Jimmy was twenty-one when he died.
I've been carrying him for twenty-four years.
I did the math this morning and had to sit down. Had to put my coffee on the counter because my hands wouldn't stay still. Twenty-four years. His entire life - every scraped knee, every first day of school, every Christmas morning, every nervous glance at a girl, every line of code he ever wrote, every phone call home, every dream he whispered into the dark - all of it fits inside the time I've spent without him.
I've been missing him longer than his mother got to hold him.
Some days, I can't remember his voice anymore. I try to hear him and I get nothing. Just silence where a scared kid used to be. Other days it hits me so clear I turn around expecting to see him there, laptop open, leg bouncing with that anxious energy he could never shake.
He'd be forty-five now. Forty-five. Maybe bald. Maybe soft around the middle. Maybe showing his own kid how to write code, telling them about the job he almost took overseas, the one that didn't work out. He'd leave out the mountains. Leave out the fear. Leave out the way his hands shook when he held a weapon he never wanted to carry.
He'd be alive. That's the thing. He'd just be alive, doing ordinary things, complaining about traffic or taxes or whatever forty-five-year-olds complain about. He'd have had twenty-four more years of ordinary.
Instead, I have twenty-four years of carrying a ghost who never got to grow old.
You want to know what that feels like? It feels like being handed something precious and breakable and being told to walk with it forever. It feels like watching the world forget someone while you're screaming their name inside your own skull. It feels like guilt that doesn't make sense - guilt for getting gray hair, for seeing new movies, for eating meals he'll never taste.
It feels like being the last light in a room everyone else has left.
Twenty-four years of birthdays he didn't have. Twenty-four years of sunrises he didn't see. Twenty-four years of me waking up and him not waking up, and the world just continuing like that's acceptable. Like that's fine. Like a twenty-one-year-old kid dying scared and far from home is just something that happens, and we all move on.
I haven't moved on. I've moved forward, but that's different.
Moving on means leaving something behind. Moving forward means carrying it with you, letting it change your shape, letting the weight become part of how you walk.
Jimmy's been riding with me for twenty-four years. He'll ride with me for whatever years I have left. And when I finally put this body down, when my own watch ends, I'll have spent more of my life remembering him than he spent living.
That's not fair. None of this is fair.
But fair was never part of the deal.
Twenty-one years to become who he was. A few seconds of gunfire to end it. And twenty-four years - so far - of me refusing to let him disappear.
I say his name out loud sometimes, to hear it exist in the world. Jimmy. To prove he was real and that he mattered. That his twenty-one years counted for something even if they ended in dust and mountains and silence.
Jimmy.
Twenty-one years you got. Twenty-four years I've carried you. By the time my watch ends, your whole life might fit three or four times over inside my remembering.
I'll take that deal. I'll carry you until I can't carry anything anymore.
Till Valhalla, brother. Save my seat.