To My Departed Friend

I put together this text last year as way to process the hurt that comes with the natural entropy of friendships as we grow older. Life, however, has a funny way of making things relevant in ways you would have never expected. Fair winds, my departed friend.

Goodbyes hurt, my departed friend. One of the cruelest reminders of the transient nature of all, they pierce even harder when they are unspoken. One day you wake up and realize that what you considered just another encounter, was actually your last.

Fret not, my departed friends as goodbyes are only as hurtful as our conditioned minds make them to be. Dig just a bit deeper and you will return to the comforting thought that nothing was lost because there was nothing to gain, ebb and flow.

I am gone from your chats, gone from your schedule, gone from the plans for that trip that is gonna be awesome, gone from the list of people that people ask you "By the way, how is he doing? You are still hanging out, right?". Enough to be classified as "gone".

Fret not, my departed friend. You did enough, we all did as much as we could given what we had at our disposal in that particular time and place of our paths. If you thought you could be more patient, more proactive, more open-minded, then you are transferring yourself to a place that exists in your mind, but did not come to be in our shared reality.

Dear departed friend, you are departed but you are not gone. For how could you be gone when you were not ever? Gone is the concept of mine that you physically inhabit the places I happen to be at.

But how is this you of yours more real than you randomly appearing in a dream months and years after we last met? It is no different than that silly saying that you have said so many times that I have shoplifted for myself. I have absorbed part of you - when I greet someone the way we used to greet each other - there is a little piece of you there. Hurdled in a small attic in that sketchy part of the town of my consciousness. You don't go out much during the day, you do not like the crowds - they suck to be honest. But once in a while, you would go out in the cool darkness of the sleeping city and spray a dick on the subway wall. You would help the stumbling drunk get back home.

In the morning a question would arise - who drew the dick and how did the drunk get home? The mysterious ghost of the town? But if I sit quietly for a bit, I will know that this is how you used to draw dicks and that no one else would bother carrying the drunk back home.

Fret not, departed friend, you are the thought that seems to be of my own production but if I sit quiet long enough, I will know that I just lifted it from a good old friend of mine.