (both good and bad) are afforded young people who share Carly's looks and gentle spirit.  Who knows how she would have handled them all?  But everyone surely agrees that the world would be a better place had Carly Henley afforded herself the chance to try... and everyone else the chance to witness from near or far just how she did.

Real life is so much randomness  that it isn't really possible to venture a fair idea of what Carly might have been like today, or how many and just which pitfalls would have set themselves up along her path.  Everyone is eventually the mere product of all of the experiences he/she has known, while the things we thought were so important during high school tend to drift down the list of what matters. So we just can't factor-in nearly seven years of would-have-been life, in order to guess who has the most accurate image of Carly Henley in the would-have-been present.

The many family members, friends and contemporaries who helped to make Carly Henley thrive have each endeavored to remain on their individual paths with Carly's 20-year-old image seared permanently in their thoughts.  Most are doing just fine despite each constantly feeling the apparent weight of having once and for some time known the bright human light which was Carly Henley.

This writer not long ago took a first-ever trip to a couple of the Canadian prairie provinces and for expecting long drives with nearly-empty airwaves it made perfect sense to pack Carly Henley's CD "Love the Skin You're In" for the long hours on the open roads.  The CD played as it always does with music that you look forward to as it rolls along.  Modern tech adds a bonus with the way that Carly's name and song titles show up in print on the radio display, making it seem more personal as the road continues to pass beneath your tires.

Time spent in such a setting leaves plenty of opportunity to wonder open-ended about Carly's choice, and her thought process as she came to that choice.  No conclusions are ever reached, but you know that society lost one of the good ones, even if you can't conclude just why it happened.

Her music remains genuinely fun to hear, and the Love The Skin You're In CD was produced so carefully and effectively by her cousins so as to preserve just that appeal.

Seven years have seen quite a number of websites pretending to have the lyrics to Carly's songs available but most are just obscuring the tribute site you're viewing as perhaps the most complete online source for the lyrics to Carly's CD, found right here, and also linked from the main page of this site.

Seven years after the last birthday Carly got to celebrate, her Twitter account is mercifully still accessible to anyone - find it here.  It froze in time the vibe of a young and vibrant person who was genuinely excited about so many of life's simple but meaningful experiences, and her vibes of that era surely helped to warm the core of her many friends, so Carly's warm vibes were not in vain.  Most of those who knew her were in a way blessed to have been allowed to freeze Carly Henley's vast appeal very near to what could have been its zenith.  Nothing could replace the chance to rise and fall with every bump and pothole on Carly's would-have-been real life path today, but those who knew Carly can probably inspire themselves from within merely by playing some of those many YouTube videos and remembering Carly in their own special ways.

Carly Henley's life seemed so enviable from almost every angle and despite her life's conclusion, Carly's enviable appeal seems something near to a constant  of the sort which our society has long valued.  Surely people watch those many videos and imagine themselves in the same shoes while Carly is singing for her friends or having fun and goofing-off with those same people.

After these many years, we can draw few if any conclusions about Carly's fate and especially why it came to be, but few can imagine wanting to leave such surroundings if what we think we can see, from the outside, is really what Carly knew.  This corner still believes that Zoloft altered Carly's perspective considerably and that her final choices were decided behind a cloud of altered outlook which most of us will never have the chance to replicate.

And so for that, the world was deprived of a seemingly wonderful person who deserved to gain from society as much as she gave to that same society during her 20 years with us on Earth.

Imagine Carly Henley celebrating the Great American Eclipse with you in three weeks, and then wonder what if...