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Brother,

There are places a man passes through and leaves nothing of himself behind. And there are places that, for reasons he could never have explained while he was there, follow him out into the years.

Perhaps this was one of those places.

Ten years and more is a long time to sit in the same dark with strangers. Long enough that the strangers become familiar without ever becoming known. We learned one another by fragments. A sentence. A joke. A name that may not have been a name. The things a man chose to laugh at and the things he could not bear to speak of. And somewhere in all that foolishness and cruelty and sudden beauty there grew a kind of fellowship that no one had thought to name.

There was no oath between us. No blood. No hands clasped beneath a flag. Yet a man can share enough darkness with another man that something passes between them all the same.

The world outside kept changing. Years went by. Faces disappeared. The old places emptied out and new ones took their names. And still there were the markybros, keeping the old fire for another night, remembering things that by all rights ought to have been forgotten.

Maybe that is what makes leaving difficult.

Not the board. Not the words upon the screen. Those things are only ashes and pixels in the end. It is the knowledge that somewhere in the vastness there were men who had been there when you were there. Men you would never recognize on the street, whose voices you would never hear, whose real names you might never learn—and yet whose laughter you knew.