I talked to Denise on the phone yesterday, and she saw Marc a couple of weeks ago (I hadn’t seen him since the end of April at No Exit) and apparantly he had cleaned himself up and was taking better care of his body by not abusing it with all that shit. Somehow knowing that he had finally thought better of himself and cleaned up makes his death all the more sad. He was cleaning himself up, about to finish his novel, and then like that… he’s gone. It’s all so absurd.

On the way home from Joe’s the other night I started to cry again. But it wasn’t like the tears that I had been shedding previous to that. The other tears were for people like Sandra and Kevin and Michelle and Marc’s parents and family… people who were close to him and are really suffering. Up until then I hadn’t realized how much Marc was a part of my life, too. We were never close, but he was part of the same group of people with whom I associate: Twenty Cent Fiction. Up until we graduated, there wasn’t a week that went by that I didn’t see Marc. We worked together in three plays. Up until the drive home Wednesday night, it hadn’t occured to me that I would have to grieve, too. Not just the kind of empathic grieving that you do when you know someone you care about has lost someone they care about. It makes me realize that I’m closer to the people in Twenty Cent than I had previously assumed.

Of course I know that some of my closest friends are also (or were) members of Twenty Cent, but I didn’t realize how connected I was to the entity of Twenty Cent itself.

Jesus, this is all so stupid!

I don’t even know what I think… And reading over what I’ve written sounds so inane and well, lame… UGH!