Even though I hadn’t spoken to my friend Tia in 23 years, it seems just utterly wrong that no one alive will ever get to hear her joyous barking laugh again. That hit me harder than I thought it would — grief compresses time; the present and past overlap, coalesce, the Möbius strip insinuating its flat coiled line. It feels like just a moment ago I was watching Tia paint and reading Vonnegut to her, hoping to spark that laugh of hers. That it was 25 years ago and in a different world altogether feels stranger to me than if you’d told me I actually time-traveled.

I guess that’s how you know you deeply care about someone — that you want them to prosper and be most who they truly are even when their world line and yours diverge completely, never to intersect again.

Thinking back, she lived her life wide open and perhaps she knew somewhere deep inside her that she didn’t have as much time as the rest of us.

And I wanted to say this, just so it’s somewhere. I said that Tia was kind, and she was — the kindest person I’ve ever known. Inextricably related to this is how she observed everything, paid attention to all the world, which is probably why we meshed. For instance, she noticed that I drank Mountain Dew constantly (then) and I am certain sensed the first time I visited her at home that I felt a bit unsure if she really wanted me around. By the next time I went over, though, she’d tucked Mountain Dew cans into every free spot of her little fridge — her wordless way of letting me know that I was welcome in her life, that she did want me to have a place there.

But she was not weak, for which kindness is often mistaken. She stood up to her parents. She emancipated herself from them legally, against all odds. Can you imagine the guts that took, the will? Could you have done that when you were 15? She was as strong as a titanium beam where it counted. Tia was unlike anyone else, a stray from some other, superior universe, and she had the misfortune of alighting in North Florida. And like poison it seeped into her, killed her, silenced her, foreclosed on a better future while making a mockery of the best parts of her that in another place would’ve shone like supernovae. That’s what makes areas like North Florida deplorable — not the people, but what those areas do to the people who don’t at all deserve that poison in their veins.