I’m still hoping this is premature. I’m still hoping those men last Wednesday were wrong and that I will find my friend Richard alive and well. Yet I must admit to myself that they appeared to be certain, and that their description of the boy I grew up with fitted exactly.

If that is so, then my friend Richard is gone, a fact I hate to contemplate. All weekend, I’ve been looking for confirmation either way, looking for obituaries, getting people to wring numbers. No luck. It’s quite upsetting in itself, not knowing: part of me says there may still be hope, there may still be a happy ending. Another part remembers the certainty of those voices.

Keep thinking back to the nursery – to when we both used to crawl across the vast floor to play wrestling on the mats. I remember how we went through school together: how, before I got my lightwriter, rich used to translate for me. The trip to centre parks; going to Glasgow; how I earned the name slasha. I remember his jokes; how he always had a girlfriend.

I find myself wanting to cry. I want to scream. I want to utterly trash a room. I find myself unable to do either of these things – they will achieve nothing. Rich was one of the friends I expected to grow old, get married, maybe get a family. It probably isn’t going to happen now, and knowing that hurts.

It hurts very much. To a certain extent, this is what comes from going to a special school, since I find it likely that rich’s death was caused due to some complication with his spina bifida. In such places one has to cope with your friends dying, moreso than in a mainstream school, I mean, and it’s no easier after you leave. Looking around at my friends in the wes today, I found myself feeling alone, unable to explain, unable to let them no why I felt so bad. I’m not saying they won’t have had similar tradgedies, and they have all been very supportive, but I still felt alone, like I was the last survivor of a band of brothers, in a battle long since over, returning to a pub full of music.

Soon, I’ll join the singing again I’m sure. Rich wouldn’t want me to get too down. But, at the moment, it feels like someone hit me in the stomach. Writing seems to ease it slightly, but it will probably hurt for some time.

—

I was about to post this when Darren, a friend whom I got to call the vicar at Weston, came. It is true.

no more doubt; no more hope