Dear Readers: Forgive me for this one. It is long and unstructured, but once I started writing, I just couldn’t stop. Thanks for your support this last week.

Dear Star:

It’s nearly midnight as I begin this, which doesn’t make it much different from half or more of the posts that I’ve authored on Phillyist over the past year and a half. What really makes it different is that, when it’s done, I won’t be emailing it off to you and Jim for edits. I won’t be emailing anything to you anymore, even though it’s still instinctual to type the first few letters of your address every time after I type Jim’s. I almost emailed you your own death notice. What also makes this post different is that when it’s done, I won’t get an email from you commanding me to go to bed, even though we both know very well that you’re doing exactly what I’m doing and you have to be up a lot earlier.

I am afraid to check my email archives to see how many of these commandments I’ve received from you since we first began working on Phillyist. Dozens, certainly, ranging from the simple “go to bed” to the more specific “why aren’t you working on your thesis?” to the sympathetic “it sounds like you’re stressed; stop working on the website and go to bed already.” I always felt guilty when I’d get one of those emails from you, because I knew that you meant them, and I also knew that it meant I was weaker and less capable than you. Which is why, I think, I didn’t listen to them.

Continued after the jump...

When I was sixteen, way too smart for my high school and bored out of my damn mind, I started chatting on the internet with people from all over the country. Strangers. My mom, probably worried I’d be another statistic for Stone Phillips to talk about when he does another expose on internet stalking, told me that I couldn’t make real friends on the internet. That you came into my life, and that I am grieving for you the way that I am, proves my mother wrong. Because, even though we met up plenty of times in the real world, many of my fondest memories of our relationship will be in the form of brief e-mails. When a local blogger decided to be particularly snarky about me, sending me a link and assuring me it was more kindergarten crush than crushing insult. Conspiracy theories when one vitriolic commenter disappeared but another materialized shortly thereafter. (You were right, by the way—the IP addresses were identical. I’m not sure if I ever told you that.) Gentle corrections or suggestions to posts I’d half-heartedly thrown together at the last possible minute. A quick note to tell me that, although I was in elementary school 2100 miles away when Axl Rose was at the top of his game, you were most likely at that concert—as a teenager. (I don't think it had ever occurred to me that you were any older than I am.) A promise to add McClintock to your NetFlix queue when I found out you didn’t like Westerns and assured you that this one was different. We emailed back and forth, approximately five days a week, every week, for the last ten months. GMail tells me that these conversations number in the “hundreds,” but I can’t seem to get an accurate count of how many. Probably better that way, I think. Hard to quantify a friendship like that.

Sometimes, I’d see that you were online, but I was always afraid I’d be bugging you if I IMed. I know that I should have known better, but the polite southerner in me couldn’t stand the idea that I might be interrupting. I wish I had. You’re gone now, and I missed my chance. I know that an online conversation would have been great, because our real-life conversations, when we had them, always were. I remember sitting in the audience at the Wilma with you before a Fringe show, quietly poking fun at some of the hipster-chic audience members as they entered, and I remember meeting up with you at Naked Chocolate Café—it was your first time, and I felt honored to be part of a first impression of a place that you’d later write about—we were supposed to just exchange some pre-release CDs with each other, and yet somehow, we ended up talking for three hours. I’ve been trying to remember the last time we hung out in person, and I think it was September 17, when we both went to see When Boys Cry, but I can’t believe that it’s really been that long and I’ve been trying desperately to come up with a time between then and now, and the worst thing about it was that after the show, I waited in the lobby at the Adrienne for a friend who was in the cast while you quietly slipped away and I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you then, just kind of waved and said “see you soon.” I really thought I would.

We had plans to see The Postman Always Rings Twice on Tuesday for this special Film Noir movie series that we’d been invited to, and I was really looking forward to seeing you. On Sunday morning when Jim gave me the news so hard to deliver I swear I could hear his heart breaking over the phone, one of the first things I thought was: “But… I had plans with her for Tuesday.” For half a second, I may have been upset with you for not giving me a chance to see you one last time. Listening to your friends and family today—people who knew you far better than I ever had the chance to—I realize that I’m not the only person who’d give anything for that one last time, that one last hug, that one last smile.

