I knew you in the days of strapping on proton packs and rolling around in the grass wearing Halloween masks. Enjoying the freedom that only youth could provide, we cavorted about our earliest days with impassioned exuberance for the imagined. We romanticized adventure and played out our endless dreams in the fields of childhood and hoped that one day we might live through to see such impossibilities with our own eyes. A man flying caped through the sky, a dinosaur hidden in the trees, a radioactive spider and a mutated strand of DNA; these were our realities, however fantastic they were.
Living through childhood with you was the most thrilling experience I can now imagine, and only now have I been able to tug at some of those memories I'd thought forgotten. So often did it seem that days of my life, nearly every day in fact, revolved around getting home as quickly as possible so that I may find myself at your front door in an effort to pick up where the previous outing left off. We would start stories for ourselves that lasted for days, unfolding in ridiculously epic fashion, oftentimes ending right where we started in an effort to replay the joy again. In these days that now find worrisome thoughts about the so-called tangibles that make modern adulthood possible, it is easy to lose sight of those things that made those days as joyful as they were. I now know that there will always be a place in my heart for those times and that imagination.
We were brothers, Jonathan, though not in the traditional sense. We shared siblings and parents, possessions and rooms, everything that made up our young lives. You were always there for me, and I was there for you. You had a family that loved and admired you for yourself. You had your mother's laugh and your fathers looks; you had your brothers' attention and admiration, and you had your imagination. That is what I will always remember you for. During the Spring of our lives we dreamt up the greatest childhood anyone could have had through the seasons of youth and I'm now only sad that we'll not be able to dream up an Autumn together as well.
We'll always love you and miss you.
Your friend,
Kyle
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