Memorial

On a walk to the observatory at the northern end of town, I scrambled upstairs to practice for a dissolution of a pact between two friends of mine, but as soon as I came up the flight of stairs I quickly noticed that there were black marks on the floor. I at first dismissed them as dry rot, but when I bent down closer I saw that it was fresh felt-tip ink. The entire schematic turned out to be a memorial to 'Toni Nikki Yoder', supposedly a friend of mine that had been murder.* Scrawled around the box within which her name was written were a verse from some song (evidently a rap) as well as a banzai cry: 'Senseless murder is wrong! 14 years old and gone!'

Combined with the news that one of my classmates had to leave school for excuse of maternity, this made for a nasty shock. I was not new to death; my grandmother passed away in 1999 from cancer of the pancreas. I also was not new to widespread funerals, either; on the Pokémon Community they are honouring a member, Mandi Lili Cormier, who died in a car crash over a year ago, and even after that period of time you will see those words in many signatures on that forum. It seems that ever since I registered on PKMN.NET, tragedy has started to come forward. Not only was I banned for seven months, but now a pregnancy in my school, the death of a nearby student from leukaemia and now the resonance of the murder of someone I knew, have established my stay here as truly calamitous, across the board.

* One of the comments has resulted in a correction here; I had originally thought it to be domestic violence after a sketchy thought of newspaper articles on the subject, but it's really a murder case.