Thursday, Sept. 27, 2007 - 8:00 pm

Memories -

I finally did it - I downloaded all of this text to a secret, off-site storage thing.

So there's a good chance this is the last time I'll write anything here, as I plan to write anything I have to write somewhere else. Sorry. Not that anyone actually reads this thing. But I was trying to decide how I wanted to go out, and after re-reading most of what I've got so far, I thought I'd write myself some notes of what I do remember from the letters. The letters themselves were so personal that I won't go into specific details here; I can't anyway, I only remember a few fragments.

And very few fragments - I guess that's why I want to document it now. I want to preserve the tiny bit that's left of the letters. I often wish that instead of rashly tossing them all out, I would have kept a few important ones. The really good ones. Well, there were a lot of really good ones, honestly. I wish I could remember more.

The one where E compared life to a CD player (CD players were new at the time) and wished we could just skip ahead to the good parts.

There was one about E getting a driver's license. And another about E's first car accident. E played it off rather cooly.

Mostly the letters were just witty banter, maybe E would describe what happened that day, bitch about school, E's brothers, riding a bike around the driveway.

The one I miss the most was the one about E lying in the field. It was probably the most emotional correspondence I've ever had or will have. If I could have kept only one letter, it would have been that one.

And that's it. I can't believe it, but that's all I remember from the letters. There were hundreds of them.

I remember a lot of stuff that wasn't in the letters. Hiding under the bus. Hiding in the woods. Hiding in the bottom of the stairs by the school. Lots of Nintendo and crappy daytime TV. Sitting across the table from each other at Thanksgiving dinner, trying not to look at each other but definitely not able to help it. Band camp - neither of us went to band camp, but it's important for its own reasons. The time I called E from that stupid house where I was babysitting and couldn't wait to get out of there because E was in town. Skee ball, and I believe we won some stupid t-shirt that we treated like a trophy. The time we re-routed traffic with construction barrels. The time there was a car accident, and E was obsessed with the "pieces of accident," a phrase that still comes to mind whenever I see, well, pieces of accident. The devilish face E would make when he was up to no good, which was pretty much whenever I was around. The weird way E eats french fries. Steak sauce. The park.

Almost all of my memories of E are good ones. I know there were bad times, but I can hardly recall them. It's nice to remember someone in such a positive light, no matter the circumstances.

But the best memory, the brightest and most vivid, was that one sultry August day.