I'm feeling better about this situation, and not because I took any action really to make myself feel better. If anything, I took actions to try to prolong the situation, by trying to find someone who could help me, or give me any sort of information.

Ultimately, it seemed like the universe decided to stonewall me entirely. Every single person I reached out to about my friend did not respond to me. In the case where one person did respond to me, we played phone tag multiple times, and never managed to get in touch before I decided to get the message 'the universe' was sending me.

It's my narcissistic romantic view of my life at work again, calling it a decision the universe made for me. In all likelihood there's more benign explanations: maybe my text messages went into the "Unknown Senders" category and the person never checks that; or, they read my messages and thought "I don't give a fuck about this," or "Fuck this guy, texting me out of nowhere, I always hated that guy," and ignored it.

In other cases, maybe it was more about there not being any money in responding to me; or it could be that they get these sorts of sad emails or phone calls all the time and they've learned responding to them is a total waste of time, or that you never know who is on the other side of the email–is this a friend asking after a friend, or is this a stalker trying to hunt down their prey?

I still haven't really reconciled all of my thoughts and feelings around all this. At times I think what has been most upsetting is just the slowly dawning realization that we live in a world of impermanence. Most of my conscious life has revolved around computers, with their (relatively) durable storage. I have carried stored artifacts with me that date back nearly 30 years now. They will last forever, in theory; they will outlast me, with certainty–even if it's just as recorded bits on a drive sitting in the bottom of a landfill decades from now.

But the people who created those artifacts, or were involved in my creation of them, will not last forever. They will grow and change; through the changing they may become new people I do not recognize as my friends. And eventually, they will die, one way or another, as that is the inevitable conclusion for every non-digital creature on this earth.

So, like, that's sad to think about. You're gonna die! You. Me, too.

But what's even sadder, depending on your perspective, is the other part of this that is gnawing at me: good god, the world is a brutal place. We're just animals, underneath it all. Mean, vicious, stupid animals, with thumbs and pockets to make us superior to everything else. But we're still just animals to each other. So much intellect and curiosity and ability, yet no capability when it comes to taking proper care of each other. People say humans are community-driven animals but there is scant evidence of it. I think that's all wishful thinking.

We've got an awful lot of proof that humans do not give a shit about other humans, individually and collectively. Why do we pretend otherwise? 9 out of 10 times, you tell a human to be nice to another human, and they shout "Fuck you!" in your face.