i'm going to be totally honest, i never know exactly how to feel whenever his death day comes around. it's important to me that i don't use his death as the means for me to gain sympathy through emotional manipulation. andrew's very best friend died when they were 16 and he was so infuriated that all these high school kids suddenly came out of nowhere, claiming that they were his best friends and they were so close. "he hated every single one of them" andrew says all the time. it's important to me that i don't pretend that i was one of mike's best friends or that we had a deeply personal connection, because that isn't the truth.
the truth is that we were mostly friends because of our mutual friends. i was at community college and my good friends were his good friends which led to lots of hanging out on campus together. lots of meals together. lots of laughs together. i never had deep conversations with him, or hung out one on one with him, or even really knew that much about him. but he was best friends with my best friends (and dating one of them) and that was good enough.
this day ^ is one i think about a lot. aubree and i rolling around in the courtyard, pretending to be secret agents (???) and devon and mike making out hardcore cause they were soulmates and that's what soulmates do. and they 100% knew we were creeping on them, but they didn't blow our cover
and it all seems so silly and unimportant now. but i don't know. whenever i think of mike, i think of that day.
this was taken the same day, i'm pretty sure. i guess it just makes me happy because it's The Group. The Group as it was every single day. We'd hang out in the courtyard on campus: Aubree + Topher, Devon + Mike, and me and Jer...the awkward extra wheels. haha Anyway. This is us exactly as I will always remember us.
So the day you died. I was in Utah, funny enough. I flew here with Andrew and we had just auditioned for the BYU school of music. It was probably midnight and my phone was dead so Aubree called Andrew and asked to talk to me. She was sobbing on the phone and my whole insides just went cold before I even knew anything. She managed to get out that Mike was dead and that he was found in his car with bullet holes in the windows and he had been shot 5 or 6 times. The call was short because honestly there wasn't much to say. Later that night I cried for like an hour. It was the first time Andrew had ever seen me cry and I honestly wasn't even sure why I was crying. I mean, obviously someone I knew and liked had died and that's sad. But even more so it was the first time anyone close to me had ever died and I felt a new sense of understanding and purpose in life. I don't know how to explain it but there it is.
So we all banded together and went to the memorial and it was basically just all your friends and family standing in a field around some candles and a karaoke machine and we all took a turn going up and saying a few of our favorite memories or favorite things about him. Devon got up and said that Mike had proposed to her a couple weeks prior but they had kept it a secret, trying to figure out the best way to tell everyone and surprise them. All my friends and the people I loved got up and said something but I never got up the nerve. I didn't know what to say and I didn't want to take time away from other people who were closer to Mike and who needed this experience for therapeutic reasons. I think I would've said something about how he was a friend to everyone and about how he bought me lunch at hibachi one time, even though he had only recently met me. after everyone talked and cried for like two hours, we all lit a candle and sang don't stop believin' because everyone knew it was his favorite song in the world. i still can't listen to it without thinking of that moment and mike.
our group was never really the same after that. everyone kind of disappeared for awhile and went into these little pockets of personal grieving. there was so much sadness with my friends, especially with devon, and sometimes it was too much to handle. i was honestly kind of relieved to move to utah six months later and get some space from it all.
now that it's been four years i don't feel the same overwhelming sadness, although i know my friends do. devon has found someone new, although i know she will never fully be over mike. aubree and topher are married. jer and devon graduated college together... everyone has progressed with their lives and moved on the best they can. and i am so proud of them. that's what i think of when i think of mike's death. i think about my friends and how much it tried and tested them and broke them down into a million pieces. and i think about how they pushed through and have found a way to continue to live in this world. and that, i think, is the essence of life.
anyway. this was a humongous cluster of gunk that probably makes no sense but i've never written these thoughts down or vocalized them or even really thought about them too much and it's about time.
rest in peace, my friend. see you soon. :)
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