Hello, I Dislike You Intensely. Have a Nice Day.

Spring break. Wish I could just watch hours of talk shows and hang out with people, but nope. I’m going to a funeral. Roger’s. He died of asphyxiation in a house fire. But at least he got away from his mom, who abused him for years, and had some peace for a while living at this grandparents’. His grandparents wrote me a letter explaining his situation for most of his life along with the invitation. I don’t know how they found my address but they did.

Oh, Roger. I’ll finally get to see him again, stop hurting over that unfinished piece of my childhood. They all came back, you know. Marina, Alex, and Roger. In some way or another.

So…yes. I guess it’s all done now, isn’t it?

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I leave for St. Paul, MN and the funeral in five hours. It’s 10:00 AM now, the plane takes off at 3:00 PM. I’ll be there in time for the wake, and stay over at his grandparents’ for the funeral the next day.

Right now, though, I’m at the park, sitting on one of the swings and kind of wavering back and forth with a foot in the sand. The kids next to me are trying ot get as high as they can and jump out at their zenith, sticking the landing with the pride of a gymnast off the uneven bars. I remember when swinging high registered no sense of fear at all, nor did climbing on top of the monkey bars or sliding headfirst down high slides. Now even going on the stepladder at the library gives me vertigo. Jesus. What happened to me? I can’t even say I’ve lost my childish fears completely, because I’d be lying. I guess growing up just means a greater ability to hide those fears, and force yourself through them…

I went to our grove again, those trees where me and Alex once sowed our words alongside the leaves and bark. The place brough such a crushing feeling of nostalgia and unreality over me I though I might lose it. Honestly. To have been there after all that’s changed…it was like walking in a dream. A lot of our entries were gone, blown out and away, disintegrated, picked up as litter. Melted into mush under winter snow, then trickled out like odd flotsam when the snow itself melted. There was no proof left that they had ever existed. I sank down between the roots of an elm, staring into space like a concussion victim, trying to wrap my head around this.

There were some entries left, though. I let them be. Reading them would be too much. Maybe other people had found and read them; there was no way to know. Ms. Tischler, who gave us the assignment in the first place, seems to have forgotten about it completely. Guess she thought no one was ever serious about it. She’s new this year, so that explains her initial off-beat-ness, but she’s more assimilated now. A little sad to see.

Oh my God, you’ll never guess what I just saw. There’s a squirrel nest in the high-up branches of one of the maples, and from where I stood it really looked like the nest had been cushioned with scraps of inked, lined paper. Our words had been keeping baby squirrels warm! That’s fucking incredible. Isn’t life unbelievable, the way it turns out?