"I walked the avenue 'til my legs felt like stone. I heard the voices of friends vanished and gone. At night I could hear the blood in my veins, black and whispering as the rain on the streets of Philadelphia." ~bruce springsteen

Today has been an emotional day. So this won't be a fun post to read. But I feel like writing it.

In school the kids read an article on teens and alcohol and then had to write a response to it. Luckily I read the responses when I had the classroom to myself, because one of them made me cry. The girl who wrote it seems like a sweet girl in class, and she's pretty quiet. In her response she wrote about certain events in her life, and she has been through so much. I don't really feel comfortable sharing the details here, even if I'm not naming her name, so I'll just say that she seems to have recovered spectacularly well considering what has happened to her. You'd never know what secrets she's got buried inside her just by looking at her. Reading her response made me so sad and made my heart break for her, and yet it made me hopeful because the fact that she was able to write about it made me think that she's coping well and has been working on coming to terms with her feelings. I want to do my best to reach out to her now.

Then my cooperating teacher got a phone call and learned that a three-year-old boy who is very close to her family was just diagnosed with cancer (stage 4, which I think is bad). She cried and I didn't know what to do. I'm not good at comforting people. I'll be praying for him. The two of us were just a mess today.

That made me start thinking about Liz. I miss her. She died of Leukemia when she was a sophomore in high school (I was a junior). Her dad died of cancer a few years before she did. His funeral was on my birthday. It was not a happy birthday for me. Liz lived on my street and I knew her since I was about 5 years old. Her house was right in front of the bus stop and I remember huddling inside her garage waiting for the bus when it rained. I remember she had great birthday parties when she was little. I remember her huge, deep, beautiful dark brown eyes and the way they looked when she smiled. I remember her dark, silky hair before it all fell out. She looked beautiful without her hair, though. Her eyes stood out even more. She was sick for awhile before she died. One time Jen and I went to her house and made friendship bracelets with her. At one point I said something like, "I would rather die than..." or some sentence making light of death. Jen glared at me and I couldn't believe I had just said that to my dying friend. A teenager shouldn't have to worry about what to say or what not to say to a dying friend. Teenagers shouldn't have dying friends. Teenagers shouldn't be allowed to die. Teenagers especially shouldn't know that they're going to die. Jen and I live on one end of the street and Liz lived on the other, so Jen and I walked back to our houses together that night and we talked about how we hadn't known what to say to Liz. I remember the day she died. It was a Saturday morning, and she never woke up. My mom told me that morning. She said Liz had told her mom the night before that she was nearly ready to go. It was so hard for me to grasp the fact that my 16-year-old friend was so calm about dying. Jen and I had swim practice that morning, so I drove us there and we didn't talk during the drive. During practice Jen had to get out of the water because she was crying too hard. I drove her home and then drove back to swim practice and got back in the pool, trying not to cry myself. At the funeral I sat with my friend Amanda. Jen sat up front because she spoke. I admire her so much for that; I don't know how she managed it. Amanda and I sobbed the entire time. I think we used up a box of tissues. Life isn't fair. But I know she's up in Heaven with her dad, and her mom and her brother are doing great now, so I have to believe that God knows what he's doing.