J.D Salinger died and it reminded me of John. We were friends in college. The very first night we hung out, he brought me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye. I think it is a beautiful thing to call up a person you barely know and invite them to go see The Rocky Horror Picture Show. When you discover they are too poor to afford a simple movie ticket, there is some poetry to be found in arriving unannounced at their dorm room with a copy of your favorite book. It was inscribed with the word, Love.

The night John gave me that book, we used my dorm room bed like a trampoline. We told each other stories. When he was five, John broke all the windows in his parent’s garage and urinated in his mother’s flower bed. When his parents asked him why, he had no answers. They brought him to a psychologist. Jumping up and down, up and down, beside me on my bed, he tried to pinpoint what had compelled him to do what he did. He had no answers. I told him that I thought childhood might become completely foreign and unknowable seen from a particular distance. I was grateful he did not laugh at how sad this observation made me. We collapsed atop my bed, shared a smoke, and willed ourselves to remember the birth canal, the acid trip we were certain was our infancy.

I never told John I was afraid of myself. At the time, one of my professors asked me what I truly cared about. I opened and closed my mouth repeatedly like a ventriloquists dummy. I was stunted like a lobotomy. I blurted out the word dolphins. I mumbled dolphins, and then pushed my chair back and fled from the table so hastily that, had I the courage to turn back and look, I’m sure I would have seen my professor shaking his head as he wiped up spilled coffee from his lap.I never told John any of this. I did not have to.

You do not belong. John whispered this in the parking lot of the Olive Garden, as all my girlfriends piled into the backseat of my car. My good girlfriends who refused to share an apartment with me that year because, as they politely informed me, they were afraid I would borrow their sweaters without asking and try to sleep with their boyfriends. You do not belong. The way John said it made me feel unashamed to be proud.

John gave me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye at a time in my life when I was terribly lonely. I fell in love with Holden Caufield. Loving Holden made me capable of loving just a small part of what I previously thought was ugly in myself. That book simply changed my life. It was given to me by a boy who taught me that intimacy did not have to hurt.

J.D Salinger is gone. I never knew him. It feels silly to be sad, but I am. I feel as lonely as 19, as tender as the folding of a green dress on a hotel bed. I wish I knew what happened to John. If I knew, I would arrive unannounced on his door with a tattered copy of the book. I would inscribe it simply with the words, Thank You.

Holden Caufield knew that he would never be able to wash away all the scrawled words, the Fuck You to the world. John knew, and he taught me, that sometimes you do not have to.