Sad News, Gay Poem

I learned today that someone from my social circle and someone I more or less grew up maybe not exactly with, but in parallel with died in their sleep this week. The second I got home, I cried like a little kid and then felt immediately guilty for it because I don't feel that I was close enough to him to be allowed to feel the grief I did. I'm not his brother nor the housemate who went to wake him only to find that he couldn't. I've pissed around with him on nights out and made small talk with him at gatherings of mutual friends. He was silly, snarky and chilled, and the first person I know personally of my age group that has passed away.

The news shifted something in my perspective. My problems aren't problems at all. I should be grateful for what I have, because any one person in my life could be gone on the other side of tonight's sleep. I thought somewhere deep down that being relatively young meant that we were indestructible. Death was something that happened to people you don't directly know and the elderly. Not to you and your friends. Not now.

Sorry about the tone of today's post. No funnies today. Just a poem that he would have taken the piss out of me for writing. I think he would accuse it of being "gay." My thoughts are with and cannot stop drifting back to his closest friends and family.

The First Of Many

And so our little generation
Starts to show some wear.
You, the first thread plucked,
And with you ebbs away
A small but so incredibly significant
Trace of warmth.

We were indestructible once
In summers of "study"
Lying, basking fatly,
Our fingers spread between sun and metal.
Our minds between vodka softened then
And fresh, unmade now.

It would be you, court jester
To slip so quickly away
At the first bloom and fade
Of frightful, matte reality -

To go
And not like the the rest of us
Begin to truly know
That what comes next is nothing.
May you rest in peace.