i miss my friend

for a moment there i was taking it really badly. you can imagine. i was walking around campus just thinking to myself, not even anything particularly profound, just basic middle school existentialism, you know, shit like, "how do all these people just live their lives knowing that someday they'll all die?" it was really intense and important for a second. then a few seconds later i was just doing fine. this was a problem to be thought about later, to be cried about at home when i had space and time and slightly lower stakes, and right now i have to go to class.

i have thought at times that hope is an emotion i'm not capable of. like, i don't even know what it would feel like if i felt it. but it's not really an emotion so much as it is a lack of emotion, a lack of doubt, but not confidence, not active, just passive. see the thing is we hadn't talked for a while. i missed them already. but it was ok because if i wanted to i could send them a dm on discord, say hi, talk about folk music or poetry or something. but now i can't, and i think i might never again. this is a person i have been closer to than anybody else in the world. this is a person who made me cry with their kindness more than once. this is a person who just kept changing my life. and now the last time i will ever see them in person is watching them walk out of the mall, happy and content. seeming so, anyway. it's not like i ever knew what they were thinking. maybe they were dealing with some awful shit. maybe the awful shit got to them before anyone else could.

i don't think i'll ever know.

but i miss my friend.