Tomorrow the process begins. I will see the killer for the first time. Is her bond hearing the beginning of due process or an emotional Pandora's Box for the grieving?

But now for another beginning.

In the fall of 1994 I transferred to Illinois Wesleyan University. I left behind a difficult Freshman year at Kalamazoo College complete with a bad case of acne and a psychopathic roommate who reduced three college-issue chairs to kindling in the course of a year.

Illinois Wesleyan offered hope when I was granted a music scholarship there after my mother encouraged me to hop a small commuter plane and audition in what seemed to me like a school surrounded by farm-belt country. Little did I know that farm-belt boredom would later provoke hours of senseless creativity.

Doug and I lived down the hall from one another in a utilitarian-looking male dormitory that perpetually reeked of Speed Stick and stale beer. The door to his room was the first thing that made me ponder the fellow student who lived behind it. The full length of the door was adorned with Fred Basset comic strips, yet none of that yellowing newsprint contained even the faintest hint of humor. Fred Basset was a hound whose thought bubbles personified him, yet not a single thought bubble prompted a chuckle from passersby. It was as if the writer thought that personification of a basset hound was irony enough.

Words are inadequate in the face of loss, but they are the means through which I will tell you the story of the senseless deaths of three men: Doug Meis, Michael Dahlquist, and John Glick.

Not a mere eulogy, but an often futile attempt to fit the unfathomable into my life while perpetuated forward into a new reality without them.

In some ways, this is what I would have liked their killer to have known about them before she decided to end their lives.

Sadly, my words -- if she should ever lay eyes upon them -- now take the form of a criminal punishment, a penance of memories.