My friend Guy has died.

I need to let that stark fact sit there for a minute. Despite some close brushes in the past (people being idiots with cars when I was a teen, my father-in-law who just quit on us one day, and of course Covid that took my upstairs neighbour among too many others), this one has hit me very hard.

I only knew Guy for a couple of years, really. We would meet up once every few months when work brought us together, usually far away from either of our homes. And yet, there are those people in your life that you just click with, and sometimes the click is so loud that everyone around you hears it. More than once, Guy and I would be holding court in some shitty hotel bar, and an audience spontaneously assembled around us. Or we went on a mission to find the most drinkable Guinness in whatever locale was playing host to us at the time, and wound up leaving the locals with A Story.

Is this thing on?

Guy for me is also a “there but for the grace of God go I” story: a single Sliding Doors moment away, I’m the one in an empty house, with a bunch of friends I can meet to play games with, but with nobody at home to tell me to look after myself — or give me a reason to.

Is that unfair? Maybe — and if Guy were here, we would argue the toss into the night, and leave a bar bill that the two of us between us would have to invent an entire new department of the company in order to expense.

Really I’m just angry that I can’t finish up a dozen conversational threads that we left dangling, share the best advice that long experience has to offer, and invent ever-more-oblique insults to apply to the most deserving targets.

I’m going to go dig out my Zeitgeist shirt that I bought the last time we were in San Francisco together, and then I am going to drink all of the Guinness and be as maudlin as I want, and be thankful — because tomorrow my house will still be full, even as his stands empty.