Just let me down, just let me down easy...

It's currently 5:32 am. I've been awake since 4 something, I didn't put my glasses on to check. WHYYYYYYYYYYY?

Okay, some might attribute it to all the wine I had at that winetasting last night making me sleep fitfully, but I want a deeper answer. Speaking of which, for some reason, I believed that the word fitfully had the exact opposite meaning up until... far too recently to not be embarrassed about. I've never really figured out why. I mean, I suppose fit sounds like a good thing, and fully reminds me of deeply... yeah, it just doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I should really just have gone back to bed, but for some reason the arctic chill of my room (the roomie LOVES his air conditioning) made me think of snow, and snow made me think of Jamie. It's funny, I try to maintain an air of emotional detachment and cool indifference at all times (I mean, come on, I DO go to the most pretentious university in America), but for some reason I still haven't gotten over her death.

Not that I should get over it, of course. She's literally the closest person to me who's ever died, and she died far too young for anyone to justify it with her having lived a full life. But I wish I could separate her death from our experiences together. The day we spent playing in the snow, running around her neighborhood, and dancing on the iced-over pond by the house where she grew up was one of the best days I can even remember. I was so nervous, inching out across the ice while she ran and jumped and sang, until I finally gave in to her enthusiasm (you always did, with Jamie) and frolicked along with her, with no thought of whether the ice would hold. And now I can't picture that day without thinking of how it didn't matter whether the ice held or not, because within three years she'd be gone anyway.

Or there was the time we were driving around aimlessly one night and saw a spotlight in the sky. I had just gotten my license, and still wasn't very good at driving in heavy traffic, so of course Jamie decided that we had to find the source of the light. And, sure enough, we followed it onto Rockville Pike, the only busy road we had in my little suburban town. I somehow got us into the middle lane, scared out of my mind, and as traffic zoomed all around us, Jamie just laughed and turned up the radio to ear-splitting heights. But shockingly, we followed that light for half an hour and finally found it, outside an Office Depot, of all things. We took pictures of ourselves making he-man poses in the just-starting drizzle and danced in the parking lot. It was on that very road, two years later, that a tow truck plowed into the passenger side of Jamie's car.

It's funny, I've never actually thought about her dying. I mean, conceptually I know she's dead. I just can't picture her actually dying. I won't let myself. The idea of Jamie ever not moving is just so foreign that it doesn't compute. Maybe that's the trouble, really. It's easier to think of her off frolicking her way through the boreal forests of Canada (her favorite type of forest, of course), but that isn't real. She's dead. That's real.

But at the same time, all our inside jokes, all those times she made me look her dead in the eye and promise never to tell something, all those times she jumped on my back and knocked me to the ground laughing... they're real, too. And the fact that I loved her, and that that's the only thing that really matters. That's real.