I had a crisis this morning, a really serious crisis, when I realized that I didn’t know what to wear to your funeral. I called Katie. “Wear black,” she told me.

“Well yes,” I said, “but the dress I’m wearing right now has this really funky uneven hem, and…”

“Jill, it’s Star. I think she’d be okay with an uneven hem.”

I grew up Jewish, so an opened casket at funerals or memorial services is something that’s foreign to me. As a result, when confronted with an open casket, I don’t know what to do. As a result, I didn’t get to the funeral home too early today for your viewing. I spent the whole service this afternoon alternatively crying and eyeing you, lying there, waiting for you to sit up and moan: “BRAAAAIIIIIINNNNNSSSSS.” If anyone I’ve ever met was a likely candidate for resurrection as a Zombie, it was you. I haven’t ventured anywhere near Rittenhouse Square this week, in fact, for fear that you’d be lurking there, slowly creating an army for Philadelphia’s impending zombie takeover. I was afraid, not because zombies are scary (I always found them just a little ridiculous), but because I know that seeing a re-animated Star C. Foster, coming at me with the sole intention of eating my brains… I’d let you. I’d let you if that meant that afterward, we’d be collaborators, albeit of a completely different nature, again.

This weekend, I leave for vacation. Two weeks in Texas with my family. When I get back, we were supposed to do two things. The first was Mexican food, chez moi, because I’d posted a recipe that was making you hungry. I told you to bring Mike, who you’d been so cute in talking to me about, but who I hadn’t yet had a chance to meet, and I’d invited Jim and his wife, who I also hadn’t met, for our little editorial fiesta. The second was going dancing—either ballroom or salsa—because you knew I used to do it, back home, and missed having people to go with. You’d first put out the dancing offer when you started taking classes, and I wish that I’d jumped on the chance. Because it would have been fun, and because I could have spent more time with you, and also… because maybe, just maybe, I could have told you that I didn’t think that the pain in your leg was from dancing and that you should go see a doctor about it. It’s irrational, I know, but I feel a little guilty for this.

If I live to be ninety-nine, I’d be lucky to do a fraction of what you did in your thirty-three years on this planet. I’d be lucky if I touch half the people who you obviously touched. The outpouring in cyberspace alone has blown me away. You had fans, Star. You had people who had never met you, blogging about how much they’d miss reading you. I’m collecting some of these links below, because if I know you, you’ve found the only WiFi hotspot in heaven and you’re doing some web browsing right now, and hey, who doesn’t like to read about herself once in a while?

This week, I’ve realized that I need to stop being afraid of doing things and to start actually doing them. That’s what you did. My god, you swam with sharks. (Nevermind that it was at the Aquarium—I need a few inches of plate glass between me and the water if there are sharks in it.) And so I’m going to try, really hard, to stop crying and to stop being sad, because I know that you wouldn’t want me to be sad, and you’d be disappointed in me if you knew that I had put my life on hold this week because of you, or because of anyone other than myself. It’s not going to happen right away, but from now on, I’m going to try.

Tonight, several members of the Phillyist staff joined Jim and me at Nodding Head for dinner. And… We had fun. And Mike came, Mike who only a few short hours before I’d never had a real conversation with, and he put his arms around me before he sat down at the other end of the table, and at some point during the evening, I even caught him smiling. I just thought you’d be glad to know that people were laughing today.

I miss you and I love you and I wish, in the simplest way possible, that you were still here. But maybe, in a way, you always will be.

God knows I’m still going to watch my back when I’m walking through Rittenhouse—I think my brains need to stay where they are, for now.

Links about you, from across the Ist-A-Verse, and beyond:
Austinist
Chicagoist
Houstonist
Londonist
LAist
Gothamist
Parisist
SFist
Torontoist
Andy Merrett (almost every link that exists right now)
Philly Future (the rest of them)

Image via geektastique, via the Sarcasmo's Corner Flickr group we mentioned.