This Boy Has Been Friends With Bigfoot for 2 Decades, Finally Shares the Truthd – Sasquatch Story

The Boy, the Stream, and the Stone

There are secrets you keep because you’re ashamed of them, and secrets you keep because you’re trying to protect something fragile from a world that breaks things for sport. For most of my life, I told myself mine was the second kind. Now I’m not so sure. Maybe it was both. Maybe I was protecting my friend—and protecting myself from being the kind of person people smile at politely and then avoid.

I’m 32 now. I have a wife. A job that pays the mortgage on time. A truck with a dent in the bumper I keep meaning to fix. I make lists and forget them. I say things like “we should really plan ahead” and mean it. I’m the kind of adult my ten-year-old self would’ve considered deeply suspicious.

And for over twenty years, I’ve been friends with something that shouldn’t exist.

Not “I saw something once” friends. Not “a story I tell at parties after two beers” friends. I mean the kind of friendship that changes your reflexes—like the way you turn your head when you hear a certain call in the night, or the way your chest tightens when you leave the woods and the shadows behind you feel heavier than they should.

If you want to stop reading now, I wouldn’t blame you. I’ve spent two decades expecting that reaction. But if you stay, I’ll tell it the way it happened. No blurry photos. No dramatic music. Just a kid, a forest, and a relationship I never learned how to explain in human language.

1) Summer 2004: The Fort That Wouldn’t Stay Put

We lived on an isolated farm in rural Oregon, the kind of place where your nearest neighbor is “down the road a ways,” and “a ways” means three miles of dirt and potholes. Behind our house, the property fell into dense forest—hundreds of acres that blurred into the national forest boundary like the land itself didn’t care about paperwork.

My dad ran equipment for a logging company. My mom worked at the hospital in town. Their schedules were a rotating door of early mornings, late nights, and tired dinners where they asked how school was and I said “fine” because that was the correct answer and also because I didn’t know how to say, I spent the afternoon pretending the ferns were an army and the creek was a border.

Looking back, letting a ten-year-old roam alone for hours sounds reckless. But in that part of Oregon, it was normal. The rules were simple:

Everything else was freedom.

That summer, I started building a fort about half a mile into the woods. Nothing Pinterest-worthy. Just a kid’s stubborn architecture: logs rolled into place, branches leaned together, smaller sticks woven through gaps like stitches. I dragged in an old tarp to keep rain off. Plastic crates became furniture. Flashlights lived in a corner like sacred objects.

I built it in a thicket of young alders so thick you couldn’t see it unless you already knew where it was. I liked that. It made the fort feel like a kingdom.

The first time I noticed something had changed, I assumed it was my own sloppy memory. I was ten; my brain was mostly made of comics and sugar. But then it happened again. And again.

Logs I’d positioned carefully were shifted—never smashed, never scattered—just moved as if someone had lifted them and placed them down with a different opinion. A pile of pine cones became a neat circle. A flat stone I used as a table was flipped, dirt side up, like someone had checked beneath it.

It didn’t feel mean. It felt… curious.

I started testing the phenomenon the way kids do when they can’t stop thinking about something. I’d arrange sticks in a very specific pattern before leaving. I’d put three rocks in a line and count them twice. I’d wedge a branch in the doorway at an angle only I would notice.

Every time I came back, something was different.

Something was visiting my fort.

And then, in late August, it stopped being a puzzle and became a presence.

I was inside, sorting old magazines—National Geographic and Spider-Man comics—when I heard footsteps.

Not deer-steps. Not the light, nervous clicks of a rabbit. These were heavy. Measured. Like someone walking with intention.

Thud.
Thud.
Thud.

They circled my fort slowly. Each step made the ground feel like it was receiving weight it didn’t want.

Through gaps in the branch wall, I saw a dark shape pass—tall, upright, covered in coarse brown hair. The smell came next: musky and wild, like wet dog mixed with earth and something… older. It wasn’t rotten, exactly. Just powerful, overwhelming, like the forest itself had decided to exhale.

I should’ve run. Every instinct screamed for it.

But fear can pin you as effectively as claws. I sat frozen, magazine slipping from my hands. The creature stopped at the entrance.

Branches shifted.

A huge hand pushed them aside, careful rather than violent.

And then we made eye contact.

