I have always been terrible at keeping in touch with people, but I have never had any difficulty with remembering them.  It is sometimes ironic how contrary my actions seem to my thoughts.  I think that a great many people would be shocked to know how frequently I think about them and just how I feel about them.  I just can never motivate myself to be the one to reach out first.  I am always too busy or too capable of coming up with excuses not to.  There are several reasons for my making up excuses, mostly that I feel undeserving and unable to deal with it.  I have always felt like I ruin everything I touch when it comes to other people.  Relationships of every kind always burgeon at first, but then, inevitably, things go south quickly and end in absolute ruin.  I do not merely end things; I destroy them, and never even intentionally.  I just seem to be the rock upon which everyone breaks.  My heart breaks every time.  I cannot begin to wonder how much duct tape has been used to hold the particles together.  The fact remains, however, that I cherish all of those people, even if I cannot necessarily convey that properly.

I was cursorily going through my buddy list on AIM today and noticed a screen name that I hadn’t seen online in three and a half years.  It was the screen name belonging to a friend of mine who died in a car accident shortly after our high school graduation.  I remember a mutual friend informing me of her death literally hours before my father and I left to go to Boston for my orientation.  Since I did not have a license in high school, I often relied on the mercy of others for transportation.  She had offered to bring me home in the afternoons after she had only known me briefly, and it was during those car rides in the afternoon that I really got to know her.  She had a troubled family life, and I found that I could relate to her in many ways.  She was an extremely kind girl.  She often hung out with people who did not truly appreciate her, and she engaged in some of the self-loathing activities that teenagers do to fill the void in their life and to try to forget the pain.  I could never fault her for that, because I completely understood her motivations.  I also knew that she was not happy with any of it, try as she might.  She was remarkably unaffected by it all.  It never took away her spirit, and that was always something I really admired about her.  She died behind the wheel at seven in the morning after a night of no sleep; she fell asleep behind the wheel and her foot pushed down on the accelerator.  She crossed over the divider and hit another car going in the opposite direction, and she died upon impact.  Fortunately, she most likely felt no pain since her death was so quick and she was already unconscious.  The couple she hit survived relatively unscathed as well, thanks be to God.

I still remember running into a woman in town who is rather known for relaying current gossip, and she informed me about the incident.  I had mentioned to her that the girl was my friend, hoping to quell any continuation of the gossip.  Unfortunately, this only caused the woman to go on.  It made me sad, but I was not angry until the woman expressed her shock that the girl had not been intoxicated or high at the time.  I suppose it was the normal reaction people would have, but knowing what I knew about my friend, it offended me.  Her honor was being assaulted, and she was dead.  More than that, though, the focus of the story had not been upon the fact that her life was taken from her, but on her hypothetical physical state at the time of the event.  She was such a sweet and radiant girl, and even to this day, I feel saddened knowing that I will never know the woman she could be.  I will never know whether she would have gotten her happy ending like she so obviously deserved.  I do know the woman that she was, though, and that alone is enough; that alone provides me hope that she has received the happy ending that she deserved, though perhaps not in the sense that I might have thought.

So, too, have I kept a tiny remembrance of my grandmother with me.  It has been almost a year since she died, and I still have her phone number programmed in my cell phone.  I do not know why — her number has long been ingrained in my memory — I have never needed to look it up.  It is still there, though.  Every time I go looking for a friend’s phone number, I gloss over it.  I do not really need it to remember her.  I think about her enough without the reminder — every day, in fact.  I even have some rosaries of hers or from her, as well as a ring that she used to wear.  Of course, keeping her phone number is entirely different.  It is unnecessary, but I cannot imagine myself ever removing it from my list of contacts.

They are not the only ones.  They are simply the dead individuals in my life that I seem to be unable to remove from it.  I have kept my friend’s screen name on my list for three and a half years, and I have kept my grandmother’s phone number on my contact list for almost a year.  That is not even counting all the people who are still very much alive and kicking.  I find it easier to remove myself from people’s lives, because I feel like it is what is in their best interest, or because I feel like they are happier without me.  That is a point of contention between myself and others, but it is how I feel.  I can easily see how cold I may appear in my perceived distance, and yet there is so much more to it than that.

I just hope that people realize how much I truly care for them and how often I think of them.  I do not expect them to, but I hope they do.  Long after people leave my life, through whatever form, they remain in my heart.  They will continue to remain in my heart.