Miss you, buddy

Approximately 13 years ago, give or take, my friends, myself and our community, experienced a terrible loss. Our friend, Kelly, was killed in a car accident on the way home from his girlfriend's house.

Whenever I pass the place where Kelly passed from this world into the next, to this day, I cross my fingers in remembrance. It's just a small thing, this knowing that I still remember my friend.

It was my senior year of high school. He was only a year out of school. Great guy. Funny as hell.

Always remember dancing around his mom's place to "Who Made Who" by AC/DC. The girls, sober. The boys, not so much.

Driving on gravel roads, hitting stop signs in his dad's steel-bumpered truck.

Right after his funeral, my girlfriends and I went prom dress shopping. Why? As discussed by Helen Fielding in Bridget Jones's Diary, hysterical displacement activity.

(Though without the drinking sake -under-a-duvet action. And obviously, sans Daniel Cleaver. Or Mark Darcy). I tried on a green- sequinned dress. I didn't get it. I don't remember what the minister said in the sermon. I just remember eating at Big Muddy's. Drinking virgin strawberry daquiri's. (Very appropriate, as we were all virgins).

Trying not to think about why we were in Burlington during a school day.

When someone dies at a young age, one always wonders what the deceased might have done in their life.

The thing is, no one really knows.

It's just left up to the survivors to muddle on, thinking of what might have been, our lives altered, without that bright light, forever covered.

Miss you, buddy.