Searching and Volcanoes

It has been almost 4 months since my friend Craig went missing. I'm sitting here right now looking at his volcano blog, which I first learned of just a couple of days after I heard the news. I did what we all tend to do...I went looking for answers, scouring everything to find information. Looking at my delicious bookmarks now, I can see that it was May 1st when I first went to his site and read the following: "Danger has a way of cutting through melancholy, the real fear blinding you to the fear dimly imagined. If you could only always just have escaped death, you would never be sad again." I can also see that three other people have this bookmarked, none of them with his name.

The original catalyzing argument that led to my recent breakup was over my response to Craig missing. I was crushed, absolutely crushed, and Ty thought I should be fine with someone he thought wasn't worth anything possibly not being alive. Craig and I were somewhat estranged when he disappeared as he hadn't offered to pay me for the author photos I took for him (I had to ask). Hindsight and all that, but at the time, my pride was hurt and I was annoyed.

The thing is, despite that momentary annoyance, he was still a person of importance to my life. There are only three people in this world who were there to share the many parties and weekends that we had with Craig during his fellowship at the Paisano Ranch in the Spring of '01. I was 20, and Craig had been my poetry teacher a year and a half earlier. He had encouraged my writing, and told me I was one of only a couple of poets in the class who were worth a damn—the other one being my friend Tim. We would drive out to the ranch, and drink, cook, listen to Jeff Buckley, laugh, and enjoy each other's company. Craig called me the human recorder on one of those nights and even now I don't know if anyone has ever pegged me so quickly and so accurately. Because I'm never the one dancing at parties. I'm always the one watching, listening, and trying to figure it all out. And as small as his observation may have been, I felt that someone was actually considering me.

There are a million reasons that that time was so significant to me, but when it comes down to it, I felt alive. I was an adult—and not in that get-drunk-at-a-frat-party way that you feel "adult" when you start college—adult in that sense of the future being before you, where you're just starting to get answers, figuring out what it is that matters to you, who matters to you, and that maybe there's something you can do with that information. Craig had a hand in that. He helped me feel alive, and worth a damn.