I will never forget the eyes—not because they were magical, but because they were specific. Deep amber with flecks of gold around the pupils. Intelligent in a way that didn’t match any animal I’d ever seen. There was curiosity there. Caution. A kind of assessing calm that made my panic feel childish.

It tilted its head, studying me as if we were both equally strange.

Ten or fifteen seconds passed. Maybe less. Fear makes time weird; it stretches seconds into lifetimes.

Then it did something I couldn’t have predicted if I’d had a thousand tries.

It reached into my fort and placed something on the ground near my feet.

A smooth river stone. Perfectly round, palm-sized, the kind of stone that takes water and time and patience to become what it is.

It set the stone down gently. Almost reverently.

Then it backed away, never breaking eye contact, and turned into the trees. Within moments it was gone, swallowed by shadow and fern and the way the forest can hide anything if it wants to.

I didn’t move for a long time. When I finally did, I ran home like my life depended on it—because in my ten-year-old brain, it probably did.

I didn’t tell my parents.

Who would believe me?

But I kept the stone.

And the next day, I went back.

2) The Routine: Food, Silence, and Trust

For the next two years, I visited that fort almost every day after school.

At first, I just waited. I did homework in a whispering cathedral of trees. I read comics and listened for those footsteps. I watched the shadows like they might rearrange themselves into answers.

After a week of waiting, I started leaving food.

Apples from our tree. Beef jerky from the pantry. Bread wrapped in plastic wrap. Small offerings that made me feel brave and ridiculous at the same time.

The food was always gone the next day.

But it wasn’t scattered like raccoons would do, or torn apart like a bear might. The plastic wrap was folded neatly and left in a small pile, like someone had tried to imitate the idea of tidiness without fully understanding why humans cared.

Two weeks after the stone, it returned.

Late afternoon light poured through the trees like honey. The creature stepped into the clearing and stopped at the edge, just watching me.

It was even bigger in direct sunlight—eight feet, maybe more. Broad shoulders. Arms long enough to make my brain flinch. Fur the color of chocolate with reddish undertones that shimmered when it moved.

It looked at the food on the flat rock between us. Then at me.

It approached slowly, each step careful—not sneaky, but considerate, as if it understood that sudden movement would snap something fragile between us.

It picked up an apple and examined it. Turned it over in its hands. Studied the skin like it was reading a story written in bruises and shine.

Then, unbelievably, it sat down about ten feet away. Cross-legged. Like a person.

It ate the apple slowly, watching me the whole time. When it finished, it set the core back on the rock with deliberate placement, like a small ritual.

Then it just sat there.

We didn’t “do” anything. We didn’t play games. We didn’t talk.

We existed in the same space without violence.

It stayed twenty minutes or so, then stood and left—no drama, no sudden retreat. Just a calm departure into the trees.

But it came back the next day.

And the day after that.

Over months, we formed a routine that still feels strange to describe because it was built almost entirely out of silence and small gestures.

I’d arrive after school, drop my pack, and settle into the fort or the clearing. It would show up sometime in the late afternoon. Sometimes it stayed at the edge of the trees; sometimes it sat closer. Always watching. Always measuring.

It seemed fascinated by my things.

My backpack. My jacket. My sneakers.

It would touch fabric with the carefulness of someone handling something precious. Once, I left my backpack open. It spent ten minutes peering inside—pencils, notebooks, crumpled worksheets—like it was studying the strange artifacts of childhood.

My shoes were the funniest. It stared at laces and rubber soles like those concepts were jokes it hadn’t learned yet.

One day, on impulse that was half generosity and half ten-year-old daring, I took off a sneaker and held it out.

The creature accepted it with both hands and turned it over and over. It examined the tread, the stitching, the tongue. It brought the shoe to its face and smelled it, then made a huffing sound that might have been amusement.

Then it handed the sneaker back and gestured at my foot like it understood that, fascinating as shoes were, humans tend to need both of them to get home.

It made a low rumbling sound sometimes—deep in its chest, steady, almost like a purr. When it did that, the clearing felt safer. Like I’d been accepted into a quiet agreement.

In my head, I started calling it “the big guy.”

I never said it out loud. I wasn’t sure names worked the same way for it, or if giving it a name would make it feel too human, too claimable.

But in my mind, it was my friend.

3) Lessons: What the Forest Actually Says

By the time I turned eleven, the big guy started teaching me.

Not with words. With demonstration.

It would point at certain plants and shake its head hard—no. It would point at others and nod, pluck them, and hand them to me—yes.

