Dear Jon

Dear Jon, Dear Jon,
By the time you read this note, you'll be gone...

I've been putting off writing this letter to you because I'm not sure of what I'm going to say or how I'm going to say it or even where to start.

I can start with the fact. The fact that you are dead. That you killed yourself and are now gone forever even though I can picture you clearly with those sweet eyes and goofy smile.

I picture you with a sky full of stars behind your head. Perhaps a puff of smoke you exhaled climbing towards the moon.

I picture you wading into the water, muscled, alive and glistening in the starlight, somehow looking at everything but the waves, getting knocked over and under, surfacing laughing.

I picture you digging in the sand, endless holes to nowhere, constantly being borne open and filled back in again.

I picture you drinking. I picture you smiling. I picture you sleepy at sunrise saying, "I've got three brain cells left and they're fighting."

I picture you knocking the sign and knocking it down again the next night in triumph.

It is hard to picture you sad, although I hear you slur your words, which makes me sad now. I know you drank too much but it's hard to have known there could be consequences, not then, when we made it night after night traipsing until sunrise alive.

I wish you didn't do it, but imagine when you did, it was with your whole heart, and there was no turning back. My guess is it was swift and violent. And there is a part of me who is glad that if you were feeling that much pain, suffering that much, that I'm glad it is over, and I hope you're in a better place, as cliched as that sounds, no one should hurt that much that they feel death is the only choice.

And I wish and I wish. I wish you felt you had a choice. I wish you'd sought help and maybe you did and that if that help wasn't working that you'd sought it again. I wish a lot of things. That we could have those nights back when we were young and could have taken ourselves a bit more seriously. That we hadn't drifted apart. That it wasn't all just so much fun and fluff. And selfishly, I wish you'd reached out to me, that I could have helped you, or at least tried.

It was shocking and not shocking at the same time that you left instructions to have your ashes scattered right at the spot where we did so much hanging out, so much talking and laughing. Way before I ever met you, this beach was my magic place, a place out of time where I always felt I belonged. As a kid, I'd spend hours digging at the sand near the breakers, entertained by the dislodged crabs and clams, watching as they over and over again dug their way back into the sand until the water would come again. I made sandcastles. Mermaids. I swam and jumped through waves and wiped out and went back in for more. I'd search the tidal pools for shells and watch the moon rise in the water making a path that led all the way right to me. I listened to the crickets in the dunes and my hair went blonder and my skin went brown. And at night I watched meteor showers and mapped my own constellations. It's a place where the world is mine.

It's the only place in my life that's always lived up to its idealization, and now it's marked by your death. And I feel sad and mad about it in a way that's making that the focus and not your death, because it's still hard to think you're gone forever, and that any goofy laugh I hear of yours on those sands to the pound of that surf will be in my head, a memory, and there are no more times with you to look forward to, and that's the way it's going to have to be because you made it so.

Perhaps, I feel closer to you now that I know that the beach, my beach, was your beach, too.

You shouldn't have killed yourself. I wish you hadn't. You're too young and too smart and I just wish you hadn't done it.

For now with love, From Me