It's been two weeks since my friend Stephen died. I checked out his FB page, and found a link to his obituary.

It's so strange. I've actually had this habit since I was 11 or 12 years old of reading obituaries. This guy in high school said I was morbid for doing so, but I've always liked reading about the interesting and long lives of people who lived through things like World War II or the Great Depression. I also like to visit cemeteries, check out tombstones, read the dates, and imagine what sort of lives these people might have lived, especially the ones who lived a long time. I felt a bit of sadness for the ones who didn't get much of a lifetime...and now...now I'm dealing with reading an orbit of someone that I really loved and cared about, with so many memories of I can't possibly list them all out.

1986 to 2013. Seriously. That's it. That's fucking it. It's all my friend Stephen got. It feels obscene. And his orbit just feels so generic, rose-colored, and stock-character. Not that I'm going to rail against his parents for that, of course.

It's just a reminder that you can't fit a whole person's life in a couple of lines. It's impossible to convey that. It's impossible to cite specific memories like the time I listened to him bitch about this snobby resident who made fun of his clothes, or when we watched a squirrel eating a Chik-Fil-A waffle fry while perched on a garbage bin in front of Willard Hall. Or when we were in Dunkin Donuts and I told him that I wrote his name as "Stever" in my cell phone, and he just grabbed my phone and changed it because "Stever" was a nickname that he absolutely refused to go with.

I keep being afraid that in thirty years, I'm going to forget what his voice sounds like, or not be able to remember little moments like the ones I listened above. Like I said, Steve and I didn't have a dramatic friendship- mainly just made up of little moments. I keep going in my head, trying to remember as much as I can about him, like how he moved and how he talked, so that he stays fresh and 3-d in my head, because I don't want him to fade into memories as some generic nice former college friend that died when we were just three years out of college. At 50-something, I want my memories of him to be as vibrant as they are now.

I had an e-friend tell me that he was worried that I was idealizing the guy, but I think I'm actually actively trying NOT to do that, because I want to keep him in my mind as he was, not who I wanted him to be. I feel like if I do that, I'll be able to keep him "real", in a sense. So I want to remember the warts. There's this part of me that's so pissed off that Steve flushed away all of his potential to try out heroin, and I keep wondering if maybe I had called him that night something might have been different.

But then there's the logical part of me that knows that there isn't anything I could have done. I know it and I accept it. Still.

I'm past the intense grieving...still some cries now and then, but not the intense sobbing that I experienced in the first few days, sobbing so intense I needed to hold on to something to stay up. I can even laugh and feel happy about something now, although I'm still mostly just going through the motions, and not a day goes by that I don't think of him.

I even managed to have fun on my 28th birthday, although a part of me just kept thinking about the fact that Steve will never have a 28th birthday. He'll never become the great counselor that I knew he was going to become, and all of the people that he was going to help...he can't now. It's such a colossal waste of a man that I knew was going to do great things with his life.

It's weird. I was jealous of Steve. I thought he had it more together than I did, I knew the guy had far more of a superior brain than I did, and I was jealous that he pretty much had a job guaranteed for him as a grief counselor once he got his degree. Steve wasn't going to flail around post-Grad like I've been doing.

But now that bright future has been wiped out. And I feel like I kind of lost my Quarterback, in a sense. Who am I going to call when I know I need a verbal bitchslap on all of my B.S.? Who is going to be brutally honest with me about where I might be going wrong? And who will have all of that backed up by the fact that we grew up with each other in college? No one. I'll never have that again. I'll make friends, but as someone once said to me...the friends who grew up with you understand you in a way that the friends that you made as an older person don't. The one person in this world that understood everything there was to know about 21 to 24 year old Jeremy...that guy's gone, and I can't ever replace that.

I kind of feel like there's this part of me that is gone now, and I'll never be quite the same again. I know I'll recover, and I am recovering, but I can't ever go back entirely to who I was two weeks ago.