Sometimes I think I am a fairly grown-up person these days, 26 now and pretty much making my own way in the world, on good terms with my family, happy with my friends and my partner and, if on precarious employment ground, at least taking proactive steps to get some better training and find a new job. Sometimes I think I’m an adult. And then sometimes I get whacked across the face with something that makes me realize I am not ready to be a grown-up because I just want to curl up with a teddy bear and cry at how unfair the world is. I am not ready to be a grown-up if being a grown-up means learning that someone I knew long ago but remember very warmly has had a recurrence of cancer and pretty bleak prospects of recovery.

We haven’t spoken in years, but he was one of the first people I ever met online. He was a few years older and I suspect it was a little embarrassing for him to have this adolescent kid with a rather obvious crush on him, but he was so unfailingly kind to me. I was in the first major depressive episode of my life and most of the time I just wanted to die. But fairly regularly my phone would ring late at night, a long-distance call all the way from the other side of the country, and a boy I’d never met would take some time to make a very sad girl laugh. He could always, always make me laugh, even on days when cracking a smile had felt like more than I could bear for most of the day.

I don’t know if I ever told him, or any of that group of friends with whom I have mostly lost touch over the years, how much they have to do with the fact that I lived through those years. I wish I had. I wish I had kept in touch. They were lifelines for me, and he in particular was a lifeline for me, at a time when I needed one badly. And there’s not a thing in the world I can do to return the favor. I can’t fix cancer with a phone call. I wouldn’t even know this was happening to him, if there weren’t still one friend we have in common after all these years.

We never did meet, but we exchanged pictures once, and somewhere I still have my picture of him. I don’t know where it is right now, but I can call it up in my memory. He’s outdoors somewhere, smiling, and so young although he looked terribly adult to me at the time. That’s how he still is in my head, a young happy-looking boy outside on a beautiful day, and a warm laughing voice on the phone. I don’t know how to picture him sick in a hospital bed, I don’t know how to imagine that voice tired and sad and not laughing anymore. I hope that’s because wherever he is, even if he is tired and sad, he still has that same terrific laugh. I don’t think I want to be an adult anymore if it means someone only a little older than I am, someone I’ve known since I was about twelve, is dying. He was a good guy and I’m sure he still is, and although we haven’t spoken in a long time, I’m absolutely positive that the world is a better place for having him in it.

I don’t know what to do with this overwhelming sadness and anger I’m feeling tonight at the idea that he may be gone from it much, much sooner than he should. I’d like someone to just hug me and tell me it’s all going to be okay, he’s going to be okay, that bad things like this don’t happen to the people who touch your life so strongly, if briefly. But of course that’s not true, and I know that because I’m a grown-up now. I think I’d like a break from being one.