Today's post is dedicated to a close friend of mine. Actually, we're nothing like 'close' in the literal sense—he lives 2,000 miles away and I've never met him in person. Nonetheless, I've known him since he was 13 and I was 16, and he's of those rare people with whom one's camaraderie remains somehow outside of space and time, that does not decay with absence.

We first met on an young writer's forum online in 2002 or so. It was a rather cliquish group and contained some exceptionally talented young poets as well as a great deal of mediocre ones. Naturally, there was a lot of drama and backstabbing involved—as there will be in any group of teenagers and especially those with a literary bent—but in my mind it was one of the most formative settings of my teenage years, despite not being a physical 'place' at all.

In any case, the majority of us were depressed and socially awkward, so we spent an awful lot of time loitering about on AIM and talking to each other. Kind of a virtual coffee-house-a-la-Paris-1960 environment. We'd critique each other's work, collaborate on poems, rant about how we were misunderstood geniuses, etc. The site shut down when I was in my late teens, and the members gradually dispersed. I don't know what happened to most of the 'inner circle', but one became a lawyer and started his own young writer's site, one is a particularly talented singer, and another, I recently found out, is dead. I went to look him up on Facebook and found a link to his obituary.

But this particular young writer and I remained friends, although our correspondence mostly consists of an occasional Facebook chat or text message these days. Neither one of us had a smooth adolescence, to put it mildly (well, who does, I suppose), and it was kind of an inside joke between us, when talking after a protracted absence, to greet each other with a languid, "Oh, still alive, are you?" We remained very cool and ironic about it all, but there's no denying that what bound us was a profound and consuming despair.

At the risk of getting all sappy and annoying the hell out of him, I won't go on about how brilliant he is and how glad I am that he ended up not dying tragically. But he is, and I am. In fact, I'm going to call it now: this boy is going to do important things, and maybe someday I'll get to make a speech about how we once wrote elegant but undeniably melodramatic poems to each other at 2 a.m. in lieu of temporary or permanent acts of self-destruction.

Anyway, this week I found out that he's just received his Doctorate in Medicine at the age of 21. On learning this I was suffused with a pure, irrational joy. Happy for a friend, yes, but something more. I remember our assertions at age 14, 17, 19—just think, if we make it through these years alive, nothing's beyond us. We might become doctors, poets, bestselling authors. We never doubted our abilities, only our capacity to find peace within ourselves. Yet it seems that perhaps we have—nothing's certain, of course, but we've both accomplished what seemed like the faintest of theoretical probabilities, all those years ago, separated by a glowing screen, half a continent, and a lot of bleeding irony. He's a doctor, I'm soon to be a published author, and our brains have more or less stopped trying to kill us.

So, my dear, my incandescent mad polymath poet—congratulations. We played the hand biology dealt us, and it seems that we've won. You, in particular, have made biology your bitch. And biochemistry, and whatever other kind of chemistry there is, and physiology, and pharmacology…