J said - Living Dead

I try to avoid it, and I usually manage to. But in the past two days, three things have conspired to shove me back down memory lane.

1) My mother called me, and asked me if I was coming home for a certain persons graduation. Ah. I think I'll call him Little One. I told her that I didn't even know if he WAS graduating, and I most certainly would not be coming.


2) This guy, on the bus that I ride home every day. looks JUST like him from the back. He is a little taller that Little One, but other than that he looks the exact same. He speaks to me on the bus, and we manage to have interesting conversations.


3) The sky today. I'm not quite sure how or why, but as I looked up into the absolute blueness of the sky, I thought of him. I don't know what memory was started by that, because Little One isn't the type to lay in the grass and stare at a perfectly blue sky. But something about the blueness of the sky and the sun and the tress made me think of him.


And I think that with every thought of him, he retreats a little. He was/is/has always been of a suicidal leaning. He often talked about dying before he was 21, and once he passed that birthday somehow I wasn't really worried about him anymore. But over these last few days, I realized that is exactly what he is, at least to me. Dead, his absence leves a little hollow under my heart. The hollow was intensely tender for a while. but it is healing. I have found new friends, and I have new paths. I no longer feel abandoned by him, I just feel as if he went on his own way down a path that it is not time for me to travel. I wish him well on the other side, and I hope that in death, he succeeds as well as he did in life.


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For some reason I don't want to end there. But I think I will. I wish that I had some sort of poem or prose or quote to go here...but I guess that is how death is. Open and unending.


J.