Dear Aly,

During our 13 years as cyber friends, we had a lot of fun chatting and sharing experiences, thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and story ideas. Even though your sense of humor was a little dry at times, the things I liked best about you were your intelligence, your great memory, and your maturity. You were way beyond most people your age. We had a lot in common from our love of writing to our liberal ways and many health issues. You really understood the frustration of what I was going through.

Even though you didn’t talk to me for a little over a year at one point, you accepted me as I was and never tried to change me or pressure me into anything. I could always go to you for advice or your opinion on something and know that I would get a very reasonable and well-thought-out response from you.

We didn’t always share the same political views and you weren’t always very honest with me, which you did admit but we sure had a lot of fun and funny moments. Remember when we would have fun trolling Molly? With the way the gullible idiot could really drive us crazy at times by stalking, pestering, and following us from site to site, I can’t deny that some of the things we pulled on her were pretty funny albeit a bit childish. You and I always had a mischievous side anyway.

I miss our online hangouts from Twitter to anonymous Q&A sites to some of the blogging and diary platforms. I also miss our daily check-ins on Skype and WhatsApp. No matter who I meet on or offline, there will never be another Alison P.

I learned many things from you from trivial and mundane things to bigger things. It is a shame we never got to meet. If only COVID hadn’t come along and messed up our plans. More importantly, I wish you had survived your health issues and gotten to live out your dreams and be healthy while you were at it.

I loved you like a sister and I knew you did too. It pained me so to see you suffering one serious health issue after another. Life is so unfair! How is it that so many stupid, abusive, and even murderous people get to be healthy and live to grow old and get so many things they want while a 40-year-old with a good heart and great mind and so much to offer the world has to suffer and die?

I don’t know if your boyfriend Cam was for real or if he was a character you made up because you were lonely and still living with your parents, but I don’t care. I miss the hell out of you and wish you had lived! I would rather you had lived and then dumped me because then I would at least know you were still out there and maybe, just maybe, someday we could reconnect again.

I wonder if there is any kind of afterlife and what it may be like for you if there is. Have you been reincarnated as a human or an animal in this country or another? Are you in another universe completely unaware of this one and the life you lived? Do you somehow know what’s going on in my life and that I made it to Florida? Do you resent the fact that I got to live much longer than you did, or are you happy for me? I hope that if you do go on somehow, you have found what you didn’t get when you lived and that you and I will eventually meet. We’ll have a lot of catching up to do!