Today, it’s been six months since Lauren died, and roughly four months since I found out about her passing. I don’t think a single day has gone by where I haven’t sent a thought her way – sometimes even several times a day.

Her website is no longer available. “This account has been suspended”, it says. That page has been up for a while. That was one of the things I was dreading the most, because then that was really it, you know, then it was infinitely over.

We are, or were, the same age. Twenty-two. While our lives have been totally different, I always feel a special sort of kindred connection and kindredship with kids my age, like our lives will always be led in parallel. We were born the same year, started school the same year, and would have hit all of those existential milestones that are associated with certain ages at the same time. Our teen years were lived in parallel, hearing the same music on the radio and being exposed to the same shit on TV. We lived through the embarrassment that was the 90s together, which the older I get the more privileged I feel to have experienced. All of us ‘89’ers, we share something special together. It is not a connection that is limited to that year; it is a connection I imagine everybody feels to his or her birth year companions. Because that is what we are – soul companions, and I think somewhere in my head I wish we could all get together one day and compare stories.

It’s still so unfathomable to me that she is not coming back, that her life had to end so early. I can’t imagine what her friends and family must have felt, must still be feeling, will always feel. I hope for them that not too many questions have been left unanswered. My information about everything is very limited, so everything is still one big question mark in my head. But I think about it often, and my heart aches often.

It seems so unreasonably horrible that it had to end like this, but I hope it ended with peace for her. She was and is such a beautiful soul, and she has had such a profound impact on me, and it seems by the looks of the comments I got on my previous entry that she had a profound impact on everybody whose life she graced in one way or another. Please feel free to share some stories or memories about Lauren in the comments; I would love to hear.

I want to end this post with a quote from a comment left on the previous entry by Laura Rose, as she says it so beautifully.

The “rest in peace, sweet girl” comment was mine. She was an incredible light of a person.
Lauren will be forever missed & forever carried by those who loved her.
She will be forever carried by me.

And by me.

Thank you for reading.