Dulcis Mors Mortis

I was of a chain of starving writers. For generations on my fathers side we'd lived in small houses covered in cheap drawing and flowers with incense and the most expensive objects would be writing instruments. Back then: an expensive typewriter. Now: a Macbook Pro. It's always been about writing, about poetry slams in coffee shops and book clubs in the small hole-in-the-wall bookstores. My mother's favorite place was Powell's Bookstore, the biggest bookstore in the nation, where after arguments with my father she'd go and sit for hours in the shelves reading someone smelling of the old but new in her mind. My father was a writer, my mother was a reader.

When I was eighteen I wanted to go to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia to major in writing and become someone well-known and accomplished. I wanted to be the next John Green, getting inspired by Looking For Alaska to the point where I was so desperate to touch the hearts of teenagers like myself.

And so I wrote that down on papers, wrote down the title of my future book, wrote down Emory University. I wrote down how many books I'd want to published. And of course just like everyone else I wrote the memories of high school and our friendship together, and wrote in truth where I thought everyone was going to be in seven years.

None of us knew who the other got, it was like Secret Santa. The jars were labeled with random letters, and we didn't know which letter belonged to who except ourselves. I was labeled as A, after the first drawing. And then the second was picking up a jar and secretly making sure it wasn't our own, and there it was. The jar we'd keep for seven years full of papers of unknown words. Fisher told us that we were holding the gold of our minds, and to cherish it with all our hearts. He had always been the one who we knew was going to succeed, the one who was poetic and wonderful, who loved books almost as much as me and gave off the vibe that he was a young man who knew he'd get what he wanted.

I remember asking him if there was any exception to opening them. At that time he looked me in the eye with a near smirk playing on his lips as he told me: Death.

Oh the irony.