Grateful and hurting. Hurting and grateful.

[treize64]

I just received word of a good friend's passing. We were law school contemporaries. In fact, we were fond of fancying ourselves antibodies to the malaise that law school tended to be. He was crude and honest and often our time together felt like time stolen. Like something illicit was being done even though it was simply us talking and dreaming and laughing. My fingers are shaking as I write this. He was as Augie March-ish a person as I'm likely ever to meet. More than anything, more than the ludicrous and digressive rants and the hookah smoking sessions and the x-rated film screenplay ideas and the stories about that time in Thailand (or was it Singapore?), the thing that linked us was a fundamental understanding of the other, a knowledge that this place we were in, this suit factory, didn't quite fit right, we were somehow misplaced and, at the same time, exactly where we needed to be.

34 minutes before that, I'd received the very last donation in a fundraising drive to put together money for my baby sister, who was struggling with application fees for post-bac programs to which she'd wanted to apply.