What Remains When a Friend Is Gone

I still remember the last afternoon we spent together, though some details have blurred at the edges like an old photograph left too long in the sun. We were sitting on that crooked wooden bench behind the café you insisted had “the only coffee worth waiting for.” It was a modest place—paint peeling from the windowsills, ivy creeping around the back door, and a wind chime that never stopped ringing even when there was no breeze. You loved it for all the reasons other people ignored it.

You nudged me with your shoulder and said, “One day, you’ll thank me for expanding your taste.”

I pretended to disagree, tilting my head with exaggerated skepticism. “You have too much faith in your coffee evangelism.”

You laughed—your laugh, loud and unrestrained, the kind that always made people turn their heads but never in annoyance. It was a sound that could fill a room. “You say that now. Just wait.”

I didn’t realize it then, but you had a way of making even the most ordinary afternoon feel slightly remarkable, as if nothing was ever completely mundane when you were in the room—or the bench, or the alley, or wherever we happened to be.

Later that afternoon, you shifted the conversation to your dreams. That was something you did often, and it always amused me—how you could go from joking about coffee to outlining a plan that sounded bigger than the two of us combined.

“Do you think it’s foolish?” you asked, your gaze lifted toward the drifting clouds. There was a seriousness in your tone that caught me off guard.

“Maybe a little,” I said, just to tease you.

You exhaled through your nose, almost a laugh. “Good. Then it’s worth doing.”

You always believed that anything reasonable was simply too small. To you, risk was a kind of compass.

We stayed on that bench for another hour, talking about everything and nothing. At one point, you pointed to a bird hopping near our feet. “If I come back as something one day,” you said, “I hope it’s a bird. Something that doesn’t spend too much time thinking before it moves.”

“You don’t spend much time thinking now,” I joked.

“True,” you said, with that half-shrug of yours. “Maybe that’s why I’d make a good one.”

When I think back on that conversation now, it feels like your voice still echoes inside the space it left behind. Since you’ve been gone, I’ve replayed that afternoon more times than I can count—not for comfort, exactly, but to remember the version of myself who sat there with you, unaware of how fleeting moments can be.

Grief, I’ve learned, doesn’t descend all at once. It arrives in fragments: a sudden quiet in the middle of a busy day, the echo of laughter that no longer has a source, the way someone else’s phrasing suddenly mirrors yours and sends a shock through me. Sometimes it’s something even smaller—a song on the radio that you once called “criminally overrated,” or the faint scent of that caramel latte you always ordered but pretended to dislike.

There’s a street we used to walk down slowly just so the evening wouldn’t end too soon. I walked it alone the other night. My steps felt heavier, though the street was the same. The lampposts flickered like always, and the bakery still closed too early for anyone’s liking. But something in the air felt altered, as if the world had shifted slightly off balance.

You would have laughed at me for being sentimental. “You think too much,” you used to say. “Just walk.”

But it’s hard to walk the same path when the person who shaped it is no longer beside you.

And then there’s the half-written message in my phone: Did you hear what happened? You won’t believe—

I never finished it. The moment passed, and with it the realization that some sentences belong to the people who are no longer here to receive them.

People say time heals, but healing, I’ve come to understand, is not a destination. It’s not a point on a timeline that you eventually reach. What time has given me instead is clarity. Not the absence of missing you, but the understanding of what it meant to have called you my friend. You altered the shape of my days—not dramatically, not loudly, but in the steady way that companionship does. Even now, the spaces you opened in my life remain; they are simply more muted.

Sometimes, when I’m about to make a decision I wish I could ask your opinion on, I imagine you beside me. Arms crossed. Eyebrows slightly raised.

“You already know the answer,” you’d say. “You just want someone else to confirm it.”

I can almost hear your voice—firm, but amused. I can almost see your expression—the familiar blend of patience and mischief. And in that imagined moment, my silence would be enough for you to grin and say, “Thought so.”

It astonishes me how you continue to respond to questions I no longer have the courage to speak aloud.

I carry you differently now—not as an absence that threatens to swallow me whole, not as a wound that refuses to close, but as a quiet steadiness that still knows how to find me. Missing you no longer feels like a darkness I can’t navigate. Instead, it feels like standing at the beginning of a well-worn path—knowing that part of it was walked together, and the rest I must walk alone.

Still, your laughter, your courage, and your stubborn, brilliant hope continue to walk beside me, shaping each step, each choice, each quiet moment when I pause and look toward the sky—wondering if birds see the world the way you did.