An Irreparable Earthquake in the Fabric of Friendship

Since birth I’ve been working on a patchwork quilt of my life. It’s colorful, it’s fun, and I love looking back on it, but it’s even more fun to create the new pieces, the additions, the new experiences that add to my already beautiful quilt. I’ve be doing this for barely over two decades, and hopefully I’ll have lots more years to put this thing together. In some places the stitches are rough and in some places the fabric’s a bit tattered or frayed, but it’s all coming together, and in retrospect, it all looks quite good. I have to admit that there are some lumps sewn in that I figured will need to be aspirated when they get out of hand, meaning too many failed relationships or other things that have me hiding under it rather than constructing further pieces. Perhaps some day I might turn to therapy or spirituality or some other form of mental, emotion, or spiritual dry-cleaning where the whole beautiful mess will be examined and analyzed square by square.

But I don’t know what to do with the square I am currently in the process of constructing. What am I supposed to do when a friend my own age dies? He was only 22. Really 22 and one day when death intruded, taking my friend without permission or rhyme or reason and blotting out the fantasy that I will live forever. But worse, as I looked back at my beautiful quilt I see a gaping hole where he had been, where the times spent, the laughter and the ‘oh my Gods’ used to reside. The fabric, ripped and flapping in the wind looks so raw and I don’t know how to fix it. Those memories – my first kiss, though forced in a playful and fun way, and the dozens of others that he tried to plant on my unsuspecting mouth, long conversations trying to understand this passionate, reckless nut but enjoying his fun loving attitudes and love of life. All my memories are now ghosts that haunt me and force me to question my life. It disturbs my peace of mind and makes me not want to ever sleep again as sleep is just the bedfellow of death. It disturbs me as do lesser questions like why people my age are getting married and having children. Things no longer make sense. Guilt and fear and hopelessness are rearing their unavoidable heads.

I never really thought about it, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever even see him again. I knew that leaving for college three thousand miles away was not just a new beginning, but an ending. Time does tear people away from each other, and that’s not really a sad thing, it’s just part of life. But then we get a call, or read Facebook entries and we think we are dreaming, but we are not. We have, ourselves, crashed at one-hundred miles per hour into the wall we did not see coming. Our tears are bad enough, but the tears of the ones who stayed close, the tears of guys we never thought we’d see cry, those tears dissolve the stitches that held together the pieces of our together past that are now a gaping wound as we search for reasons that we know we will never find. I begin to place a new patch, but that patch will never quite fit properly, and every time I look at it, it will remind me that things I thought were permanent are not, and that people I love or even just enjoy will not be around forever.

Only the Forever stamp is forever. Ten years from now, if I still have those stamps, I can use them when a letter costs a dollar or less or more, but ten years from now I have no idea how many of those colorful and wonderful patches will be shredded or changed irreparably, or even if my own quilt will still exist on this earth. But I don’t have too much time to ponder these things because, life, mice, and midterms intrude – and maybe that’s good.

Inspired by recent events and the lovely no-longer-teens who are in my life and copyrighted 2010 by Nancy Grossman-Samuel