So it will go, if it must... I guess

It's heart-wrenching that today rolled by so smoothly, only to crumble to ash mere inches from the finish line. Erin's friend Jess is dead.

...So it goes?

Maybe so in the Vonnegut's now-resting eyes, but as it would turn out, things are seldom so simple when reality strikes. I can't tell Jess' friends and family about the beads on a string, and even if someone did I doubt it would get through to cut their mourning short. She probably had a boyfriend, too, who is now alone - just like that, and suffering. The more I think about it the more I hate it, and the more I hate it the more I think...

Katie is at Sean's, and so is lost amid the mourners and the guilty-minded, and I feel for her too because I know how those situations scare her more than the event itself ever could.

All this reflection is hitting me, because as I always seem to do before someone I love dies or before a close friend's loved one dies, I got that ominous feeling when I woke up this morning, that unexplained urge to go home and stay home, retreat from friends and family, that suspicious part of my subconscious that frets over various scenarios all day long. It happens every time; I guess I just have an instinct for this sort of thing. But it's never that obvious to me until after said catastrophe rips a world apart. Then I go over how I should have and could have, when really there is absolutely nothing I could have could have done, right?

A very small part of me is still making up scenarios. In one, the scary voicemail message I received on my cell phone this morning is somehow connected to Jess' death. I don't know, I'm not logical right now.

I didn't really know Jess, only of her. It's kind of crazy to think this much about it if I didn't even know her, but at the same time, if I were to die, I would hope that people would stop and think about me too, if only for a minute or two.

Since I'm not really all that religious or that interested in the whole afterlife thing, I have no ideas as to where Jess went from here, but here's to hoping it's somewhere even better?Without a doubt she died much too young. I can only think of one intelligent quote on death, so I suppose I will close with that and hope she lived her life well?

-Manda

"We all die. The goal isn't to live forever. The goal is to create something that will."