If there's one thing I've learned about people, it's not what you do or say that affects how people see you. It's how you make them feel.

teenage memories are made in cars

You. I miss you. Most of the times I forget you're gone. My mind plays tricks on me-it's as if you have been placed in the "Friends Who I've Lost Touch With/Are Out of the State" file and until the urge to speak with you arises...I get slapped in the face with it all over again. It's like the Kubler Ross model, this twisted, neverending cycle that I consistently find myself in. I force myself to replay our last interactions over again, try to remember the tenor of your voice, the subtle physical idiosyncracies like the way your eyes crinkled into tiny slits when you were laughing. Pictures have preserved your physical likeness but I wonder if without them...would the way you looked gradually fade from my memory? Pictures certainly couldn't capture the way you smelled. I remember panicking when the shirt your mother gave me eventually lost its telltale scent.



It hurts the most when I see you in my dreams. Being not a practicer of lucid dreaming, my dreams, when I have them ARE reality for me when I'm in them. Mostly we just sit and talk like we used to, sometimes while sitting in your old Jeep. Some of the best conversations I had in my life, I had in that car with you, sometimes stoned, sometimes listening to Death Cab for Cutie or Led Zeppelin, and almost always looking over Grizzly Peak.

I just wonder sometimes what you would have become, the person who you would have grown into. Strangely I feel lightyears away from the person I was but simultaneously the core, the nugget of who I am remains the same. I just feel like there was so much for you to discover, so much more experiences to be had. Truthfully, sometimes I am envious of the devout with their creature comforts of prayer, "God's plan", and heaven. Rationally and logically, you are gone from this earth, nonexistent, not lingering in some manmade dimension that rewards good deeds and punishes the bad. But it's hard to disparage humans from longing for wish fulfillment, the hope that we are special and that the end of our earthly lives is not the end of our journey, I guess.

It will be good to go home. Go back to the familiar. It will be nice to have some solitude, to get away from my life down here. I'm feeling restless again...