Suzanne Beecher

Dear Reader,

Today's the day! The launch of the 21st Annual Write a DearReader Contest.

Don't start thinking to yourself, 'I'm not a writer.' Because I started the writing contest 21 years ago for someone exactly like you. If you can tell a story, you can write a story. Everyone has at least one 650-word story inside of them (the maximum number of words allowed in an entry), and I'd love to read yours.

The Write a DearReader Contest is all about writing for fun. Two people can work together on an entry, so feel free to collaborate with a friend or spouse. If your entry is chosen as a First Place ($200 cash prize), Second Place ($100), or Third Place ($50) winner, I will donate a 50% matching gift to your local library in your honor. The winning entries will be featured in my daily column.

So get busy and start writing. Write about your grandmother's favorite recipe or tell me about your favorite or most obnoxious neighbor. What's the one word that would best describe you? What's your wish, but it hasn't come true yet? Write down the conversation you'd have with your cat or dog if they could talk. Tell me about a perfect first date, or one that made you run the other way.

If you made a list of things about yourself that make you feel proud, what would they be? When does your passion shine? Inspire folks to do what they love.

When do you pull up the covers and hide-out from fear? Serious, funny, embarrassing situations, thoughts about life, fiction, and nonfiction, the topics are endless. Memories make great stories. Write about the antics of a quirky relative. I remember when...

Does the thought of writing something that people will read give you the willies? Perfect. There's your topic--write about your fear of writing. But start writing about something, because it's time to enter my 21st Annual Write a DearReader Contest.

To review the guidelines and read last year's winning entries, click here.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Start writing and have fun,

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@firstlookbookclub.com

P. S. This week we're giving away 10 copies of the book Loved One: A Novel by Aisha Muharrar. Click here to enter for your chance to win. 

ONE

There was no bride. There was no groom. No seating chart with my name in calligraphy—a blue dot next to Julia indicating a preference for fish. No DJ coaxing guests to the dance floor with a multigenerational crowd-pleaser, no maid of honor fiddling with a sheet of white printer paper, unfolding it from eighths to fourths, then taking a theatrical deep breath before she says, Okay! So.

Which made sense because it was not a wedding.

But there were approximately a hundred of us gathered at Berkeley City Club, a grand Italian Renaissance Revival building often rented out for private events (like weddings), and there were two sections of dark wood folding chairs separated by a wide stripe of hardwood floor (an aisle if you will), and more important, it just felt like it should have been a wedding. It's what we did that year. We went to weddings. Not together—though Gabe did ask, the year before, when the invitations went out and before he'd started dating Elizabeth, if I'd be his plus-one to the Tokyo wedding of his percussionist and backup vocalist. They'd met on tour with him. I would have loved to go to Japan, but I already had another wedding on the same day. By September, I'd been to six and RSVP'd to three more. I was thirty—Gabe, born the same year but in December, was twenty-nine—and apparently we'd entered that stage of life where if you haven't nailed down your version of semiformal cocktail attire, you'd better do it quick because that's what your weekends were going to be for the next decade. This perpetual wedding season was such a well-known truth about people our age that I could feel an awareness of it in the room as I stood up, clutching my own folded sheet of printer paper, and began to speak about my dear friend Gabe. It was one of the things I had to avoid saying in Gabe's eulogy—the obvious thing—that he was only twenty-nine, and his death was so sudden, by anyone's estimation, it would have been more likely I was speaking at the happiest day of his life.

My dear friend Gabe. This was the one line I'd prepared and now I'd said it. I'd hoped to come up with more by the time I arrived at the funeral. In my studio as I packaged orders. On the flight from LA, the car ride from the airport. But no, nothing. I lowered the microphone, stalling for time, and tried to remember how I was supposed to feel about Gabe. Outside, UC Berkeley students chatted on the street below us, cars and trucks drove along the city's concrete hills. It was a beautiful cloudless day.

"Gabe was the kind of friend who was more like family," I said. This was true. Having briefly dated as teenagers, when we met again in our twenties, we became friends so quickly it was clear we worked better that way. And we'd remained close for years.

"I could always count on him," I continued, launching into one quickly delivered anecdote after another to prove this point. As I scanned the faces in front of me—mostly Gabe's music associates and peers, plus both sides of his family: his father, his cousins, the aunts who'd flown in from Colombia, and his mother and her relatives and friends—I was sure none of them could tell, but I knew there was a disconnect between the words I was saying and what I was feeling. Not because I was in shock or numb. Though I probably was both in shock and numb. And not because the stories weren't real. I had plenty of examples of Gabe being sweet and constant.

Of course it would never have been painless, giving that eulogy. But it should have been easier.

The problem was even though Gabe was one of my closest friends, the month before, we'd made a dumb mistake and slept together.

