Why is it so strange to me. We haven't talked in years, we weren't lifelong friends. We usually just sent messages electronically. Nothing but ill-fitted pioneers of electronic pen-pal practice. I didn't know what to make of you. I mean how much could our inclination to keep up the conversation be attributed to real intellectual thought. "Intellectual thought" I hate when I boil things down to things like that. So pretentious and blue-cold. But nonetheless we talked for years intermediately. Maybe it was something of a comfort, maybe it was attraction, maybe something in a grey area between.

I know you had some family troubles. I know you'd yell at me for drinking, and I wondered why. I heard once your father was in jail for drunkenly running over a girl. I still don't know if it's true, and I'm sorry if I subconsciously treated you as if it was and never asked to talk about it. I was bad at those things. I know we never talked about your marriage. I never even knew if it officially had gone through, or when you had broken up, or even if you had divorced. I don't know if I wanted to know, it seemed like you didn't want to tell.

You did tell me you started smoking. I was younger and more keen to be excited upon hearing someone else I knew enjoyed a bowl. We always made plans to smoke together but I was always to tangled in my high school relationship. I didn't know you'd get too relaxed with substances. Or at least I don't remember thinking of it.

I don't even remember thinking of you anytime recently. Not exactly the thing one would expect to read, but it's true. I was as unready as I could have been when I was told you had passed away. I knew snow had fallen and hoped a fatal crash wasn't your goodbye. With a little help of our once linking electronics, that had pinged our little bits of data to and fro in the atmosphere and into each other's hands, I found out you had been struggling with addiction.

I felt weirdly ashamed for not having known. I'm not the best friend, I'm not the partner, or the boss. There's no logical reason I should have caught the clues or been observing at all. Yet an insistent feeling that I should have at least known what you were going through ticked in my head. I remember feeling so strange when you had married, because you had said you wanted to marry me. I had never taken the statement seriously, but it still holds me in disbelief, much more now. Maybe it's that in the core of it all you wanted a future. I'm sorry you overdosed. I'm sorry I can't write to you any more.