Dear Danni,

It is November.  I'm at the coast in the same neighborhood where you took your life.  I'm sitting here wearing your jeans, your friend is near, typing on her computer.  A fire burns in the fireplace.  It is a brilliant November day and the waves curl in the distance.

There can be no asking you how you've been.  I can't say that something here waits for you when you get back.  I can't embellish a relationship you and I never had, or speak nostalgically of things that we used to do together.  All I know of you is an echo of your life.  A quiet wave that swept through time and proceeded through the lives of those that remained.  As I sit here waves wash up on the beach and scatter themselves across the sand.  It is quiet here, your friend and I came here for some peace.

Driving out this morning I learned that your birthday is Saturday November 10th.  I learned that you would have loved to have known me, with exception that my indecision would sometimes drive you nuts.  You liked older men, I'm told. This is a coldly exciting notion.

I also learned that perhaps killing yourself was not such a bad thing.  We're all killing ourselves.  Drunks do it with drink, smokers with cigarettes, most of our country is digging it's own grave with a fork.  The great thing (or not so great) is that we all get to choose just how we die.  For most of us death just takes a little longer.  We can opt out if we want. 

Just let me say this one more thing Danni.  I wish you had taken a slower path to death.  I wish you were here damn it.  I wish I did not have to write this letter so disappointed because I sit next to a wonderful person who had her heart broken when you suddenly and irrevocably left her and this world.  Yes she is getting over it, yes she will be fine.  Yes these things will make your friend and I stronger people and we will not prolong the pain by wishing for these things forever.  But I have been thrust right into the little world where you lived your last hours and I feel all at once relieved and sort of shocked.  I don't need details of your death Danni.  I want to know about your life and there is nothing new to write about your life.  Nothing to ask you about last week, or last month or last whatever. I only know that like like a wave, you once swept through here.  You caused a ripple I feel, like sand on the beach.  Now you're gone.    

Russ~