Bruce used to call me every few months or so, out of the blue. We’d only met in person a few times, but after working on two intense games with him, we had a bond that made conversation easy.

And you know what makes conversation easy? When you can have short silences, pauses where you don’t have to speak, you don’t have to be witty. A lot of the pauses we had were reflective. Many times, Bruce cried in the pauses. They were little whuffy quiet sniffly sobs, only becoming bright with grief when he tried to talk again.

Because, see, he’d started calling after Terry died, and he found himself casting about, lonely, lost, his heart full, but nowhere to put it. So, he leaned on his friends, and that’s how I found myself newly-minted as a temporary North Carolinian in 2007, lying back on my futon with my phone pressed sweatily to my ear, babbling about the moving truck journey from Chicago. I regaled him with tales of how much I felt I had given up in order to come here, and the sheer potential gain from such a loss.

He understood, in the worst way possible: Terry was at peace, but only by dying, only by discontinuing treatment for advanced complications from diabetes. Bruce felt betrayed, relieved, angry, frustrated, and, ultimately, understanding, as much as he couldn’t even comprehend Terry’s decision. Unmoored, Bruce wanted to get out of the house he shared with Terry. He told me hopeful stories about this apartment he scored in a church being converted into living spaces, and how it wasn’t home, but it was something, it was movement.

I always felt a bit of wonder at his phone calls to me. I felt flattered: here was this guy who had literally hundreds of friends all over the world, and he was calling me, to cry on my shoulder, to cheer me on in my slow and steady move towards being a professional game developer, writer, actor. I was humbled by his affection for our friendship, and I did indeed cherish it.

So when I got the email on Christmas Eve that he had died on December 12th, I was shocked into … nothing. There was no grief, initially. I got the email, from his account, signed by someone I didn’t know – a friend? A relative? A co worker? I didn’t know. All I knew was that Bruce had taken very ill, had gone into the hospital on the 9th, and had passed on the 12th.

Morbidly curious and feeling my face go hot from shock and a sneaking sense of shame, I opened up my GMail search and looked for any correspondence we had had. Only one other piece of email from that same account showed up – just about a year previously, and I had never replied. Of course, at the time I was just getting back home to L.A. from seeing my Dad for the very last time, and so I had tuned pretty much everything out. But it was a kind email, a sweet one, a personal private show of support for me, just like always.

I just haven’t felt like writing here since then, and I was already feeling overwhelmed with the feeling that I hadn’t much to really write about, so why write at all? Does my life really have to do that thing where every holiday is now an obstacle course of emotion and grief? Will I need this quiet time to just feel hopeless and scared and worried, every single damned year from now on? I don’t know.

Probably not. But still. My phone won’t ever ring from him again. I won’t have his cheery, emotional voice on the other end of the line, I won’t have to plug my phone into the charger just to stay talking as long as we need to, I won’t hear his grief and love pouring across the miles, buoying all of us who knew him up a little higher above our own tide lines of stress and sadness.

I miss Bruce, and I am incredibly sorry he’s gone. He was an excellent, intuitive writer, with a gift for drama, tension, and hilariously clever comedy. I hope he had people near him to soothe him, and although I don’t believe in the afterlife, I must admit that I am comforted that in some small way, he won’t be missing Terry anymore, that in some way, they have once again become one.

Goodbye, friend.