2003-11-11 - 4:41 a.m.
i remember when i met her. it was the summer josh moved to ft.lauderdale and got a place with franklin and omar. through some unknown venue she met franklin and soon became a regular at their apartment.
we had some good times that summer. we put soap in the fountains of retirement communities and ran off screaming like children. we did chinese fire drills at busy intersections with her insisting that i have a turn despite the fact that i had never driven before. she showed me the best way to tell when pasta is done. she would throw it on the cabinets and if it stuck it was dinner time. we made crazy pasta art on those cabinets and we preserved our collections in hairspray.
i hadn't thought about her since last winter, and now she is gone. she stopped to help a stranded motorist on the highway and that single kind hearted action stole her life from her in a fleeting moment. a speeding truck, a collision...that's as far as the details go.
she was a genuine individual, which is a rarity in this world. i'm not going to say that i wish we had hung out more. she was a sweet girl with many gifts, but circumstances never led to anything more than this. that's fate. and i suppose all this was just her fate.
it's times like this when you really begin to grasp mortality. this makes me want to tell everyone who is important to me just how much i appreciate them because we might not be here tomorrow. this is random, and it makes you want to live for today. it makes you want to drop out of school and do all the things you've ever planned on doing in your life before time runs out. life has never seemed so short and panicked before.
making pasta will never be the same again.
