Rememberin' Thoughts of You

I lost my best friend in 2024. We met in the Marine Corps sometime after my first deployment. He was one of the new guys, and my first real memory of him is the two of us running PT in the rain. I couldn't tell you exactly what was said that day or how it happened, but somewhere along that run I met the guy who would become something closer than a best friend. He became family. We deployed to Afghanistan together. We came home together. We spent weekends driving across the state just trying to get away from military life for a little while, usually ending with him doing something stupid to make another guy uncomfortable, acting completely innocent when they got pissed, and me inevitably having to bail him out or back him up. Getting out of the Marines didn't change much. He came and lived with me for years. He dated my younger sister and tried to hide it from me because apparently he thought I'd beat his ass. I was more worried about her breaking his heart. For as tough as he could act, underneath it he was an emotional lightweight just like me. His favorite color was pink. He loved the number 69 because, of course he did. He never really stopped screwing with people just to make himself laugh. He loved his family with everything he had. He had a way of making the people around him better just by being there. He was the best man at my wedding. After spending the entire day and night celebrating with us, he made sure my wife and I got home safe and ended up crashing on the floor of our tiny studio apartment. That's who he was. When I decided to write this song, I didn't want to write something that only remembered how I lost him. I wanted to remember how I knew him. The stupid shit. The road trips. The rain. The deployment. The jokes. The loyalty. The kind of friendship where you didn't have to ask if the other guy was going to be there. Not a day goes by that I don't think about him. Life was truly better because he existed. This one's for my brother.