Things that make you go ____________

At this moment, a dear and old friend of mine is on her way to the funeral of another good friend of hers. Her friend was killed this past Saturday morning by a hit-and-run driver coming down the wrong way on a one-way road...She was coming home from her late-night shift at the hospital where she worked.

I just found out the guy has turned himself in, which has gotten me thinking about it all again. It's so weird...They'd been friends since the fourth grade, grown up in church together, and then suddenly there's no more. I'd met her. It's difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that a person doesn't exist on Earth anymore, especially someone as young as myself, so I can hardly imagine what the people who were close to her are going through.

It's made stranger by the fact that this whole incident has called to mind a night about eight years ago, when I found out that my best friend had died from an asthma attack. That was even more surreal for me...it had been about a year since my family had moved from San Diego to Raleigh, and I was watching the Stargate movie with my parents when I got a call from a friend I hadn't talked to since we'd left...in fact, I hadn't talked to anyone since we'd left, not even Jennifer. Just silly juvenile flippancy, I guess.

But I sure didn't know how to respond then. I was only 13, and hadn't yet had those deep experiences that serve to connect your soul to someone else's, but still, I knew that she had been my best friend. And even though the cross-country move had diminished my chance of ever seeing her again, that night and that phone call blew it out of water entirely.

Everyone has those moments that are indelibly etched into their memory, those patches of time whose details are raised above the surface of every other normal day...I remember talking to my friend Anya about our other friends, and wondering if she thought badly of me for being able to change the subject from Jennifer so quickly (I mean, what is a 13-year-old supposed to do with that?). I remember wondering why I didn't cry...and I remember doing crunches later that night and suddenly bursting into tears. I remember thinking, in my little-stained 13-year-old mind, that I would be tortured for life because I would remember her every time I heard her quite-common name, or heard anything about Stargate (which in my house, was every week).

And I remember that this did not happen. Pretty quickly life went on as normal--the whole event settled into the back of my mind, not a very deeply-wounding event because of the distance (not just physically, but also temporally). But it still was surreal then, just as it always is now whenever sparked into remembrance for whatever reason.

The loss of a "loved one," as our society has labled it--something from which I have been spared thus far...though it has always, for as long as I can remember, been my greatest fear. Not heights, not spiders, not failure, not death (my own, anyway)...the thought of the loss of a person dear to my heart is about the only thing that truly saps the life out of my own. Funny though, that this has diminished with age...I guess that only makes sense.

Done reminiscing...just want to say, a mi amiga mayor de Carolina del Norte, te amo, chiquita, tengo suerte por tener tu amistad...hang in there.