A friend called from the darkest place. The next morning, at dawn, I called him back, and each ring felt like a lifetime. He picked up. That became the routine for months, and almost eight years on, he is the one who checks in. This is where the check-in at the end of every journal entry comes from: the friends who say fine when it does not quite land, the question we hold back so we will not offend, and why care does not need certainty before it speaks.

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If someone you know may not want to be here, ask them plainly, and do not hold it alone. A local crisis line can help you too. If the danger is immediate, call emergency services.

Written by the author and narrated in a digital copy of the author's own voice. Music: Memories by Adriel Dos Santos, from Pixabay.

An old soul is a child with an adult's job. You grew up with fear as your navigator, and you still use it. A truck door at five o'clock, and a child who can tell the time without a clock. Years later a different house, and the same cold hands. This is about the equipment that got installed early: the scan that runs before you have decided anything, the compliment that was really a job, and the one person nobody is assigned to check on.

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Written by the author and narrated in a digital copy of the author's own voice. Music: Memories by Adriel Dos Santos, from Pixabay.

A lost friendship. There is no word for what you are. Not widowed, not divorced, not even estranged, exactly. A friend who mattered is still out there, and nobody is going to ask how you are doing with it. This is about that loss: the photograph the phone hands you, the two accounts of the same years, and the future nobody counts.

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Written by the author and narrated in a digital copy of the author's own voice. Music: Memories by Adriel Dos Santos, from Pixabay.