Grief is not something you can look in the face for more than forty-eight hours. Or I can’t. I got out of the house today – I studied, I got my new ID card, I started exploring the luminous resources of the Hopkins library. I filled out the paperwork for my new apartment on St. Paul.

But now here I am, at home again. I took out the trash in the rain, and I came upstairs to the computer, and he is still dead. It really happened.

I got the news of an old friend’s death on Saturday morning, at his own hands, as they say.

I spent this weekend not at Artscape, like all other Baltimoreans, but talking to our mutual friends, stunned and uncomprehending. I haven’t left the house since I found out.
Some of the writers went floating down the river in inner tubes today. I did not go.

I spent today in a frenzy of composition, writing a fifty-page-long story of every incident I remembered from the ten years of our friendship – incorporating emails and all the data I had, to try to make sense of his death. It’s done now.

I thought, initially, that it would be a tribute to him that I would put up here. But it’s far too personal. I may say something about him here, someday. But not now. Forgive me for quoting Orlando Legolas, but, “For me, the grief is still too near.”

No one who reads this blog knows him. But he was twenty-eight, and he was the greatest writer of my generation I have ever known. I know many very good writers. He was the best. And he was also my friend.

I will miss him every day of my life and all the days after that, too.

My father suggested that I go into one of Maryland’s many Catholic churches and light a candle for him – I think I will do that tomorrow. I had to write the story first, but now that it’s done, I could do that.

If you are the praying type, please keep my friend in your prayers. I don’t know why I can’t say his name here, but I can’t. I can’t. But if you pray for the young writer who is dead, I think that will be good enough.

Thank you, whoever you are, you who are reading, for continuing to ride alongside me in this wagon caravan / Big Thunder Mountain / Cadillac Escalade / velocipede / called life.

That’s enough. I’m exhausted – I’ve been writing for ten hours. I hope that now I will be able to sleep. A few minutes ago, Amelia the cat led another, larger, more hostile black cat into my room. I have no idea how they got in, but it was really creepy to see two black cats walk around the door when you only expect one. I shut the door, and I’m going to bed.

Tomorrow I will go to the church and the library. And something else will happen, the day after that.

It’s going to rain soon. An old friend stayed with me over the weekend, and now she has returned to the city to which I always intend to return, but never seem to – San Francisco.

I know she is gone, but I keep seeing her everywhere – once in the revolving rotisserie door of the station staircase, once framed in candlelight negative in the glass window of a train, once talking trackside on a cell phone, once wearing ballet shoes like toy boats. The city is scattered with her stand-ins.

My mother and I discussed the things we forget the other day. We didn’t talk about the things that, in compensation, you remember more than once.

Dear blog, I write you from the laptop of my friend, slowly poisoning my sinuses with cat hair, preparing to assist her in a move from one Ravenswood dwelling to another Ravenswood dwelling. I have arrived early to steal time on her computer.

I have spent so much time on trains today that I expect the door of this apartment to suddenly sway open and chant, “Doors open on the right.” This entire apartment could start moving parallel to the Red and Brown lines. I’ve been sleeping here to help her in the evenings and mornings, which makes the move-prep easier, but the commute longer.

We have, as one always does when one moves, been using the opportunity of putting her whole life in boxes to take stock of it. She has also been giving me all of her (too small) clothing. There is something so natural about it, though – the impulse to just give stuff away as you go. You can’t take it with you, or if you do, you’ll be sorry. Every tiny T-shirt that she assures me really does fit me is one less she has to carry with her. I cannot say no to them.

Outside, the trains continue to move. The trees are starting to flower.