11/28/2004

Today, a friend of mine was killed in a car accident. Except it wasn't really today, it was almost two months ago. For me though, it may as well have been, because I didn't find out until this morning. Being here, it's easy to feel left out of the loop, but at moments like this, it's extra difficult.

Stacy wasn't even that close of a friend, but she was someone who I knew and cared about, a fellow SFSU journalism student, an incredible photographer, and someone who would strike up a conversation with anyone and everyone who cared to participate. Her hair was the thing that always caught people's attention, a web of braided and beaded dreadlocks that stretched close to four feet down her back, I'd guess.

It seemed insignificant at the time, but now I remember the last time I saw her alive, in May. She gave me a ride home after an end-of-the-school-year party, in the same maroon 1987 BMW convertible she would be killed in less than five months later. According to the story I read in my college paper online, she ran a stop sign on a freeway onramp at an overpass near Daly City, south of San Francisco, was hit by a passing car, broke through the guardrail, fell more than 50 feet, and was struck by another car. I just hope for her sake that it was over quickly.

That I had no way to know about this is what makes it hardest... Everyone else who knew her found out within a day or two, I assume, but as isolated as we are here, she only died for me today. In the same world where instant communications are a fact of life, it took me two months. Intellectually, I know that people are killed every day in accidents all over the world, but I think that this may be the first time it was someone who I had a personal connection to, someone who I didn't read about in the paper, and think, "wow, that's really terrible." To know that someone my age, who I saw just a few months ago is dead, that's not an easy thing to deal with.

What a reality check this is- no matter how difficult life may get for me over the next 25 months, at least I still have one. As much as I may become sick of living in what people in the US would consider a shack with no electricity, running water, and a pit latrine, at least I'm still around to do it.

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