Tom

My God in not so many years it’s gonna be 20 years, very soon, a few years, since Tom died. You can hold your breath until you go blue in the face, you can scream into the void as loud as you possibly can, you can stand very still and wait, and nothing changes life and death. Nothing.

What was he in his 30s when he died? And we got so quickly from our 20s to our 30s. Click of the fingers. And then he was gone. And now he’s nearly being dead longer than our friendship lasted. Time? There’s nothing like it. Nothing stops it. Nothing changes it. Nothing cures it. It is relentless.

Best friends forever, we used to say. Who thought forever was going to be so short?

Here I am going on 20 years later and what have I done? I met Sam, since. He and Tom never met. I can't really, kind of, believe it. Such important people in my life and they never knew each other.

How can that be? Tom was a good guy.

It makes no sense at all. In a true and fair world, where there is an actual god, they’d have been great friends by now.