Here's the thing nobody tells you about missing someone this hard. It makes you feel like your life was supposed to be bigger. Like the ache is a setup. Like.. somewhere behind the curtain some dude with a clipboard is about to walk out and say, okay, this is where it pays off. It's supposed to be prophetic. That's how it feels. You miss a person so much that it has to mean something, right? Nobody gets this homesick for nothing. The universe doesn't waste this kind of voltage on a story that goes nowhere. Except it probably does. It probably just does… I work nights. I sit at a front desk while the building sleeps, and my brain does what it always does when nobody's around to interrupt it. It goes looking for the one thing I'd rather not find. For me that's an old friend. I'm not going to say who. You can call him the old friend, since that's what he is. Here's the embarrassing part. Missing him is the only thing that makes me feel alive right now. Everything else is flat. Work is flat, the drive home is flat, food is a logistics problem. Then I think about him and something lights up, and I'm like, oh, there you are, I was wondering where I put that. So naturally I started doing reincarnation math. Say we do meet again in another life. Great. Love that for us. But what are the odds I recognize him? What if he comes back as some old Asian lady at a bus stop and I come back as a pigeon? That's not a reunion. That's me pecking at her shoes while she tells me to get lost. Cosmic comedy, no refunds. I know he’ll never read this. Let's be honest about that. I'm not sending a message in a bottle, I'm just talking to the wall and the wall happens to be, well, this. This is for me. It always was. Writing it down is the only way I know to stop it from echoing around my skull at four in the morning. There's a new guy in my life, . He's a little like him, not in a way that stings, more in a way that makes me smile. Same kind of energy, same kind of loud in a room that needs it. And I think he would like him. That's a strange thing to catch yourself thinking, that someone you can't reach would get along with someone you just met. But there it is. I hope he’s alive. I hope he’s happy. Not in some hallmark bs greeting card way. I mean I actually check that wish like a pulse, quietly, now and then. Alive and happy. That's the whole request. Part of me still wants all of this to mean something. A sign, a thread, at least a reason.. The other part, the skeptical one who does most of the talking, says it's just a human heart missing a human, and that's the entire story. No prophecy. No second act. That’s all.. I'm trying to be okay with the second one. Mostly I am. So that's it. I've got to live my life now. Real hours, real bills, a pretty decent new friend named . And if you're out there somewhere, doing fine, being yourself, then good. See you in my dreams.