The words seem to escape me when I need them the most. I’m not looking for a literary justification, the only justification that will be worth it in my eyes is a spiritual one and hopefully it’s a long time before I confront that. I’m just looking for a way to express the cold in my stomach, the way my heart split up the middle when I heard she’d died, the way it still aches right now for her mom, for her dad, for her sister, for her friends.

Maybe there are no words. Certainly there are none when I talk to friends, friends I haven’t spoken to since graduation or before. Is this going to become a regular thing? Phone calls exchanged every year between friends that can’t keep in touch otherwise, only when other friends lose their lives to stupidity?

I know it’s not uncommon. I know it happens everywhere. People die. It’s terrible. Life goes on. I think the thing about it is that our entire community has had to deal with it so frequently, for so long. Parents burying their children. So wrong on so many levels. I sit in relative silence. I’m not hungry. I want to see her again, the girl I’ve known for almost sixteen years.