I learned salmonberry, thimbleberry, huckleberry. I learned that some ferns had edible roots if you knew how to prepare them. It showed me mushrooms—oyster mushrooms on dead logs, chanterelles under firs—and it showed me the ones to avoid with a sharp clicking sound and a violent shake of the head.

It taught me about water, too.

Not all clear water is safe. The big guy led me to places where the creek bubbled up from underground springs—cold, clean points where water arrived fresh from earth’s hidden channels. It would cup its hands and drink, then step back and gesture for me to do the same.

That water hurt my teeth from the cold. It tasted like purity, like the opposite of a tap.

It taught me other things I didn’t realize were lessons until years later:

How to tell direction by moss growth and sun angle.
How to read animal tracks in mud and know how long ago they passed.
How to move through underbrush without announcing yourself to every living thing within half a mile.

For something so large, it moved like a ghost. It didn’t crash through the forest. It flowed through it.

When it demonstrated something, it would pause and watch me try. If I did it wrong, it didn’t scold. It simply did it again—patient, endlessly patient, as if teaching me was part of its own purpose.

As a kid, I felt proud.

As an adult, looking back, I feel something else, too: a quiet awe at the idea that it may have been trying to protect me by teaching me to survive in its world.

4) The Stream: Gifts and the Shape of Friendship

By thirteen, the big guy’s visits felt normal. I’d get off the bus, toss my backpack in the kitchen, grab whatever snack I could, and head into the woods. My mom would call after me, asking when I’d be back. I’d shout “for dinner,” and that was that.

Our main spot shifted from the fort to a stream about a quarter mile deeper. The water ran fast and cold, even in summer, fed by snowmelt. Smooth river stones lined the bank. Trout hovered in darker pools like living shadows.

There was a flat rock that jutted over the water. Big enough for both of us—though “comfortably” is relative when your friend has to dangle his legs in the stream because he’s too tall to sit like a normal creature.

We’d sit there for hours, watching the water move, listening to the forest breathe.

The big guy started bringing gifts.

Not just smooth stones anymore—stones with quartz veins like lightning, stones with fossil impressions. Feathers: blue jay feathers that looked painted, hawk feathers with perfect banding, once an owl feather so soft it felt like touching air. Pine cones so symmetrical they looked manufactured.

It presented them ceremonially, placing them in my hands and watching my face, like my reaction mattered.

So I brought gifts too.

Cans of tuna and salmon sneaked from the pantry. Fruit. Once, a small mirror from my mom’s bathroom, because I thought it might be interested.

It stared at its reflection for twenty minutes, making expressions, watching them change. It touched the glass, then looked behind it, as if trying to find where the other creature had gone.

It was funny.

And it was also… sad.

Watching something intelligent meet itself clearly, maybe for the first time, felt like witnessing a private kind of loneliness.

5) Fishing: Patience Made Visible

The stream became our favorite place because the big guy fished there.

Not with a rod. Not with traps.

With hands.

It would sit absolutely still, one hand hovering just above the current, eyes tracking motion I couldn’t see. Then—too fast for my brain to narrate—it would snatch a fish out of the water like it was plucking a thought from the air.

Rainbow trout. Cutthroat. Sometimes steelhead.

Its timing was impossible. Its reflexes made human reflexes look like a slow apology.

And every time, it shared.

It would tear the fish in half with one clean motion and hand me the larger piece.

Yes, we ate raw fish by the stream. And no, it didn’t taste like the fishy mess people imagine. Fresh trout eaten minutes after being caught tastes clean and mild. The meat is cold, firm, delicate in a way cooking erases.

It showed me how to scale with a thumbnail. How to find and avoid the thin bones. How to sit still long enough that the world forgets you’re there.

Then it gestured for me to try.

At first I was terrible. I splashed and scared fish away. I grabbed at empty water. I sat too long, then moved at the wrong moment, like my body and the stream were speaking different languages.

But the big guy never lost patience.

By fourteen, I could catch fish with my hands occasionally. Not often. Not like it did. But sometimes I’d feel that cold slippery body and manage to hold on, and the big guy would rumble in approval and pat my shoulder with one enormous hand.

Those pats were gentle, but they landed with the weight of a creature built from timber and mountain.

And every time, my heart would swell with that weird kid-pride of being seen by someone who mattered.

6) Loneliness: The Sound That Followed Me Home

Not everything was idyllic.

