"Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell." Edna St. Vincent Millay

I remember the first time I heard his voice. A late night, chatting on the computer, led to his suggestion that he call me and we could talk for a few minutes. Dealing with the increasing decline in my grandmother's health and feeling poignantly alone, I accepted. My stomach was in knots when the phone rang a few moments later.

The minute I acquiesced to his suggestion, my crippling insecurity reared its ugly head. I wanted to sound witty, sophisticated, and just a little vulnerable. I sounded like a nervous schoolgirl who had been huffing paint fumes. I spoke very little and mostly uttered monosyllabically to his lengthy stories. Somehow, though, he saw through the nervous laughter and didn't peg me for an idiot. We laughed. We shared stories. We talked about music and movies. We compared high school antics. The conversation and even the silences were comfortable. And more importantly, comforting. His voice began to lull me. And the few minutes that we had planned to speak stretched into hours. And a friendship was conceived.

From the very beginning, ours was a friendship based on laughter and compassion and empathy, forged in the worst possible days of our lives. He was battling the doubts and loneliness of losing his closest relative, his sister, who was both confidante and cheerleader to him. I was slowly watching my best friend in the world, my grandmother, slip toward her death. Together, we shared memories, the keening ache of loss, and laughter, always laughter. In the end, it would be the friendship I would miss the most.

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"I would ask you to believe that he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and there are deep wounds in it. I have seen it bleeding." Dickens, Tale of Two Cities

When everyone in my life tells me how callous, how unfeeling he is, when I begin to question the sincerity of his actions, I remember my last morning with him. I laid in his bed, next to him. I was in that place, half between waking and sleep, when I felt him stir.

I knew I'd never be like this again with him. He had said as much the night before. And after his pronouncement that this was to be the last time, I began to tell him everything. How I felt, how I would always feel, without regard for how it hurt him or the guilt it would incur. And that morning, when he woke, his conscience got the better of him.

He cried. Cried like I've never seen a man or woman cry. Great racking sobs that started in his belly and worked their way up, that's the type of crying he did. He put his arm across his eyes, so I couldn't see. But I could feel his body quaking, convulsing with the tears. I pulled his arm away with the admonishment that his tears were never something he had to hide from me, of all people. And I held him as he cried.

We had shared tears before. However, they had been tears of personal loss which bonded us. These tears were the signal that all my dreams were ending, right in his bed, with a finality I would never have guessed at.