All of our friends will go away, they're going to better places

I hope you'll excuse me if this post is scattered, but I can't seem to find an orderly way to say what I mean right now.  


Son Tran,


God, I hate that I'm writing this.  It feels like a goodbye letter, and I can tell you that the last thing I want to say to you, is goodbye. 


I think you would hate the idea of me writing about you.  Sure, you'd like the attention, but you probably wouldn't agree with anything I said.  You'd ask me to take it down, I'd say no.  You'd end up blackmailing me saying that you'd start a vicious rumor about me around the Mass Communications department.  I'd eventually cave and take it down.  That's how it would've played out.  I know you too well. 


God, I'm going to miss you Son Tran.

I've got to write this to you before I become to be too far away from it.  I don't mean to say that in a week's time I'll have gotten over it, but instead that every day that passes, every second that ticks by leaves me further away from you.  It's been five days, and already I feel that my memories of you are fading.  Yesterday I couldn't recall what your laugh sounded like.  This morning I found myself thinking about what you might say in a specific situation, and I couldn't for the life of me find your words. 


I just think that you should know that you were my closest friend.  Though I've had friends I've known longer, that have proved themselves to me countless times, you were my closest friend.  You were the one who was able to keep up with my day to day ridiculousness, the one who had to put up with me on a regular basis.  You  handled it deftly, like no one else could.  For that, I thank you. 


I don't think I've ever felt this alone.  It's not that I'm just sad that you won't be my constant companion anymore.  I can deal with being alone, what I can't deal with is you not being here at all.  I'd gladly take a world in which you were still here, even if it were a world in which we never knew each other.  Because the world needs you in it.  I could handle not knowing you, if it meant that someone else got to experience what it was like to be your friend. 


Saturday night Katie tried to get me to get a tattoo to commemorate you.  I knew I didn't need to do that, because I don't need any further reminders that you're not here.  I don't need a badly inked scar to remind me that you're gone.  It's only been five days, and yet I can feel it everywhere.  The night you died, I studied for a government test with the notes you took last semester (and they were laden with the profanity the world had come to expect from you).  Saturday while serving as a pall bearer at your funeral, I wore the suit you helped me pick out last February when I was a pall bearer at my grandmother's funeral.  Today I ate the Vietnamese food that I love, that I never would have tried in the first place without your insistence.  Simply put, you are already everywhere.  I cannot escape the person that you helped me to become. 

And you did help me become this person.  I've known you so long that you are a part of me, a part of who I am.  When I met you, you were the boy who passed out fortune cookies form his backpack between classes.  The boy who created line dances during second lunch. The boy who let me know that it was okay to be different, to be loud and unruly, to be myself a hundred percent of the time.  And then you were the man who smoked too much, the man who did what he wanted, damn the consequences.  As much as I had learned from you in the past, you also became somewhat of a cautionary tale of sorts, the kind in which a person has too much freedom, and no idea what to do with it.  You died the way you lived, independent and reckless. 


I haven't quite grasped the concept that you're no longer here.  I can't think of you in past tense yet.  It's still "he is, he does", instead of "he had, he did", and it's going to be hard to start thinking of you as a part of my past.  I just can't make sense of this.


Though, if there's one last thing I'd like to tell you, it's of a memory I have.  A couple of weeks ago you were having a particularly bad day, and you called me to talk you down from your crazy as you usually did.  I don't know how we got on the topic, but I mentioned how fortunate I believed myself to be to call you my friend.  I told you that I know how seldom we get to choose who our friends are.  It's not up to us to decide, usually.  I did not seek you out, but it happened anyways.  I said that even if I had been able to choose my friends, I would have still picked you.  I'd pick you, again and again, no question.  So, I'd like to thank you Son Tran for coming into my life, and tell you that I'll never forgive you for leaving it so soon. 




Your Friend, Jordan Gribble