Ok here is the proposed final version of the email to eric

Arbitrary greeting,

I'm assuming that you are graduating this May, and I wanted to congratulate you. I remember what it was like when I graduated. Of course now you are probably dealing with all those amazingly stressful details, getting through finals, handing in papers, finding apartments, sending out job applications. As I recall you were concerned about what you were going to do. I remember my senior year the question I most feared was "So what are you going to do now?" I didn't have a clue. Maybe you know by now, maybe you don't. Don't worry. Most people don't know what they are doing. (John Cusack in "Say Anything" said it best "Most people think they know what they're doing, but they don't. I don't know what I'm doing. But at least I know that I don't know what I'm doing.")

Anyway back to your graduation. As I said I wanted to congratulate you. You probably think that this letter is to get some sort of response from you. I don't want you to write back. I have in a way convinced myself that you don't really exist. I find it upsetting when I accidentally see you because it reminds me that you actually continue to exist. I think of you now more as an abstract, like a character in literature. It jars me to see you in the same way it be jarring to see Holden Caufield walking around.

Then why do I write? Well because I still care about you. That's the problem with being a writer, you always want to know the end of the story. Every crappy 2 am HBO movie I have to stay up and watch the end because I always want to know what happens. I guess I never quite figured out how to let go of things. This is not to say that I am sitting around pining for you. I still wonder about what happened to my first boyfriend, not because I want to get back together with him, but because I cared for him for so long. We were very close friends, and I still wonder if he is ok or happy. One of my friends from high school died recently, a few months short of our ten years anniversary. I hadn't spoken to her in ten years, but I still was upset by her death. I still cared about her. You thought that you kill my care for you with your silence, but if Chris couldn't do it in ten years of silence, what makes you think that you can?

So I don't want to actually hear from you personally, but I would like to know, from time to time that you are still alive and hopefully doing well. I have a kind of inverted solution. I have a weblog where you can go and see if I am still alive. Just to see if I posted that day. And don't worry, this is not a hate site. I spend more time bitching about my job and my students and my current life. Don't trust me? Go visit the site http://misslapin.blogspot.com.

Well, that's all that I have to say. I hope that you are looking forward to graduation. I remember when I finished grad school. I was so proud of myself. It was a wonderful feeling. Even the fear of going into the world again was exhilerating. I remember the two weeks I didn't have a phone or bed or really any furniture to speak of. My friend Phil saw me at a poetry reading and asked me why I was so stressed out and I explaiend to him about the apartment. He said, "Relax, this is the only time in your life you will be without a bed or phone ENJOY IT." He was right. How I long for life without a phone now. The key is to remember to enjoy everything. Good luck.