It’s funny how you don’t think of someone for years until an email from an old friend tells you they are gone, and then, just like that, her face and all the faces you both knew a thousand years ago come flooding in. All the late night conversations in kitchens over coffee, the parties that raged from one night to the next, the in-jokes, the mugging, the partners changing and the pet turtles in a bowl named for all of you, these things, that had lay buried for years in some recess of the mind, are once again vivid, and painful, and funny, and precious, and you can’t stop remembering and wishing you had added more pictures of her, of them, all these long years that are now irretrievable once again.

And so you resolve in your mind, your heart, that you will not let that happen with those still present in what remains of this short interval between light and dark. This, a vow made in the early hours as the sun sneaks its way into the world.