Days gone by

It’s been a little over 2 months since my brother passed.  My life has regained that sense of normalcy in regards to my daily activities.  I’m functioning through the days, enjoying the time I have with my family.  But there is still that emptiness in my life where Ryan had previously filled.  Ryan will always be with me; in my heart and in my mind.  We may not have seen each other as often as we used to, but the times that we did spend together really were great.  I look back at our time and I try to remember the best of times we had, but I struggle with the idea that I could have…I should have…done more during his time here to help him fight his demons.  I try to live my life with the concept of not giving in to the could haves or should haves or would haves. There is usually no point in doing that and it never helps to dwell on those sorts of things.   This is a tough one to get past though.

My daughter is turning 3 next month.  We’ve been trying to find a place to for her party because having it at the house just won’t work out too well.  My wife took her to a place called Elevated Sportz (with a Z!) up in Bothell before, and she really enjoyed it.  I have never been there before, so I was looking up their website to see what it was all about.  Turns out, it is the same building that used to be a go kart track called Kartz.  It immediately brought back some memories.  This place was special to me because it’s where I first met a lot of my current friends; about 13 years ago.  It was the site for the very first Importmix.com forum meet.  The guy that worked there / family owned it (I’m not really sure) David has become one of my most trusted friends.  I had become pretty good friends with a lot of the people on the site, but never met them in person.

At the time I was doing graphic design work and had access to a vinyl machine.  I had been talking with a guy who wanted to do some new graphics for his car.  I had never done full car graphics before, so I was excited to give it a try.  He drove a Nissan Maxima and wanted the Nismo stripe design.  All I needed was the dimensions and I could get started.  This meet is where we decided I would take those measurements.  I told him I would be there and we would find each other, describing myself as average height (which is code for short) with a red beard and brown hair.  He said he’s tall.  Great.  So I get there and it’s a cold day, with a chance of snow (which is did later in the evening), so everyone is wearing heaving coats.  And, there are a couple hundred people there.  I was walking around for about 10 minutes looking for a tall guy through this crowd of people who are all talking, when I hear the loudest bellowing ‘BRIAN’ roaring over the crowd.  Enough so to make me turn around and look.  “BRIAN” again, and I see a guy who’s head is clearly above the rest of the crowd.  It kind of startled me.  That was the first time that I met Matt.

I have a lot of people in my life that I consider friends.  Close friends.  But it’s rare to have someone in your life that you can easily call your best friend.  Matt is that person to me.  He is a genuinely great person, and I know there are a lot of people who will consider him their best friend.  Sometimes I sit and think about how long it’s been since I’ve seen him, and it makes me sad.  I know life goes in different directions for everyone, but I miss the times that we used to have.  But he will always be one of my closest friends.