My heart still drops straight to my shoes sometimes. I don’t know that I’ll ever really get used to this process. The repetition of loss. Lather, rinse, repeat. Maybe a part of me is numbed a bit between you, Jess and Grams. Yet I know there’s more big ones to come, that will gut me all over again. That the people left to help me stitch back the pieces will be less and less because that is the very nature of loss.

I don’t want to be our Mark. I don’t want to be the witness.

Course I never thought I’d outlive either of you and yet here we are.

There is a matter of luck in all this. Luck that out of all the collections of atoms that could meet and become friends on this hunk of rock hurtling through space, mine got to exist by yours for a while. Luck that Marty remembered my phone number after our years apart. Luck that Amy and I decided to go to that show. Luck that I went to Denny’s that day. Luck that any of us every got to exist at all. You’re a gift. You all are. To me, to each other. To our little circles that cross in just the right little venn diagram that is life.

In my head, I hope the end is like Supernatural. Everyone gets their own version of the afterlife. I hope you got your ice cream cone, that you’re working on your parents convertible at a country home in the hills and you know why.

The ebbs and flows of try are for you. All of you. I have a harder time being brave if it’s just for me. Despite all the work it’s still hard to see the worth in that.

I just want to go see a show again and feel the way we did back then. Stupid, young, free, a little bit dumb about so many things and so smart about so many more.

My heart misses you, my head even more. Sometimes I wonder what the alternate universe of us could be. Where we’d fit in everyone’s lives now.

Could we love as hard as we do if we hadn’t had to lose you? I don’t know, but as much as I try not to take that for granted it is what humans do best after all.

Don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. These are the good old days. Wish somebody would have told me then that ours were too.

Go see Jess and Gram for me. Have her make you the brocolli soup and some potato pancakes. Trust me, they’re amazing.

Miss you, A2. Always.