A Brief Conversation on a Shitty Thursday

Last Thursday Aaron McFarland and I went into Preston's classroom at lunch to discuss creating a philosophy-type club.  We were going to meet a couple of other people interested, but they never showed, so we just stayed in the class and talked until lunch ended.  Breanna Rodriguez had just held a meeting for a Yosemite trip she was planning and immediately came over and asked us if we were there for the meeting.  We told her no, and she said something like, "Good, because you just missed it."  And then she sat down with us and we just had a conversation.  It was this conversation that compelled me to write this.  Just me, Bree, and Aaron sat and talked about life- not even academics or anything- just a real human conversation.  We weren't close friends, just people who knew each other, but she still wanted to talk to us.  She was one of the happiest and most genuine people on Righetti's soul-sucking campus- and she actually cared about other humans.

I walked away from that conversation remembering (from time spent in our group in Mrs. Byrne's English, sophomore year) what a great human being she was.  I hadn't had a conversation with her since that sophomore English class, and this is part of the reason that the news that she passed away just a day after talking to her again had such an impact on me.  Not because I was a close friend with her, but because she could form a bond with people in fifteen minutes.  She had such an upbeat attitude about life that she was able to make people happier just by being around.  I don't understand how a human being could be as positive as Bree was: even if the people she was around were negative pieces of shit, she'd still stay positive. 

If anyone deserves to die young, it's the people who just sit around and exist like I do; who don't really care about the community they live in or participating in it.  Not the people like her who were out there actually trying to make a difference.  Not people who have futures- promising, meaningful futures.  She was going to make an impact on the world

I'm typically not a very social person, which is why Bree coming up and talking to Aaron and me out of nowhere surprised me; she just liked being nice to people.
Actually connecting with someone you haven't talked to in over a year and then hearing that they passed away the next day just made me feel sick.
I learned what kind of person she was in Mrs. Byrne's class two years ago, and this conversation just brought all of those memories back.

This world is ninety-percent asshole; she was in the ten percent that cared and mattered.  I could never be a fraction of the person she was, nor could most of the students at Righetti.  We didn't just lose a person- we lost a piece of the future.
If anyone deserves to die young, it's the people who just sit around and exist like I do; who don't really care about the community they live in or participating in it.  Not the people like her who were out there actually trying to make a difference.  Not people who have futures- promising, meaningful futures.  She was going to make an impact on the world; she was going to do things that were beneficial to humanity.  You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who knew her at all who would disagree with that.

Though I didn't know her as long, this hits me even harder than Mark Bae's death back in August.  Mark was suffering, and he made a choice that I can personally understand.  Bree wanted to live and should have for at least sixty more years.
That's what makes this so fucked up: she was going places, she had plans.  Hundreds of Righetti students (probably upwards of a thousand) like me don't.  Usually I just see a bunch of assholes every which way I glance and think "fuck America" or "fuck this planet," but people like her gave me hope for the future.

So many people have written so much about this awesome and inspirational person, that I know this probably seems like I'm just jumping on the RIP bandwagon.  You know, joining those people who haven't even met someone in their community and still post some long-worded message or some half-hearted "praying for the family" post for the Facebook likes and shit? 
I've contemplated whether or not I should post this because of that, but then realized it doesn't matter if people think that's what I'm doing.  What matters is letting people know that she was one of the kindest and most innately "good" people I have ever known, no matter how many other people have said the same thing.