Time is a thief. It comes in the night when you are sleeping and it takes the present away. It steals constantly, but it only steals small things: a moment here, a second there. It's so good at what it does that you do not notice the theft until so much cumulative time is gone. You go to look for an event in your memory, expecting it to be in the recent past, only to find a blank space, with a dust imprint on the mantle where it was and you realize time has stolen it. It's not gone, just much much farther away.
Such is what I feel now, for the memory of a friend who died 20 years ago today. It's a selfish feeling, one only the living get to have. I feel cheated. I cannot be old enough to have a friend who died 20 years ago, while I was in college. I cannot have gone 20 years without this person in my life. It cannot be two decades. He wouldn't have been 43 years old now. That would mean I'm in my 40s. It simply cannot be that my friend has been gone for so long.
And yet he has been gone that long. And I have been robbed of 20 years of parties, camping trips, weddings, children, divorces. Hell, I've been robbed of the right to grow apart, to become someone he didn't care for anymore. I'd like to think we'd still be friends no matter what the distance, but I'll never know. I'd gladly give up my friendship if it meant he were still around.
Instead, he's gone, and the new/old thoughts come back to me. I'm angry that he rode his motorcycle on a rainy November night, I'm mad at the patch of leaves that threw his front wheel out. I'm mad at the negligent police who assumed he was drunk and sent him to jail, rather than the hospital. I'm mad at Clint for being stubborn and defensive after the wreck. I'm mad at the idiot jailhouse nurse who looked at him after he complained of difficulty and sent him back into the drunk tank twice. Ultimately, I'm mad at the stupid, avoidable, sad way he left us. I can't change any of it. Besides, the court cases have already been won and lost; it is what it is. All I can do now is remember him, so that is what I will do.
His name was Clint Stoll. Hes was 23. He was my college roommate and dear friend for 6 crazy, fun, awesome months. He had brown hair and brown eyes. He was from Colorado. He looked like Vince Vaughn before Vince Vaughn was a thing. He was blue collar: he paid his own way through college by working at Sherwin Williams and I respected the hell out of him for that. He had a great laugh and a charisma that was arrogant without being insulting. He could save any party, and I mean that in the best way, because he could talk to anybody and make them feel like he really wanted them there, that they belonged. He was a champion of the underdog, because he was an underdog. His best friends were both popular people and outcasts. He made them hang out together because he wouldn't stomach cliques.
He made me feel like i had value. I knew I did, but but i didn't feel like it. But when Clint told you you were smart, or had a good idea, you believed it. I would've liked to have seen what kind of man he would become. I would have liked to see him as a father. He came from good people and he was destined to make good people. He would've been a good engineer, and a good dad. Somewhere out there a boy scout troop is missing a rebellious leader.
Clint was no James Dean. He was not a brilliant, troubled youth destined to be immortally young and tragic. It's easy to imagine him that way because it makes his loss easier: 'He was just too beautiful for this world'. But the truth is much, much worse and still so very hard to bear 20 years later. The truth is he was well-adjusted, kind, smart, hard-working and empathetic. He had a bright future ahead full of love, loss, mistakes and successes and it was ripped away in a flash. The truth is it still hurts.
Clint, it's been 20 years. I miss you.