Alert: Completely Serious Post Ahead.

Pics from Mike's brother added here.

Congratulations will be postponed for the week so that I can give remembrance to a friend from high school who overdosed and died last week. The news came like a punch to the gut and spread quickly across the network of people who knew Mike; we all had the same contradictory emotional response: shock and little surprise.

Mike, like many of us, experimented with alcohol and pot. Then gradually got into the harder stuff. He want to jail, then rehab. He was trying to start over. His parents were driving to his place in California to give him their car when they got the call mid-trip from his friend who found him. News is still coming in.

We haven't seen Mike in years, but the sucker punch was immediate and swift. I'm still close with several people I went to high school with (the average size of a graduating class was 70 people), and each of them have direct relationships with other people from our town; those relationships have kept me deeply connected to that place and that time. A group of my high school girlfriends came to DC for a weekend last November and we talked about Mike a lot, as we did every time we all got together. Most of us had some type of "experience" with him, whether it was making out or more. I mean if you hadn't gone a round with Mike, well, it's probably because you passed out early. But he wasn't a dick about it; he wasn't using you. He wrote several notes to me in the yearbook and on his class pictures that he was "so grateful that we got over our past and could remain good friends." I don't remember having a relationship with him, nor do I remember ever expressing regret that it never materialized into a relationship; it was what it was: two high school friends screwing around.

But he was sensitive. And maybe that sensitivity made him more susceptible to the path he couldn't escape. As my friends and I talked and emailed this weekend, we wondered how he felt; if starting over seemed insurmountable and whether we should have reached out more. We wondered if he knew how much we still talked about him. And how we always held out hope that he would come out the other side.

Note: I'll be scanning and uploading pictures at some point over the next couple days, so check back...