Thanks for the responses, y'all. No need to know what to say. I sure haven't figured it out these past few days.
I do want to share this here, though. It's a bit about JP that's very much related to the site.
The last deck JP built had a ton of angels (his favorite creatures) and those annoying white enchantments that cripple your creatures, like Hobble. He called it the Handicapped Angel deck, crippling the opponent's army while pounding away with winged warriors. Anyway, he adopted Handicapped Angel as one of his AIM handles.
I cannot believe how f'ing appropriate this has all turned out to be. JP means a helluva lot to me. He made me feel good about myself at times when no one else was doing much in that area. He's also pretty much the reason my girlfriend and I are together today. His initial approval was very important to me, for some reason. And it was wonderful how quickly she also took to him. She and I dated last summer, then broke up as she spent a semester in Italy. When she came back, it was all up in the air what would happen with us, but he saw that we should be together. If it weren't for him talking to her for hours on end about it all, she might not have decided it was worth another go. Now we're about to move in together.
There are also these other odd little coincidences that I'm sure I'm really stretching it to notice, but they're there. Courtney (my girlfriend) and I actually noticed this stuff from the very beginning. JP stands for John Phillip. My dad's name is John. Courtney's is Phillip. Our initial anniversary (from last summer) was on JP's birthday. We got a new anniversary when she returned from Italy. JP died on the day we hit eight months.
Now, JP had quite a few struggles. He was a constant reminder of why I didn't want to be 16 again. All that identity-searching...which I'm still going through...is super-tough when you're a teenager, y'know? But, JP faced a ton of ****e that I've never had to. He told me more than once that he felt like he had aged faster than he was supposed to, and in some ways, he might have been right. At any rate, this world held him down in so many ways.
I feel so weird being so...sappy, I guess, about this stuff. But I keep coming back to the idea that I'm so lucky that JP touched my life. It's a shame that life didn't always deem him so lucky, though.
Finally, now, the Handicapped Angel gets to go home. I have tears in my eyes as I write it, but I have to like thinking about it that way.
Thanks for reading.
