God, it is embarrassing how deeply I yearn for your company. Especially when I can say with certainty you have not thought about me once since we last spoke. So much has changed in these years that we really have become strangers. Can fate's strings be severed so sharply you become more unfamiliar to one another than when you first met? Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s you I miss, or simply those times and the relative ease of youth before we both got fucked up. I suspect it’s a bit of both.

I keep hoping we run into each other somehow. Maybe on the tube or the cinema or at the mall. I used to imagine seeing you on the bus for a split second sometimes. In this fantasy, we don’t even interact. I’m not even 100% certain it’s you. You’re thinner and your hair is longer and you’re wearing all black. I’m trying to figure out if you really are you without seeming like I’m staring. You don’t notice me at all. You’re wearing headphones, the same Sony ones as mine, and your hair falls over your face as you’re glued to your phone. Samsung or Apple? I can’t remember, though I can vaguely recall you preferring Android. Nerd. I get distracted by something, and by the time I look back, you’re gone. I never knew you as a smoker, but if you are outside, I picture a cigarette in your hand. If you ask me for a lighter, this could be my chance to reconnect, for recognition to dawn over your face when you look at me for the first time, but of course you never do.

Sometimes I wonder if it will take someone dying for us to see each other again. Sometimes I wonder if it will be you. There is darkness in both of us that makes us kindred spirits, though I’m pretty much a wet kitten compared to you. That God complex of yours. Did you ever grow out of it or has it gotten worse? I will never forget the fear and awe and desperation and relief you incited, though I was naive back then. I still don’t know how you did it. It’s one of the things I’ve wanted to ask you about over the years, but of course I never got the chance.

Sometimes I think about how much worse we would make each other, or at least, you would make me. The depths I would have fallen to if you were still in my life. The depths I still have the capacity to reach were you joining me. This is just conjecture, maybe neither of us would have ended up like this. I don’t know what a life like that would be like, so instead I imagine blood. I imagine twisted pleasure in mutual destruction because the alternative, that you might already be broken or terrible in ways I could not forgive, is not something I can bear. Not even for your sake, selfishly, but because I would hate to have devoted so much energy to your memory. It has crossed my mind once in a while, the suspicion that there might be a reason for your condition, some sort of guilt you harbour. I’m not sure why, I guess even with you I am mistrusting, always expecting the worst. I hope it’s not the case, but it’s not like you’re here to ease my doubts.

You really are spectral, eluding even word of mouth. I hope you find your way back to the land of the living, and that we might meet there.