I lost a friend today. Actually, I lost my friend over two months ago, but I didn't know, because no one he knew when he died, knew me. And so, no one told me he was gone. What happened was, that I knew he was ill, and because we corresponded regularly, when I stopped getting any response to my emails I became concerned. I found the obituary online. Sometimes technology is frighteningly informative.
We met when we were in college; he was a tough city kid who was there on a scholarship and I was a clueless prep school product who went to college because I was expected to. As it turned out, we both loved poetry, and for opposite personal reasons, were careful not to admit this to the wrong people. The difference was that I loved reading it and he loved writing it, which if you think about it, was probably the reason we became friends.
I tried writing poetry, but it was truly awful. I just had too much to say in what seemed like way too small of a space. But the thing about his poetry was he could take that small place and fill it so full that it was always a surprise to realize that his complex thoughts actually fit perfectly. So I gave up and wrote stories instead, and we both heard the universe breathe a collective sigh of relief.
After college, we went our separate ways, largely because in those days that's what men and women who were friends did; in other words, you couldn't just be friends, you had to be something else...or else nothing at all. But the fact that we were both writers in a world where this craft is largely misunderstood (or mostly ignored) led to our continued communication in letter form.
This correspondence followed him as he lived and studied in England and Ireland, and me through marriages and children and a wide range of potential careers. Our literal paths crossed only once when we found ourselves occupying the same teaching position in the same school, not at the same time, but in immediate succession. He had moved on to a new job in another nearby prep school and I, in my first real teaching job, opened my new desk drawer to find a folder of notes on the Shakespeare play I would be teaching, in an all too familiar handwriting.
Our correspondence was by no means regular; sometimes years passed with neither of us being in touch, or periodically, not even in possession of an accurate address with which to do so. But then, one day, I'd get an envelope with some poems enclosed and a note saying, "Tell me what you think of these." Then I would check the return address, and package up my latest story and respond in kind. He always remembered my birthday as well.
Email, of course, made all this easier and more immediate. But the relationship remained much the same. Though we lived closer now, we still never saw each other in person or even talked on the phone, preferring instead to communicate as we always had, through our love of writing. There is just something about stringing words together in this expressive connection with each other that makes what you have to say more specific, more poignant, more perfected than anything could be spoken out loud. I tried my best to do this well, but he always did it better.
When my friend published his first and only volume of poetry, he told me that he did it because he wanted to leave some evidence that he had walked on this earth. I started writing novels for the same reason, and together we joked about how all six people who bought our books would certainly remember us well. Just to be sure we remembered, though, we included each other's names in the book dedications, where they would always confirm our long friendship. But as more and more people disappear from my life, I've come to realize it isn't being forgotten that's the hardest, it's being remembered.
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