My boss asked me what I was up to, with my mischevious grin. I find it hard to contain happiness.

The bike commute home was glorious. Sunshine, speed, good CD. Shamelessly smiling and saying hello to everyone.

So I get home and there's a message from my sister. A family friend passed away last night. Cancer won. It's so hard to imagine what her husband would feel, or her just-graduating highschool daughter, or her first-year medschool daughter, or her world traveller son... We used to go hiking together. I remember the Stein Valley. She collected wildflowers, pressing them between the pages of the identification book as a kind of album. I'd sleep next to her and her daughter, in the ladies tent, while her husband, son, and my dad slept in the mens (smelly) tent. And her son, well, there is a long story there, but that'll be another entry. A month ago, when I was in the driveway at home, she stopped by on a walk. She explained that this was her first walk in a long, long time. I could see how much she loved this world. There is this space that she's left. I do not know what to say to anyone.

See, I do not consider death to be punishment. It is natural. It is inevitable. But it scares me so, so much. To think about never waking up, or never flying down the highway with old friends, or drinking up the sunshine and the smells of the forest and farm.. to never feel the high of being loved, the intense comfort of being entangled in someone's arms and legs.

It reminds me that life is too short to be holding back things that I want to say to some people. How much I still care. I am young, but I am old.

It makes me want to fight. Research, the cure. Inside, I know that The Cure does not exist. Or else, if it does, when we find it another disease will develop. It is nature and her population control, in a crude sense. Apply to vet school, and if I don't get in, go to grad school. That's the way it is. And no boyfriends. Stay grounded.