I keep track of everyone I've ever known. I have a little blue and yellow book filled with addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and birthdays. I meticulously update, periodically checking to make sure that everyone is in the right place, making sure that everyone still lives in the apartment penciled into my little book. I can't help it. I have an unexplainable desire to know where everyone is all the time. (I drove Jillian crazy in the dorms. She couldn't walk out of the room without me saying, "Where are you going, Jilly? When will you be back?") Somehow, it's comforting to have a concrete piece of information about everyone. It's good to know that, even if I don't know anything else, I know where my friends are sleeping at night. I know where to find them in an emergency, I know what number to call when I need something.

I was checking up on Rock and that John Henry kid just now, knowing that mid-August is the time of year when everyone in Madison plays apartment tag. (Madison makes my job easy; they update their directory annually, even for the off-campus students.) I found Rock right where she belonged, but John Henry had moved on me. He had vacated the crumbling green house, the last place I visited him.

The place was a shithole, and I'm not surprised that he left. I'm not surprised that he didn't bother to tell me about the move. Still, I am a little bit sad about it. I've contemplated this before, of course. I knew that there would come a day when he wouldn't bother to notify me of his whereabouts. I knew that, eventually, he'd fall off the face of the earth into complete anonymity. I knew that he wouldn't want me to bother him anymore (not that I've been bothering him; I haven't) and I knew that, at some point, I'd be unable to find him.

He'll graduate from college and I won't find out until I try to look him up and he's not in the directory anymore. He'll go to grad school in some state far, far away and I'll never hear from him again. I won't know that he's married, that he's got kids, that he's in a jazz band, that he's happy. I'll wonder, but I'll never be able to find him. He'll just disappear. He's good at that.

I've been expecting this. John Henry simply isn't one for maintaining contacts. Once you're out of his life, you're out. I'm not just referring to myself here, either. I wouldn't make a good example, obviously. John Henry doesn't speak to Nathan Thomas, his best friend from high school, either. They stopped being best friends almost immediately upon leaving for college. John Henry just doesn't do distance. It's too much work for him, I guess.

He was a strange kid, that Mr. Henry guy. He was at the same time the most ambitious person I ever knew and the laziest. He acted as though it would kill him to make a phone call or take a shower, but he'd practice his guitar forever to make a certain note sound exactly the way he wanted it to, or he'd forego sleep for days in order to make a computer program do exactly what he wanted it to. It's strange...I used to know him better than anyone else did, and now I don't know him at all.

...chances are that I'll never know him ever again. Ever. I don't like that.