You Will Never Believe How Chills Crawled My Back When I Received An Email From My Missing Bestfriend

True Story

Pop up glairing on my phone’s screen, I peeped at the notification.

Gmail.

John.

John?

I opened Outlook on my computer. Then double-click the top tile.

“Subject: Are you still alive?”

Chills grew on my back.

I remembered this email I sent three months ago to John. It was the last from a string of failed attempts to establish contact.

For the last three years, we chatted daily on Skype. Having lost sight for ten years before that, we made sure we wouldn’t roam away again for so long.

He was brilliant. As a pure analytic mind, he reminded me of Spock, minus the ears. Feelings were not his bag’ o tea; prime numbers were.

He was odd to the eye. Walking like the hunchback, headdressed like Yoda, he wasn’t your go-to-bars-buddy.

You’d find him behind a screen, slashing ogres in dungeons or speeding the Nuremberg Ring on iRacing.

You’d also find him building fantastic neural networks and unique pieces of software. Dropping college twenty years ago, he managed to leap from a grocery store manager to an AI specialist for a mining company. Without school between the two.

“Babe, I received an email from John!”

I had to talk to my girlfriend. As I didn’t expect this email, it caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting it.

“Go on! Read it!”

She was right. I could not know without reading.

I sat again before the screen. I had a weird feeling.

You see, three months ago, I was desperately looking for John.

I sent him mail over mail to only receive silence.

I tried to find his mom and his sister. I turned out to be a terrible detective.

I even tried his work but could not recall the place’s name. I panicked. I called all three mines in the region. Can you picture how weird these calls turned out to be?

Then I started reading.

He had a stroke. Three months ago. He spent the last months in rehab. He just got home. Ouf!

But there’s more.

The blood reached some parts of his brain. Memory was one of them.

“I don’t recall you. I remember spending a lot of time behind my keyboard. But I don’t remember what I was doing there.”

“Maybe can you tell me who you are and what our relationship was?”

Tears caught on me.

John was my only friend. The only one with whom I could enjoy deeply boring stuff for non-initiate. We spent nights competing on Google’s Code Jam, drinking coffee, and joking rationally.

And now, I am alone to share these memories. May I say hold, since there’s no one to communicate with anymore?

What about those memories of us playing in a band, his Pontiac 6000, the beer we had at Christmas two years ago, and all the lines of code we enjoyed.

I lost you, John, and it saddens me.

You are still alive, but you are dead to me.

But where ever your life may lead you, I hope for you that you’ll find someone like me.

Want to learn more about me? Phil Stöck

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