I’ve always been so good with numbers. There are phone numbers I wish I could forget and certain days of the year that will always hold meaning for me but no one else. This isn’t one of those though.
In one week it’ll be two years since you were found. I remember the day I read that you were missing like it was yesterday. I told our friend. I remember just saying to him over and over, I have a bad feeling about this. We exchanged misery and attempted comforts.
You were last seen November 17^th 2020. Two years tomorrow. It was six days of waiting to know what had happened.
I still think of you and our group every day. I remember the first time we met was with your dad in the elevator. You disappeared every weekend and then we knew it was to go home to your parents. That made me smile. I didn’t quite know yet how to live without my parents, and it brought me comfort seeing that our families were never actually as far away as they felt.
The first few times we spoke I remember thinking you had such a gentleness about you…you were soft spoken but giggly, and until you were cracked open, you didn’t talk that much.
We ended up bonding over music and weed. I remember when we found out it was you who had been secretly smoking in our building and found it hilarious that you were hotboxing the room you shared with the person in charge of our whole floor. That still makes me laugh.
I remember the shoulder taps to tell you I was sitting beside you in class, and how the exchanges of quiet hellos turned into hours of texting. You were one of the first guys I’d met who was made of softness. You wouldn’t have hurt a fly.
Looking back, I wonder if your gentleness was a way of reacting to a world that wasn’t so gentle towards you. You emanated kindness and availability and you remembered every birthday, every concert, every exam. You wished me fun nights, good luck, and good years to come. Now I wish you were around to see the good years we’ve had and who we’ve all turned out to be.
When I think of you, I feel such anger over how fleeting our time was with you here. And I feel such a deep sense of missing you.
I wish I could go back in time to be alone with you and know what was in your head. I wouldn’t have let my eighteen year old nervousness and distrust of men get the better of me. I would have given you so much more of my time. I didn’t know there was such a limit. I would go back to us making the car smoky with our joints, giggling over whether we thought anyone knew the four of us were in there. We sang and laughed at karaoke that night, and ate so much chilli we could’ve puked. We were happy.
But then life happened between the three of us, and I ran away. Things crumbled quickly after that. I’m sorry.
Even though I know you’re existing somewhere out there, I want you to come back. I want you to see how we’ve grown into ourselves in ways we didn’t think possible back then. Carl is so happy and healthy and is as sunshiney as ever. I think about how I wish you could meet our future partners, and that they could get to know you instead of just hearing about you. I wish you could have heard Post Malone in concert. And heard Chance’s new songs. And have experienced how big your world would have become after university. I wish you could have sat with us by the river. We made amends. We just didn’t do it quick enough for you to experience it along with us.
Most of all, I wish you could be here to hear what we miss about you, but I know that’s selfish of me.
“Nothing good lasts forever”. You were intrinsically good. Objectively good. It brings me comfort that wherever you are, I think you’re at peace now. In a way you weren’t here.
Your loss continues raining grief on us, and the realization I’ll never see or hear from you again is one I’m met with every time I drive past dark. Also when I drive beside the river. Every year in mid-November. Every time I want to share a new song with you, or send you something I’ve written. I guess that’s the thing with grief though…It never goes away, it just becomes part of you. And understanding grief as love with nowhere to go eases it a bit, but doesn’t make it go away.
I heard a guy say the other day that he brings grief to sit with him at every table. This is true. We miss you, but we bring you into everything we do. Our darknesses aren’t quite as dark because of you. And we feel you with us in the lives we now live a bit more to the fullest because of our friend not walking on this path beside us anymore. You’re still here, just a little further away.
I’m sorry for everything Brett, and I’m the luckiest person to even have known you. I wish your time here wasn’t cut short. Thank you for teaching us so much without ever even meaning to. I am more kind, more open, and a better person because I met you. I miss you. Rest peacefully.