Here in this diary I write you visions of my
summer.
It was the best I ever had.
There were chorusus and sing-alongs
and that unspoken feeling of knowing that right now is all that matters.

All the nights we stayed up talking
listening to 80's songs,
and quoting lines from all those movies that we love.
It still brings a smile to my face.

~ The Ataris

This song gutted me. The whole CD, though I've just listened to it for the first time, took me back to every "last summer" with Sam.

Last summer we used to scrape our change together to buy cheap wine and beer (we could barely afford food, then), and we'd sit outside at the picnic table with Jesse and Jessica and play spades for hours. When they would leave Sam would build a bonfire and we'd talk for hours about everything and nothing.

We camped in southern Ohio and shared a tent that was the size of a garbage bag...and we held hands when we slept. Sam taught me how to fish, and I caught my first bass.

He threw me in the neighbors' pool at least a dozen times. We'd dump buckets of ice water on eachother in the shower and have pillow fights with the kids that lasted for hours.

Sunday mornings I used to make a huge breakfast...bacon, eggs, pancakes, sausage, and toast. We'd spend half of the afternoon sleeping together on the couch in front of the air conditioner.

He took me kayaking for the first time at Hinkley Lake. We went mountain biking, and I called off of work every other week to go fishing with him. I loved watching him fly fish in the Cuyahoga...

Sometimes we'd lay in bed at night and talk about everything from the Bible to breakfast cereal. We used to stay up late and play Rat Screw until we were laughing too much to keep playing. Sam would come home from the bar and play that awful David Allen Cole CD and listen to our beagle, Zeus, howl with the music.

We listened to Marilyn Manson, Eminem, Metallica, and Weezer. Sam would get upset when I would read books when he was with me, and would grab them from me and throw them across the room, just so I would talk to him...but he'd take me to Borders to make me smile.

Every day I'd come home from work and Sam would be playing darts in the freshly vacuumed living room with Jesse...only to find that he had thrown everything up the steps or in the closet and vacuumed to make it look like he'd cleaned all day.

On his days off of work he used to call me at the office at least twenty times to try to convince me to come home for "lunch." He'd watch Jerry Springer (which he knew I hated), and call me with his hypothetical situations..."If I were to have a baby with both of your sisters...would you break up with me?"

We'd stay up until 4 am playing Playstation 2 games...laughing and getting pissed at eachother when one of us would spin the other out on the final lap of the Daytona 500. When we showered together he'd hog all of the water.

In the mornings, when my alarm clock went off, I'd lay in bed and hold him, listening to his heart beat. Every nine minutes I'd get up, hit the snooze, and return to him in bed, sometimes doing this for hours.

We'd look at eachother and knew exactly what the other was thinking. He was the love of my life, and he was my best friend. He knew me better than anyone, and I him. So how could I not see this coming? How could I ignore the signs? Why couldn't I help him?

I let him down. Now I've lost the best part of my life. The only nine minutes I have in the morning are filled with eerie silence in the room where he told me that he "wasn't good enough for me"...that he "didn't want to ruin my life." He was the only thing in my life that I was truly proud of, and I hate myself for being too much of a coward to be with him right now.