They told us about you in an email addressed to the community. Three paragraphs signed by the president of the university that seemed incredibly honest at the time. I had to read your name twice. I’d just seen you a few weeks before and my mind kerfuffled over the arithmetic of these two ideas. When it had settled again, I admit, I wasn’t devastated. The feeling was akin to recognizing the passage of time: I thought I should get on doing something with my life. I didn’t know you very well so it was like finding out a distant relative died.

Other people felt more strongly. They wrote articles about you in the school paper and gathered for candlelight vigils. They commented on your Facebook page. You were such a great guy, _______, and, You will be missed, they posted, as if maybe you might pop back in and thank them. I didn’t do any of this. They held services for you and I didn’t attend. I had other things to take care of, or maybe I was just too tired. Really, I didn’t know you very well.

This is what I knew about: You were in one of my classes, and I thought you were droll. You wore buttoned-down shirts with basketball shorts and dirty white sneakers. You quoted Ignatius J. Reilly and Faulkner. I thought you were pretentious but decent enough and it helped that you could write a bit. All you ever wrote about was New Orleans, and you wrote about it as if it was your drunk father. One story I remember was about an old widower and his well. The well had spoilt recently and the man could not afford to pipe his house. The last lines read: “The man watched his well submerge into the murky water, and felt no despair. He knew there was no saving it. It had run dry sometime ago.”

I thought that was a nice way to end a story. It reminded me of my favorite grandfather who was a widower too and killed himself after his dog died. When I was young, he’d sit me on his lap and tell the same story about the war, how he’d thrown his rifle into ocean on the ride home, but I never told you about any of that. I told you things like, “Your story has nice construction” or “Your characters don’t seem realistic,” which are things you say in writing workshops. You said things like, “You have a talent for expressing melancholy.” We didn’t know each other well, after all.

I was in the cafeteria for dinner, and I’d just paid for my food when you approached me. More than anything, I remember how you walked because you didn’t walk, you trudged, your head was low and each step seemed like a burden. I never noticed how you walked before, but I know it wasn’t like that. You looked like the most defeated thing I’d ever seen.

“Hey,” you said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Not much,” you said.

I looked around for a seat.

“You’re a senior, right?” you asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Almost finished.”

“Almost finished,” you said, and smiled a little. “Any plans for after school? After graduation?”

I thought it was a funny question to ask in December. “I’m moving home, hopefully find a job in finance.”

“Oh,” you said. “Good luck with that.” You said good luck in a tone I cannot describe and then you walked away and it was the last time I saw you.

They found you next to a levee near your childhood house in New Orleans. You had shot yourself with a gun you bought from a former high school classmate who’d stuck around. So you know, I think it was unfair of you to do that. You could have said, “Let’s go have a drink,” and I would’ve gone, but you said Good Luck instead. Good Luck. I think about you often now. I read your stories for conversation. I read your stories and feel like I know you though I never will. I try to convince myself that your well had dried up long before you ever met me.