Our friend Scott didn't wake up this morning.

Scott was the lead singer in a band we became friends with while we lived in St. Johns. We drank and smoked pot with him and his bandmates countless times over the course of the year I knew him, our involvement being of the fuzzy sort which seems to develop at bars, friendships which accept the peculiarities of one's life and asks no deeper questions than to find something to laugh over. In all this time, I never knew Scott's last name. Uncomfortable with this, over a drink one night I asked him. The question seemed to puzzle him, but he answered. It's funny now to realize I was too intoxicated to remember what he said.

I thanked him but wasn't in the right frame of mind to explain my reasoning. Had I been sober enough to do so, I would have told him how strange it feels to know someone, and yet remain unaware of their surname, as if their name itself feels alien inside your mouth. Growing up, we encounter entire family trees. I can explain precisely how a high school acquaintance's whole extended family is connected, down to random ex-wives. And yet, with an unknown last name, all of this is circumspect, people become ghosts, uncertain spirits only half-connected to the world you know, names tenuously tied to faces that can change without warning. A surname gives grounding, presence. Reality. A surname can be traced down the pages of a phonebook, the ink of a birth certificate or at the very least known to the almighty Google. A surname forces you into being. In going back to school, again I know everyone's last name, I know their collective histories. In St. Johns this was never the case.

In the time we knew each other, Scott repeatedly told the story of a poem he penned for a class, a sonnet, how much he thought I'd like it. Finally, after weeks of back-and-forth badgering, him promising he'd show me, me demanding he just recite the stupid thing, he shoved the original copy in my hand and said "Read it." It was on a tattered piece of college-lined paper, smudged and probably home to the residue of countless coke lines. I scanned the poem more than a few times. It was far from perfect. Words were misspelled, the rhyme scheme completely fell apart in the last few lines. He pointed out a bit of wordplay that was only somewhat witty. But still, I couldn't tear my eyes from it. It was an elegy, to longing, to hearteache, to misplaced desire, to the bitter regret we feel for mistakes we know we make. The kinds of mistakes for which Scott's fingers and nose and lungs and finally his heart were routinely picking up the tab.

His life was in shambles. He barely managed to hold a steady job at Subway. Once, when his student loan check came in, he bought drinks for the entire bar, keeping a bottle for himself, which reliably dwindled down to nothing by the end of the night. The stories of his evenings after the bar were of the obscene amount of drugs he consumed, from the occasional eight-ball of heroin to a day spent huffing paint cans. Of his real life, I heard rumors of rich parents, a psychotic ex-wife, years spent huddled in a clunking van. Nothing I ever felt comfortable verifying. And every night I knew him, it seemed his body was a canvas, a startling panegyric to suffering and self-hatred, pity and fear, dutifully accepting everything he threw on it. We always joked that he'd die before he made it to thirty-six. If you looked at the stretched exhausted skin, you could have sworn he was nearing fifty. He was twenty-nine. I joked once that Scott was the epitome of today's youth. That if we were to have our Don Quixote or Jack Kerouac, it would be him, that he was who we'd need to write about, and his death would be the only way to end it.

But this poem humanized Scott for me. Until that point, he had been at most a caricature, a character. It was in reading this poem I felt his unsteady heartbeat, saw him crystallize as a real person, no mere ghost at the bar. The poem was marker, just as a grave, that said "I was here. I existed."

After I finished reading, he told me to keep it, for posterity. My roommates and I pondered giving it back to him, that he should keep it to build it into a song, make it into something more, or perhaps just for himself. But we knew he would refuse. And partly, we admitted that maybe it was good for one of us would have it. In case he really did die. We laughed off the possibility, but the laughter felt shallow. Why is death always a laughing specter?

All I have left of Scott is his poem. My heart isn't broken for the loss of a friend, and yet it feels sorrow for the loss of someone who could have been a much closer friend. Someone whose last name wouldn't escape me, whose mother I could call and offer apologies, someone whose obituary I knew existed and could see, to learn what kin he left behind, where he came from. An official history. But that perhaps will never happen. Scott will forever be only half-known to me. One may argue that I knew him just as well as I may know anyone else, that merely knowing someone's last name is at most a formality. And that may be true, we are more than words on a page, or the ink of our birth certificates. But those words do mean something, as do the physical objects they inhabit. Just like Scott's poem, They help to make us more. More than just ghosts of memory and uncertainty.