Day 375,

I actually made a point of avoiding you when you first washed up, especially after I heard you were going to be Archivist.  I still missed the old man and had a lot of tangled up feelings with all my good memories of the archive being tainted by sadness over his loss.  But I couldn’t avoid the place forever and I missed it as much as I did him, so I finally got my courage together and made myself go down there.

I was so nervous about how it was going to go, seeing someone else in his place, watching over our books, intruding in my place to hide from the world.  But then I got down the stairs and you looked ridiculous.  I know I should say I’m sorry for laughing like I did, but I’m still not.  I don’t mean that in a mean way though.  Seeing you there, looking nothing like him but drowning in his clothes like you were his kid that had gotten into his closet and surrounded by an utter mess was just the right kind of silly to get rid of those nerves and make me feel better about, well, a lot of things really.  I know you were embarrassed but please don’t be when you look back on that.  Under the exact context that you couldn’t have known, I don’t think you could have made a better first impression.

And I’ll admit, seeing all the books out of place and hearing they were going to be reorganized felt wrong at first.  The archive means a lot to me, and who were you to change something so important?  But then as you were talking you just got so into it.  Talking so fast you were stumbling over yourself and repeating things but smiling the whole time.  Here was someone else who really cared.  I was afraid you wouldn’t.  

As we got to talking and while I settled back into my old reading spot I started thinking maybe rearranging everything wasn’t so bad.  It was a fresh start.  A way for the archive to keep what it’s always meant to me without reminding me of what I’d lost.

From there, it wasn’t hard to start thinking of you as a fresh start.  Someone who didn’t have any prior history or associations with me to poison the present.  Someone I could do things right with.

You know I’ve drifted away from all my other old friends.  Some of the reasons I’ve told you, some I think you’ve figured out, and some you probably have an idea of now after all that other stuff I wrote.  I’ve had my problems in the past.  Still do.  But I’ve gotten better.  And I’m still getting better.

I know it was never your intention, but thank you for giving me the opportunity to try being a good friend again.  For being any kind of friend again.  I think we both know you can be alone without being lonely, just like you can be with others and still be lonely.  I was definitely the latter for a long time.  Longer than I realized, and you were my first step to getting out of that.  

Okay, yeah, I did have that weird friendly-messing-with-each-other-acquaintanceship with Cass even before you showed up, but that was really just another part of the masks until mutual friendship with you was able to catalyze it into something else.

I wrote something to this same effect before, back when you were sick, but maybe once you return we can start talking more about this stuff.  Help each other out of the holes we dig ourselves into.  We’re both bad at talking about it though.  Maybe we could try writing each other letters.  That was something in a story I read once.  Writing letters to say the things we can’t in person.  I think you’d like that one.