This next one should be a phone call, but my phone is off. Tsk tsk. I have a very good friend on my submarine, named Karim Cain. No, I feel comfortable enough to call him my brother, outside of physical resemblance. Our constant banter is a clear indiication that he fills the spot of the brother I never actually had. Sidenote: he was my mentor when I first got to the boat, and I still marvel over how he helped shape me into a carbon copy of him. Its not easy admitting that with arrogance either. What helps to ease that pain is that fact that I’m proud of it. Anyway, he’s leaving in about a month, and there have been multiple times that we’ve had that conversation so many friends have in this fast life. Will we keep in touch? Will we remember each other, be lifelong friends? Us being brutally honest people, the outcome is always grim. No, we will not be lifelong friends. We will not forever be in touch. We will think, and miss the camaraderie of the brotherhood, but we will move on with our lives. And we don’t say this out of laziness, but out of past experience. Cain is just the last of a long line of brothers that I’ve failed to keep in contact with, because I’ve been cursed with this sense of detachment that won’t allow me to hold on to friendship when it spans the globe. I’m a military brat, bred to be relocated at a second’s notice. As a child, even when I was too young to acknowledge it, I secretly knew this was what my future would consist of. I’ve experienced the pain of losing a friend far too often to consider it anything more than a papercut. This is what allows me to go out to sea and not worry myself sick about the world affairs, what drives my family crazy when I go weeks without calling them. They think its because I’m insensitive. I realize its because I’m desensitized. I lived in Africa for a year and some change with no one’s company but my grandmother and my uncle, how can you not expect me to adapt? This is what I’ve become, compassionate as ever but cold as ice when it matters most. I’m ashamed of my self-preservant ways.
This is dedicated to my long line of brothers who I have failed. Austin Israel Lewan Johnson, Chris Marquez, Corwon Curtis Martin, Steven Gifford, Fas D DreamChaser Bayoh, Zach Nottnott Cook, Brandon Cunningham, Joshua Pruitt, Dinero Melianno,

Zack Wood … the list goes on.