It’s been nearly a week and I’m still equally at a loss for words and full of too many that just don’t quite hit the mark or help make any of it more comprehensible. Billie, you were such a champion and a dreamer. Not just for your own life and hopes but for others’ too. You supported your circle relentlessly. You always commented on my writing and encouraged me to keep doing it. I can’t count the times we bonded over our frustrations with the world and the hopes we had for it—whether about climate change or racial justice, poverty or church culture or working through trauma. Or all the many things we saw eye to eye as 3’s (I know we’d both roll our eyes at me even typing that)—the struggle to believe in ourselves, the perfectionism and high expectations, hating literally anything we’re not immediately good at. But also seeing the potential for so much good and powerful change in people and the world and wanting so desperately to be a part of it in some small way. It seems like just yesterday we had just officially met at Home in Los Feliz back in 2017, despite having known each other from a distance at APU long before then. Five years of game nights, cocktails, so many dumplings and noodles, talks of travel, hours of laughs, photoshoots, and a million other things and it still won’t ever be enough but I’m so damn grateful for the time we had. In the spirit of your ever-present encouragement of my writing—an excerpt of some words I mustered the other night: “We mark the seconds of memory with teased out fragments, mind delineating tangents of what was once here now lost by forced detachment. Desperate for answers that won’t arrive we catalyze, anesthetize the broken space then realize there is no explanation in this wretched devastation. So we remember.” Never going to forget you, dear friend. Until we meet again, save a boutonnière for me.