an ugly and subtle shadow has slipped silently into my life and suddenly administered a slap on the face to me yesterday...I have a friend who is Sick. I have never realized that she is Sick. I mean, I knew she was sick and had been given the details of the illness and etc., but when it came down to acknowledging the effect it would have on me and my life and everyone around us, I was completely unaware that she was Sick.

yesterday, I was made aware.

It's a terrifying idea. I've never understood how quickly someone might be taken away from me. I am very very afraid. I have always felt an immeasurable sadness and emptiness in that Langston Hughes "Poem", the one that begins "I loved my friend/He went away from me". I am deathly afraid of that poem, I am afraid of the loneliness that lurks within those first two lines. I even wonder at times whether or not this is some kind of reflection upon my own fear of mortality, the idea that someone who is part of My Life could possibly be negated---I mean, yes, relatives have died, but I've had only one great death in my life that has ripped a hole for the loneliness in me. And the misery and emptiness I still feel from that death, so devastating at the time that I Band-Aided it with a pathetic attempt at 12-year-old stoicism, makes me fear for the misery and emptiness that will sneak up on me, time and time again throughout my life, until at last I am confronted with the greatest loss a person can experience.

I am afraid for my friend. I do not want her to go away.