Let the rain come down and wash away my tears
Let it fill my soul and drown my fears
Let it shatter the walls for a new, new sun

(A New Day has Come --- Celine Dion)

When you get the news that a friend, a school chum, who was there when you got busted for the first time by a police officer(possession, I was caught with joint in my hand, first puff in my entire life and who happens to drive by?) has passed away, the tears begin to fall.

One of my best friends, Fran, that school chum who was there when I got busted, passed away the other day. 

Fran had cancer, she fought it harder than anyone I knew could. The cancer never truely had Fran, she'd like to say.

I cried harder than anytime in my life.  I don't think I cried as hard when I heard my mother had passed away back in 1993.

Now, as I sit here, writing in my 'blog' like I did as a teen in my diary, I think some of those tears were for myself.

A death within the friendship ring is a reminder that life isn't as long as we believed when we were younger, immortals in thought back then. 

Time sweeps by us quickly, one day our children are infants, in our arms, cradled, the next, they are grown with children of their own, and the next, well, we're the ones being cradled, softly whispered to that everything will be okay by our children.

Fran and I dreamt that one day we would go to Hollywood, become the big movie stars, show everyone how it was suppose to be done.

Fran made it closer than I did.  

She got to Nevada after college, met a man named Steve, and settled down and made a family there, and then, later, moving to Washington State for the rest of the show called Life.

She told me once that she did flash her boobs at a movie producer, or she thought he was a movie producer.

"He could have been the janitor at the local movie theater!" she had laughingly said a few times. 

This isn't my first friend to pass away. 

There was a high school acquaintance, friend to everyone, who was killed in a car accident before we graduated.

We cried. We hugged but it never felt real, that it could happen to us, again, we were immortals.

Now, it is too close to real, it could and will happen to me someday, though hopefully not too soon, my ex's soon to be wife, the bride, has asked me to be in the wedding, not just as an observer, but an honor most times handed to the best friend, or a stranger off the street, and not the ex-wife of your groom.

"Would you be my matron-of-honor?"

I can hear Fran laughing up above me as I agreed.