Dear Dennis, A few days from now, you might have been at your 10-year high school reunion. Kind of like me, even though I didnt technically graduate with you. As I am poor, and at a pretty huge transition point in my life, I will be there in spirit. Much like you will be. You and I didnt really get along in junior high. Me; I had a hard time getting along with, oh, pretty much anyone, but there was a pretty, um, *special* kind of tension between me and you that I found somewhat hard to forget. As our tenuous preteen years turned into precocious youth, that tension waned a little bit. And I was happy for it. Then after my sophomore year, I moved to Sheridan. It was a move I was immensely thankful for, mostly, but in the end it turned out to be almost more lonely for me than the Lander years. The reasons arent really important. Loneliness manifests itself in similar ways for all of us. It is one human experience that is almost, as the saying goes, more constant than change. And I know you understood that. My senior year at Sheridan High School was weird. Really weird. And very lonely. But I had speech to look forward to on weekends. I was always pretty damn stoked when Lander and Sheridan were competing in the same tournaments because of a few friends I looked forward to seeing. (Seriously, it was kind of ridiculous: I earned the nickname Decorum!!! because my lovely fellow Sheridanites had to try and hold me down to keep me from standing up whenever your team won something...it never worked. And Im *really* not sorry I embarrassed them; sorry guys :P) I never expected that one of those friends would be you. Something about both of us changed between 7th and 12th grade. When I saw you in the extemp draw our senior year, I was surprised. I didnt think speech was really your thing. But there you were. Smiling. And you came over and...greeted me. I was shocked. I didnt think youd ever want to talk to me for real. I didnt think you would ever want to give me the time of day, much less be my friend. Me, of all people. Someone who was used to being a social pariah, among other things. But you did. Sometime between 7th and 12th grade, you saw something you actually liked about me and you ran with it. You took a chance on me at a time when no one else really would. You *remembered me* after I moved away, and you developed a strange respect for me as I grew up. As you grew up. Our senior year was really great on the weekends, dont you think? Didnt really matter who broke to finals (though, if I must say, I had an epic damn year in 2004). Never really does, honestly. I will never forget the last time I saw you. It was at the Buffalo tournament. It was either extemp or Student Congress that you and I both placed in, and we got to go walk up to get our awards together. You were smiling, I was giggling like an idiot, and our respective teams were pretty proud of us. (And dont you try to say otherwise: you know its true, so shush :P) Before we went back to sit down, you gave me a hug. And I was so happy, at that moment, to have a friend. You smiled from ear to ear as you congratulated me, and we said our goodbyes and walked out into the frozen wasteland to get back on our buses and go home. Not even bus duty could get me down after that tournament. The day I learned that you were gone, I was devastated; I took a couple days off from my summer classes, even. But I was grateful that a mutual acquaintance of ours took the time to find *me* of all people and tell me. Im sure it might seem strange to you, but I still miss you a whole lot. You have no idea how much you touched my life the last time I saw you. I am not sure our paths would have crossed again, but I would have remembered you, regardless. Dennis Kennedy, the world is less without you in it, but I know that my life and the lives of many others would have been far dimmer had you never been here at all.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 10:24:17 +0000
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