a flash of lightning, passing.

We still refer to J as "the boy," and we will for a long time, even though he's now maybe an inch taller than Anna, which means 1.5 inches taller than me. It's weird for him to be taller than his parents, as though a body at 13 isn't already enough to contend with, so at his request we've stopped measuring for the time being.

He is a remarkable human by any measure, and further so as an autism-spectrum person, but he is more typically autistic in many respects, including a difficulty making friends. So we were blown away a few years ago when he made a friend on his own, a very sweet kid a couple years younger. We got to know his mother, and met his older sister occasionally. I don't think we met his father (though more on that in a moment). Years passed, and the friend decided to change his name from one masculine name to another, but also to start using they/them/their pronouns.

The dad has some typical abuse/control problems, and moved the family up to Oregon, away from the support network they'd built down here. It turns out I'd interviewed the friend's father for a job a long time ago, and further that the friend's parents had once brought a hailstorm of drama and heartbreak down on folks I met separately. I mean a crazy hailstorm, like "if they tried to get on Judge Judy, no one would believe it actually happened" kind of crazy. In the back of my mind, I knew the dad lived here in town, and it's not surprising that they should be at the same school (for quirky kids) together, but that they should independently befriend each other is pretty out there.

(The father's ex-wife is re-married but still uses his last name; the friend's mother uses her maiden name, so I didn't see the connection until everyone was tagged in a Facebook photo.)

Last month, J's friend N committed suicide, at age 11. Powerless, un-heard, un-seen, un-accepted. Just...gone.

"It is impossible, when we're children, to acknowledge how vulnerable we are."

It could have been me. It almost was. Nothing in particular made it be otherwise. It's not like I knew things would get better with time. Just...luck.