A year ago today, my friend Brianne died. Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. She was twenty-two years old...

I knew this one was coming. We had been waiting for a while. That's a terrible thing to say. But it's true. We knew about three weeks before that she definitely wouldn't make it. After going into remission a few times, with each remission only lasting about a month, with the last one ending in the choice between hospice and home, I prepared myself for the news of her being gone. On June 5, 2008, exactly three months after Eve died, and a few weeks after Winston Napier, I was prepared, but more in the numb kind of way.

I was working in Worcester for the summer. Info desk in the mornings, administration in the afternoons. She was having a "celebration of life" party that day. All of us, friends and family, were invited. I couldn't make it because I was in Massachusetts. She lived in Georgia. The saying that "only the good die young" seems like such a cliche to me. The good die young, but not everyone who dies young is good and not everyone who dies is young. Three months of 5ths, though, had brought the end of two twenty-two-year-olds, one by bullets and the other by disease. And one in his fifties, by choice. Two-and-a-half months later, there would be a fourty-five-year-old, too, because of a heart-attack, even though he was in top shape, in the best of health, and one of the best dancers in the country.

I swallowed my grief and held it in. I'm still holding it. Slowly, though, it dawned on me. I had been wrong all along and Douglas Adams was right: it was stupid to search for the meaning of life. It really is 42, whatever that may mean. Life is chaos. Life is madness. Life is a maelstrom of brief moments of celerity and large plains of fear. It is worth what we make of it, and only that.

So, I was an English Major. I dedicate myself to fiction and the analysis of it. I claim it tells me about life. But I know it's all only theory. Theory upon theory and I become the living dead. It's not real life. It's everyone else's. It's fantasy and fantasy is an escape. Forget the Subtle Knife. I don't need a blade to cut a window out of this world and into the next by finding the smallest of gaps in the fabric between this world and the next. All I need is a book and light to see by. Then, I'm gone. I fall in love with characters who don't exist. I cry for them and I leave real life behind.

Eventually, inevitably, I come back. I am no Sibyl Freid. But I make up names for myself. I am Nyx Waterhouse. I am Shae D. Fields. I am Aurora Borealis. The list goes on. Call me by one and I'll answer.

Yesterday, I found out that I'm going to Israel next year. As long as student loans are deferred, which is taking some maneuvering, but going well, and if more loans or scholarships will fall down on my shoulders or fly out of my ass like butterflies. Either way, it will happen. I get what I want. And I want this. I have three more weeks of Georgia before I don't see it again for at least a year. I have three more weeks of America.

Next year, I hope, will bring only life, unlike last year, where the stars were wickedly aligned. I reiterate: I hope. That's the thing with life. You never know what it'll bring and everything's a part of it. All we can do is step forward, one foot in front of the other, one by one, never missing a beat.

This is for Brianne, who I met on my sixteenth birthday, while I was singing under an awning in the rain in Southern Georgia, at Valdosta State University and there was a double rainbow in the sky. Just for me. This is for her and for Eve, and for all of us who have to keep on living despite the hell of today; it's for us, who have to prepare for anything, things that are even worse than 5A.M. cements or cancer, or hangings--and I'll stop there because we all, unfortunately, know the rest.

I only sent this out to ten of you. I'm in a crappy mood. But it's an anniversary and on anniversaries like this, I brood.