How is it with you, my friend?

Here, things are the same as always -- except that we all miss you very much. That's me and Harriet and Jimmy and Lydia and Sue, I mean. The others miss you too, but we are the ones who are really destitute and lost without you. We don't know how to live without your daily injections of witticism and humor....

I'm sorry. That's such a sad way to begin a letter... and you were never sad. You were always cheerful and full of life, so full of life; I thought that you must be an incarnation of that primal force, a distillation of life's essence, an elixir derived of all the happy days anyone ever spent....

I'm sitting in the corner booth at Jim's Ice Cream Parlor, just as we always used to do, twirling a white rose between my fingertips. We don't come here anymore; Harriet and James and Sue and I. It reminds us too much of you. But right now I want to remember you. I'm sitting here, alone, looking at the black and white checkerboard of the floor stretching from my booth in a long diagonal to the counter of the soda fountain. I remember how the school sold out the Homecoming dance one year, so you got Jim to move the tables so that you and Corianne and me and Stephanie could dance the night away on this very floor....

Sue loved you. Did you know that? She's been crying her eyes out ever since you left. She's been crying and hurting inside and wishing that she could hate you instead of love you... but she can't. She loved the way you smiled when she talked and the way you were able to laugh at any problem and most of all, that you always called her Suzanne instead of Susan or Sue.... The little things.... You really should think about coming back just foir her sake....

But what am I talking about? You can't come back, and if you did you'd probably just go bug-eyed bonkers thinking about Josephine instead of appreciating the one who really loved you. You probably would trade in Sue's happiness for one quick peck at Josephine's mouth without ever seeing the glow in Sue's eyes every time she thinks of you. You'd probably compromise any friendship you had for one long, deep kiss with Josephine Dett! You'd probably....

I'm sorry. I'm unfair. It's just that seeing Sue so upset and knowing that it's all because of you and -- Damn it! We were a team! Together! The two of us! But now you're gone and I'm still here and I'm alone, facing all the problems that you left behind and.... I don't know any longer. I just don't know about anything. Now that you're gone. I'm sorry....

You really should have stayed. Here, with us. Instead of gallavantin' off to places unknown and far away. I mean, no matter how horrible life here was or how much better the place you're at now is, we were, we are, your friends. We want you, we need you... we love you. If you'd told us what you were feeling, why you wanted to leave, anything, we would have listened. We might have been able to help. Your life was good and I just can't understand what was so horribly wrong that you couldn't have asked your friends for help.

But now it's too late; now you're gone, never to return.

There's an empty spot in my heart that I used to think was reserved for Stephanie -- but now I find that it was really reserved for you. It was reserved there so that I could place you and all the memories about you; the picnics, the parties, the grumbling-about-teachers; into it for another day. It was placed there so that I'd never forget.

But I'm already starting to forget. The memory of your face, your smile, your laugh... they are but blurry reproductions of the reality which was you. Like this flower, this white rose that I hold in my hand. It has been cut off from its parent, snipped while still in the infancy of its birth. Does the parent remember it? Does the bush from whom it came remember the tiny bud so recently sheared from its loving branches?

It remembers. It remembers that it once held life -- sweet, precious, beautiful -- upon its boughs, that once a thing of perfect beauty had hung upon it, an adornment that brought pleasure to it and to others. It remembers that that perfect beauty had been plucked from its proper place, stripped from the stem that gave it life. It knows that it is dead. And in its way, it mourns the loss, not bringing forth new blossoms in winter to replace its darling summer child.

The rose is from your garden.

I cut it from the branch with my own hands, with my own knife.

I cried, then, and wondered why. Why had you done it? Why had you left us alone? I cried for a long time and let my tears water the bush whose precious blossom I had stolen.

Then I cut another piece, stem and leaves this time.

I planted it in your grave.

Some day new leaves and healthy branches and a white rose will shade the path you took away from us....

I've forgiven you. I want you to know that.

It was hard. I want you to know that too.

I couldn't understand why you'd leave us, at first, why you'd destroy yourself when it seemed that life itself flowed through your veins.

But it was only blood after all. Warm, red blood like the rest of us. Warm, fragile life's liquid that you spilled onto the floor of your room.

I still don't know why you wanted to end it, but I have learned to accept it. I sit here, in Jim's Ice Cream Parlor, remembering the good times and spinning your rose.