2007-10-09 - 10:59 p.m.

Just Wait
I thought I had learned about death last summer when my friends were in that car accident on the back road at the Lake. The one who was killed went through the sunroof and died in his best friend's arms. Another was in a coma for months and still can't speak or feed himself. The three who survived have constant nightmares. None of them had been drinking. None of them were bad kids. They'd just driven into town to pick up a movie, something we did all the time that summer, and were on their way back, driving too fast, the music up too loud, and they lost track of where the road rises to meet the railroad crossing. The police report said that the car must have been doing close to eighty when it took the crossing like a ski jump. If I'd been at the Lake that week I probably would have been with them, squeezed into the middle of the backseat or on someone's lap. I knew them only as well as you could know anyone you see a few weeks a year but I acted like their tragedy was my own. I was on the Internet constantly, IMing with the three who were okay, checking Matthew's condition, the one in a coma, offering my grief to all of them as something they could count on, something that showed I understood and would help them through. Gradually, all three of them stopped responding to me. They were nice about it, said they were busy now that they were back in school, said they wanted to start to forget. After you died, I knew why they'd stopped talking to me. I knew nothing before that car hit you and you landed without a sound at my feet. Nothing. Just like all the people who try to tell me how to feel about you know nothing. Just like all of the people in my school who write poetry about 9/11 for English class as if the fear they are feeling is the same as real loss. And just like all the people who lost no one, the tourists, who go to New York and cry over the rubble. I want to tell them all to go home. I want to tell them to go home and hold their children or their lovers or their parents. I want to tell them that they are using that place as an excuse to be sad and afraid when there will be reason enough for that in their own lives if they just wait.

- "Dear Zoe", Phillip Beard.