"He doesn't live here anymore..."

The call came from his old school, looking for a donation. He's been gone from home almost continually since he left high school, is it eight years ago already? His room is still pretty much the same, with his books and toys and art from his teen years still on the shelf, his rocks in the window sill, his posters on the wall. That photo of him high up in the badlands, in a natural wind tunnel funneling a thousand miles of prairie winds through an opening between the eroded rocks- he was only eleven, and he never looked back. The summers spent in the Boundary waters, college in Colorado, even the seven weeks in the Ford ranges in Antarctica- always away, always with his rocks.

It's a tough time for him now. Work plans haven't come together the way he wanted, and living isn't exactly cheap in Seattle. But he is loved, by us from afar, and by a special someone close by. I want to make it better, but it isn't my place nor have I the power to change things. It would be wrong to say that it all went by too fast. Life goes on at its own rate, with you or without you. But sometimes the house is too quiet, its rooms too empty, as we sit- me and my old friend, sorrow.