Jenna Felice is standing behind a stall in Confluence. She is talking with passion about Century, about fiction caring and confident, and I decide I like her. Memory, bronze that moment. Let it fall into time marked an end, not a beginning, a stifled promise; a friendship that was just a bud which now can never flower. How it hurts to cast you into the past tense. Bronzed into memories frozen in old attitudes closed away from change that melts the living like lost wax. It hurts us, not you. The past encloses you like shrinkwrap no present tides can touch you you are borne away behind nothing can hurt you now, nobody can reach you. What burns us you cannot know that life goes on, goes forward empty of your presence and we must go on with it missing you always leaving you behind. It catches in the voice when we must say of you "she was" and never, now, "she is" the things unsaid, the things you'd want to know that we can never tell you. It does not help to rage to fight life as it sweeps us on. All we can do is live each day knowing this day may yet be all we have for us and for our friends and call our memories precious. Jo Walton, 11 March 2001 originally posted to rec.arts.sf.fandom, Sunday, March 11, 2001