Kuma died in January. I only just found out, because of Reasons.

Oh, Kuma, I don't want to be here with you, not like this. I want to be at my desk at work, comfortably focused on my immediate tasks; not here in this train, travelling with my unceasing unbidden thoughts of you. If I can't work then I want to be reading, or walking; or doing anything at all except for trying to breast this confusion of memory that so sorely needs to be structured and tamed with prose. If I think of you at all, I want it to be with lazy fondness: right now you should be sleeping, or watching the dawn and awaiting the start of your day. I want to think of you as vital, gentle, and secure in the knowledge that, one way or another, life goes on. But life has not gone on, and now I travel in the company of your calm and charismatic shade.

You're gone, I know you're gone, yet I seem to feel your presence still. Are you out there, somehow? Does some integral trace of you persist and wander, embedded and immersed in a deeper reality as once you immersed yourself in your environment of redwood and strand? Or, this 'you' I feel, this 'you' that I even now feel compelled to speak to — are you only your evanescent reflection in my memories, a mental model to which my intuitive theory of mind cannot help but ascribe an ongoing independent awareness? I feel you, yet I miss you, yet I speak to you in defiance of time and distance and death itself. Such strange contradictions that our minds are wont to hold.

Strange also, how much you came to mean to me when we actually spent so little of our lives in each others' company. But you were so remarkable, Kuma. Beautiful you were, yes; as beautiful as any I ever met; but also vital, and self-aware and self-assured, possessed of an easy serenity and an apparent intuitive understanding of your right to your place in this world. You were your own creature, invested with more richness and subtlety than I could ever have fathomed, and, to me, you were also something of a lodestone and a metonym for aspects of what I want to be, what I aspire to, what I uphold as the Platonic ideal of a life worth living. I loved you; not like Raika loved you, not like I love Mischa; but enough that something of what you were left its imprint in what I am and what I carry forward in my own existence. I never met anyone quite like you, and I hope I never will again. I don't want you to be anything but unique: a singular point, never to be repeated in all the unfathomable phase-space of all possible creatures across all possible time. Irreplaceable, you are in a tiny sense eternal.

Kuma, you are gone from us. I heard the news in one of those casually brutal ways, from the kind of off-hand comment that goes clean through one's breast like an intangible bolt, leaving only a numbness that gradually, over hours, transmutes into a puzzling, stubbornly irrational disbelief. I had unquestioningly thought to see you later this year, to spend time with you, and part of me insists that's still possible. Another part, compassionate, denies it. Sooner or later it'll win out and I'll believe and, with luck, weep. From now and forever more I shall know you only in my memories, and I shall never forget you.

I think it's time to mourn you now. And those fellow travellers who see me crying in public should know it's for as good a reason as there could ever be.

Kuma, 2001-2014 †