I finish a run and see I have a voicemail from Matt.

“Truth tidbit colon,” he says. He does this when leaving voicemails, stating his punctuation marks like he’s dictating. Mostly because he knows it makes me laugh. “I used to be really jealous of you and Pilot’s relationship. Now I love how we kinda have our own unique friendship too. I know that’s dumb,” he says. “Ell oh ell. Miss you.”

I wonder if he’s been drinking.

His voice doesn’t sound like it, but he gets emotional when drinking. I get nostalgic. Two sides of the same coin. Maybe even the same side.

Or maybe I wonder because it is an earnest truth I myself would probably only say, at least unprompted, when drinking.

I call Matt back, leave a voicemail in return. “It’s not dumb exclamation point,” I say, because doing his thing back at him makes him smile. It makes me smile too. Turning his thing into our thing. “I used to get jealous of you and Bud. And I get jealous when Mike and Mary go visit their friends in California. Exclamation point!”

I want to say I hadn’t realized that about myself until I said it out loud, though of course I had. I knew. I’d never said it aloud though. Usually I try to not even admit to myself that I knew, to the point where saying it out loud feels like its own kind of realization.

 

Midway through a run we used to go on together, listening to an album we used to listen to together, I start thinking of Matt. I get emotional, but inspired too. I run a little faster; feel a little lighter, in stride and in spirit.

At the end of the run, I call him, leave a voicemail. “Went on a run today and was thinking about you. And then Tunde sang…” I pause. I want to sing the lyric but get embarrassed. But then I make myself swallow the embarrassment, make myself sing it like I know I should. Like I want to. “‘I’m a happy idiot… Waving at cars…’” I sing, and the singing, and the making myself sing, and the thinking about Matt listening to me sing to him, it all makes me smile. “Miss you,” I say. “Exclamation point!” I add.

 

I write a story about Matt only I change his name to Pilot. And then to Shotgun. Then to Kevin. Then back to Matt.

It’s about Matt, but isn’t. It’s all made up, but is honest and true in that way that fiction can be. OK, it’s mostly made up. In that way fiction can be.

I check my phone and have a voicemail from Matt. Like’d he known I was thinking about him. Writing about him. Like he was knowing I was wondering what he might thinking about it. If it might be too weird. The parts I made up, the parts I didn’t.

“Never too weird,” Matt’s voicemail assures me. “Shit pops in your head and comes out your hand onto the page. It’s all little pieces to puzzles.”

I smile. I like this way of thinking about stories. And about him. And him thinking it about stories and me.

 

End of a long day, I’m exhausted. I have a few drinks. I get emotional. Or nostalgic. Or maybe those are the same thing.

I dig out my memory box. My box of mementos I never had a word for until I had a student who wrote an essay about her box of mementos and titled it “Memory Box.” Old ticket stubs from concerts and movies; my first, long-expired debit card; old school IDs; the shark tooth necklace my grandmother gave me; a folded-up note from my mom. There on top is the postcard I bought on my last roadtrip, intending to send it to Matt. Buried down deeper—deep enough that it’s there but excavation would have to be purposeful, never accidental—is his funeral program.

I stare at the postcard and remember where I was on my roadtrip when I bought it. Buying it because I was thinking of him. Thinking of our runs, the time we’d roadtripped across the country together, just hanging out.

A few years after buying this postcard on a roadtrip, I got a call from Pilot that Matt had died. He’d been riding his bike to go watch a baseball game and hit by a driver. The driver swore, and other witnesses confirmed, that Matt had suddenly veered into traffic. There was nothing the driver could do. No one ever knew if Matt had hit a rock or his brakes or a gear got stuck, if he’d just been goofing around and hadn’t seen the car coming or he fell, or something more intentional that no one ever mentioned, and I don’t think anyone actually believed, though I somehow knew we all wondered. One of those mysteries of life that feels like knowing the answer to would change things, though of course it wouldn’t. It was the same grief either way. Or maybe different grief, but neither better nor worse. Different sides of the same coin.

At some point in the days or weeks or months after—it’s hard to know, time having become a blur of grief for a while there—I started leaving him voicemails when I was thinking about him. When I missed him. At another point, some time after that, I started imagining voicemails that he was leaving me back. Telling me what I needed to hear or echoing the conversations of old that had stuck with me or just saying hi.

I turn the postcard over and written on the back is (Exclamation point) and his address. I don’t know why I never sent it. Time got away from me. Life got away from me. I call Matt’s old number, leave him a voicemail telling him all of that. I think about the voicemail from him tomorrow in response.