* * *

An immediate and important caveat: Gabe and I were actual friends. I won't mention this again, because then the lady doth protest too much, but the point has to be made. We weren't the kind of friends who were never really friends. The kind of friends you see in a romantic comedy where there are two incredibly attractive people who are deeply emotionally invested in each other, and we're supposed to believe they have never once considered the idea of sexual intercourse. The kind of friends who are secretly in love with each other and only realize minutes before one of them is about to get married or leave town, and the next thing you know they're jumping in a car, or on a horse, or running down the street, whatever, and they tumble into bed, or out of frame, depending on the rating of the movie. Having several male friends, this depiction of male- female friendship was always a pet peeve of mine, but somehow Gabe and I had tumbled (onto a couch, not a bed, but then, yes, eventually a bed too), and we'd ended up in this exact ridiculous situation, except we'd done worse than that because we hadn't even gotten a stolen honeymoon or new zip code; we'd just made a real, and awful, mess of everything.

But—you may be thinking—there's always a chance to make things better. Even if it gets really bad, if you're truly good friends, then you can work it out. And absolutely, totally you can. Unless, three weeks later, one of you dies.

* * *

"Oh, Julia, he loved you." The first person I spoke to after my eulogy was Gabe's manager, Kathy Liu. We were in the restroom. It was small, with two narrow stalls and two side-by-side sinks. Kathy was middle-aged, probably closer to my mom's age than mine. She was wearing a Tina Turner concert tee over a long-sleeved black dress. Gabe's mother, Leora, had asked that instead of the usual funeral garb, in honor of Gabe's career as a musician, we wear our favorite concert tees. I'd chosen a Billy Joel's The Stranger shirt (an inside joke for no one but the deceased) under a black tuxedo jacket. It was clear Leora wanted Gabe's funeral to be a departure from traditional mourning and as much of a celebration of his life as possible. His producer and frequent collaborator Jabari Bernier was currently leading a twenty-minute musical tribute with a jazz quartet. A time of reflection is what it said in the program. A time for a bathroom break is how several people interpreted it. I'd avoided the long line for the women's room and found an empty restroom downstairs. Well, empty until Kathy walked in. She hugged me, then took a step back, concentrating with concern as if she were appraising car wreckage.

"He just adored you," Kathy said, clutching my hands in hers. "I remember we were headed to a show in Houston, and he kept saying, 'Julia's going to be near here. You have to leave some time so I can see Julia.' And I said, 'Okay, where's Julia staying? Which hotel in Houston?' "

I knew this story. Kathy had told it to me before. She was one of those people who connected with acquaintances by continually reminding them of the single experience they shared, imbuing an anecdote with dramatic reverence, as if it were Kerri Strug's Olympic vault or some other monumental event worthy of its own ten- part docuseries. Now finally we'd reached the episode about the dismount.

"And then he said, 'Oh no, Julia's staying in Austin.' Austin! I said, 'That may as well be a different state, honey.' But I got him there. So sweet."

I had once found this story sweet too; now it was, at best, proof that Gabe was terrible at state geography.

Kathy rested her funeral program on the edge of the sink. Gabriel Wolfe-Martel, 1986–2016. "I'm sorry we couldn't reach you directly, our priority was Leora."

"Of course," I said. I'd found out the same way everyone else had. Through the internet. I was at a workbench in my studio, tightening the prong setting of a bespoke ruby ring, the chain nose pliers gripped between my thumb and index finger.

Mandy, the new production manager for my jewelry line, was at her desk. Mandy had only worked for me for a few weeks, but we'd hit it off instantly after realizing we'd both grown up the only Black girl in a mostly white suburban school. There was often an immediate bond with other onlies, a shared interest in things that would probably go on some ill-conceived this-is-for-white-people list that we'd come by honestly and early before realizing those things weren't made with us in mind. Somewhere Mandy had a photo of herself with her all-white soccer team and somewhere I had a similar picture; we got each other. But we hadn't known each other that long, and it can take some time for me to open up to people, which is why it wasn't her fault when she looked up from her laptop and gasped. "Wait, don't you know one of the guys from Separate Bedrooms?"

"It's just Gabe," I said. This was a common mistake. Separate Bedrooms wasn't a band of four or five guys, it was a stage name for one person.

"Oh," she said, her voice tentative. "People are saying he, like, died?"

Kathy pulled a handkerchief from her purse. A handkerchief. You didn't see those too often. I pointed to it. "Am I going to need one of those?" I was sort of trying to make a joke, sort of genuinely afraid. I'd never been to a funeral. Which I knew at thirty was lucky. Though it's hard to feel lucky at a funeral.

"Oh yes, dear," Kathy said. Her face softened into a maternal tenderness. "You may not feel it yet, but at some point, it will hit you. And then you'll be back to normal, talking to someone, just like we are now, and it will hit you all over again. Grief comes in waves." She patted my shoulder. You let me know if there's anything I can do."

(continued on Tuesday)

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