The worst part of 5 years and 2 months mourning my baby brother was the day that the dream got me. I dreamt about him a lot but I'm a shit screenwriter so the dreams were always cliched garbage with obvious meaning. Stuff like "We're standing on a bridge that I can't cross, and he says he needs to cross it but I'm trying to convince him not to". The kind of stuff you write for a high school creative writing class that you don't need to pass in order to graduate. But one got me goooooooooood. It was one of those hyper-realistic dudes, I was driving with my wife to a restaurant that I used to go to as a kid, we were picking up takeout to bring back home. As I was loading it into the car I heard his voice behind me say "Aren't you forgetting something?" I turned around and it was him, and everything else about the situation felt so normal and boring that of course he would be there because he was always there every time we did this. But my brain knew that we had been spending the last few years more or less constantly thinking about the fact that he was gone. It almost always results in me realizing that I'm dreaming, but just this one time it went the other way and my brain said "Oh joy, there must have been some sort of years-long misunderstanding and he's actually been here and fine the entire time!" Then I woke up. Cruelest thing I've ever done to myself, but it's a bit comforting to realize that it's in the realm of normality.

I felt that one, too.

It took a couple of years after a good friend of mine died before I stopped texting him on occasion.