But we don't cry and we'll never die Do you feel alive in overdrive?

 

A year ago Saturday, someone very dear to my heart passed away. There is a giant black hole sized hole in my heart where my grief lives.

Let me tell you some things about him. I knew him for just shy of 9 years before he passed away very suddenly last January. He made me laugh every day, he made me crazy. He was a notorious truant, snack thief, and prankster, but he was there for you always in ways  you'd never expect. He constantly surprised me. He was almost 20 years older than me, but I called him "my son." I'd tell people, "that's my son!" He was fun and funny, but brilliant and worked hard (when he wanted to). I loved working with him, and I loved being his friend. He saved everything I ever gave him. We had a long-running in-joke that our version of "personal space is outer space." We referred to going outside as "being in the wild," and one time I did a stupid dance for him "out in the wild" and he pretended to not know me.

The day before he passed, he had snuck out into the wild to get snacks, and I gave him a (joking) hard time about not saying bye to me. When he left at the end of the day, he made a big pageant of goodbye into the elevator. He zipped away and was gone, and I never saw him again because the next morning he was gone.

Last summer, I saw that sweater in a gift shop at the Natural History Museum, and the employee was so nice and let me just have my breakdown and comforted me. It was such a niche and stupid in-joke, and here was this strange lady crying in front of her, she handled it so well, like a pro. I ended up not buying it because I didn't want to carry it around, but I found out they sold it online, so I'll buy it when I can emotionally handle it.

Sometimes it's not plain terrible, it's fancy terrible with raisins in it, and losing someone who never did a single bad thing in his whole life is a fancy terrible.

Intellectually, I know he's gone, but emotionally there's still part of me that thinks he's still out there playing hooky.

I love and miss you, man.