Maggie

There are people that exist on the periphery of your life. They enter and are important, and fade without ever leaving. They overlap; they are strands of the braid that goes in and out, a part of the tapestry woven by the Graces. Every thread makes your life and each one snipped lessens it.

Maggie is one of these. A good friend once, and a close friend to close friends. She threaded her way through my life at so many instances. Dorm mate and nearly roommate. One-time love of my own one-time love. Roommate with a friend of a close friend, who became a close friend. To think of her as peripheral does a disservice perhaps, to the person she was and the friend she could have been, but she was peripheral the way the sky is peripheral. You understand its importance, and you can always see it, and it's there when you look.

Maggie died today. I feel grief and guilt; as though the sky is falling and I might have stopped it, had I only been paying attention.