Melody,

I received an email from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice last Friday announcing their new, tightened book donation policies. I immediately grabbed my phone to message you and get your thoughts on the changes and their impact on the Inside Books Project. That’s when I learned the sad, shocking news — a year and a day after the world lost you. I feel like an asshole. What kind of friend doesn’t know his friend is gone — for an entire year?

Your death has shocked, saddened and, honestly, destabilized me a little. I’ve spent the last year thinking of you, nonsensically delaying messaging, only to find you were already gone. I don’t know why or how you left, but you’re gone.

We weren’t super-close friends, but we were long-time friends. Going through my emails and messages from you, the earliest I can find is 2004, and we were already friends by then. The rest has become digital dust in deleted undergraduate email accounts and lost in the passage of time. I don’t even remember how we met — I need you here to remind me.

I remember sitting at a now-long-demolished coffee shop (probably ultimately replaced by Dell Medical School) while you did homework in college. You always seemed more than just eleven months my senior — probably because you followed a more traditional route through college and into professional life while I took gap years and heavily drank. I only remember getting drunk with you once — when you introduced me to the North Loop area and Barfly’s. For the longest time (more than 15 years), my mental model of the N. Lamar/2222/Guadalupe area came from a hazy ride in your car because I was too drunk (and, at that time, responsible) to drive.

I have an email from the 2000s in which you exhort friends to vote against the Austin smoking ban. You were probably the most civic-minded, reasonable, well-informed, self-aware engineer I’ve ever known. Despite your success, you were even-keeled and self-deprecating about being an engineer: in a 2005 email asking for band recommendations, you described yourself as “tragically unhip” and stuck in 2003 because, well, you’re an engineer.

You were always supportive of the various projects I started: my writing, my political work, my music mixes and recommendations, and San Antonio Review. You contributed your thoughts, labor, and money.

In 2015, you asked me to write a creative writing handbook that IBP could send to prisoners. It was at (what I didn’t know was) the tail end of a long stretch of unemployment for me after leaving Texas politics and grad school, and I think you paid me generously for it.

We were different but similar. We shared a love of (and a lot of) music (you replied to almost every one of my monthly music mix newsletters until I ended them in 2019), family stories (raccoons, the impact of misinformation on relationships), dogs, and a compassionate politics. I knew of your love for The Economist, the Austin City Limits festival, and, for a long time, AMD. I know your love for the latter had dissipated a bit over the years. I wish we could talk about that.

I guess we didn’t talk or hang out more because of hectic schedules (mostly yours after I left politics) and, over the last ten years, my coming and going from Austin. Though we did bump into each other at SXSW and, likely, ACL. But we never stopped chatting.

You may have helped spur our move to South America with your comment about how nice it would be to leave for a while when our lease ended in Austin — which is exactly what we did.

You were also one of the last friends I saw before moving to Uruguay. I donated the bulk of my library to IBP through you. You came to our house one night to pick them up. Later, you told me the longtime volunteer who processed my donation, Skot, told you, “Whoa, that donation you brought in was amazing, I was surprised it was so consistently awesome” — a compliment you had to know would please me.

I’ve barely written since moving to Uruguay. I’m sure you would have encouraged me to write about Montevideo and the rest of the Southern Cone after moving here in 2022. Instead of doing that, I fell into a depression and haven’t recovered.

I so wish you were here to chat. Looking over your messages over the past few years, so many of the emotions you had been expressing since COVID are ones I’m feeling as well. I wish we could commiserate again, share advice again, and make dark jokes about how we felt again. I never even got to tell you about my experience with a universal health care system (outside the U.S. military). Four stents in my heart at 43 in Uruguay! But it certainly proves affordable care is possible — even in a country of 3.5 million humans and three times as many cows. You’d have found that a bit funny.

The fact that we don’t have any common friends (as far as I know and as impossible as it seems, given we both lived in Austin for so long) is likely what makes this more difficult for me. While I know so many others share my grief, there’s no one for me to personally share it with. (I did reach out to Ben to express my sadness and sympathy and let him know you are well-remembered.)

You were such a good person (yes, I know everyone has flaws, but I never really saw yours). Thank you for being my friend and blessing my life with your presence on this planet. I miss you. For as long as I have my senses, I will remember you — and keep Ben in my thoughts always as well.

I can probably keep finding memories to share and expressing my gratitude for your friendship and sadness at its loss, but I think simplest is best at this point: I miss you.