Nemo saltat sobrius

Sunday evening and Monday afternoon I got two batches of terrible news from home. They added up to this: Two of my friends are dead.

There are no pretty words. They have not passed on, the final curtain has not gone down, they have not shuffled anything off, they are just dead. And they shouldn't be. I know how it looks. Four teenagers in a car, coming home from a last camping trip Labour Day weekend, swerve into an oncoming van. But they weren't drunk. Two girls and a boy died, one girl got out with only bruises, physically. They weren't doing anything wrong... I don't think they ever did anything wrong. I want to explain these people to whoever's reading, as I knew them.

There was Amanda, who I didn't know.

There was Stephanie, who I knew from when we were both in grade five, proud and nervous to be starting Honour Choir. She has a cheerful face and a sweet smile. Her website entries are all extraordinary; she liked to post photos of herself, her friends, and other subjects, all full of charm and vivacity, always accompanied by captions that may have been spur-of-the-moment but were always perfect. She listened to Josh Groban and Switchfoot and was going to Capernwray Bible School in England -- she started a countdown (on her website, naturally) to when she would leave. Steph was the one I never paid as much attention as her merits warranted. It's absolutely useless to say it, but I wish we'd been closer.

There was Luke, who is so difficult to talk about. Luke was full of sunshine. I only met him in October, at a surprise birthday party for the fourth girl, the one who got out alive, but meeting the famous Luke was a highlight of the evening. We played a board game called Cranium, and we both got very excited over the word puzzles. He was very smart, a National Scholar in biology, but Becca and I agreed today that he never used his intelligence to make anybody else feel stupid. In eleven months of knowing him, I got to feel like we'd been friends forever. It always made him so worried when any of his friends fought. We were always happy when Luke was around. He understood what was important -- not petty grievances, not small grudges, just the simple divine fact of being friends. We were all looking foward to being his friends for the rest of our lives.

And now we'll never see them again, not in this life. And how can we continue? James Boswell wrote that nemo saltat sobrius, "sober men don't dance". In a frightening, uncaring, and insecure world, we cannot do anything but fight for every bit of happiness we can find. Last night the campus pub was doing an 80s night, all-ages, playing all kinds of good old bad songs. Everyone was dancing around madly, reminding me of all the times we put on good old bad songs in Laura's basement and did the same. I did Luke's trademark Elbow Dance at the edge of a crowd of strangers. I ignored any funny looks I got, because anyone who can't deal with the Elbow Dance doesn't deserve to know even a secondhand version of the person who invented it. If they taught me anything, it was that we have to squeeze all the joy we can from our existence, whether it's in year-long countdowns to a departure, or in tablecloth sledding, or delinquent pebble messages on driveways, or in the Elbow Dance.

So last night, I went out and danced for them. Luke and Steph would want me to be happy, so I tried.