Sometimes, when I had to leave—when my mom called me in for dinner or the sky began to dim—the big guy made a sound that tightened my chest.

Low. Mournful. Drawn out.

It echoed through trees like the forest was trying to hold the note after it left the creature’s throat. It sounded lonely, like it knew I had another life to return to, one full of lights and voices and safety.

And it would be alone again.

That sound followed me as I walked home. It faded with distance, but it didn’t disappear from my mind. At night I’d lie in bed and hear it in memory, replaying like a song you can’t shut off.

I started staying later in the woods, partly because I was a teenager and partly because leaving felt like abandoning someone who couldn’t follow.

I wondered what it did when I wasn’t there.

Did it have others? Family? Friends?

Or was it sitting by the stream all day waiting for me to show up after school?

That thought made guilt bloom in my stomach before I even had a name for guilt.

7) The Fall: When Friendship Became Action

When I was fifteen, the big guy proved—without any room for interpretation—that it wasn’t just curious about me.

It cared.

It was early spring, sunny but cool. I was climbing an old oak near our meeting spot, trying to get a better view of a hawk nest. I’d climbed that tree a dozen times. It felt familiar.

I was about fifteen feet up when I heard a crack.

The branch beneath my foot gave way—rotted through from the inside despite looking solid.

I fell.

Time did the slow-motion thing people talk about. I remember the ground rushing up. I remember trying to twist so I wouldn’t land on my head. I remember thinking, with perfect clarity, This is going to hurt.

I hit hard on my left side. My arm took most of it.

I heard the break before I felt it—like a thick stick snapping inside my body.

Then the pain hit: white-hot, immediate, bright enough to blot out thoughts. My arm was bent wrong. My stomach rolled. Tears came before I could be embarrassed about them.

I lay there gasping, staring up at the canopy.

And then the big guy was beside me.

I hadn’t heard it approach. It knelt down, huge shadow falling over me, and made soft worried sounds deep in its chest.

It examined my arm with astonishing gentleness, barely touching. It looked at the angle, then at my face.

I was crying hard now—pain and fear and the sudden awareness that I was far from home with no way to call for help. My phone was in my backpack. Even moving made nausea surge.

The big guy made a decision.

It scooped me up like I weighed nothing. One arm supported my back, the other under my legs. It held my broken arm against my body so it wouldn’t move.

Then it moved.

Fast.

Through the forest, over logs and rocks, weaving between trees with memorized precision. The ride was smoother than it should’ve been. I could feel its heart beating against my side—strong, steady, reassuring.

It carried me all the way to the edge of the treeline, where our backyard began.

It set me down in the grass gently, like placing a bird back in its nest.

Then it looked at me with those amber eyes—worry clear as daylight.

It touched my cheek with one finger.

So gentle. So deliberate.

I cried harder.

Then it retreated into the trees and vanished before my mom could see it.

My mom spotted me from the kitchen window and ran out panicking. Questions spilled out of her like water: what happened, how did you get here, why didn’t you call?

I lied through tears and pain. I said I walked back.

The ER set my arm. The doctor called it a clean break. “You’re lucky,” he said.

I thought about what luck actually meant.

For six weeks, I couldn’t go into the woods. My mom wouldn’t allow it, broken arm or not. I stood at the yard’s edge sometimes, staring into the trees, imagining the big guy waiting by the stream, confused, maybe hurt.

The guilt was heavy enough to make my chest ache.

The day my cast came off, I ran back like my heart was tied to the stream.

And the big guy was there.

Waiting.

When it saw me, it made a sound—half huff, half rumble—that felt like relief. It approached slowly. I held out my pale, thin arm.

It touched the place where the break had been, tracing gently, then looked at my face.

I swear I saw relief in its eyes.

That was the moment I understood: this wasn’t just a weird woodland routine.

It was a relationship.

And it had been worried about me, too.

8) Growing Up: The Slow Betrayal of “Busy”

High school didn’t end our friendship. It just complicated it.

I got busier. Homework. Farm chores. Teenage exhaustion. But I still made time. Sometimes I brought camping gear and stayed overnight, telling my parents I was just out camping. They shrugged in that rural way that says, “Fine, just don’t die.”

Whenever I slept out there, the big guy positioned itself between my camp and the deeper forest, watching.

I felt safer with it nearby than I ever felt anywhere else.

Once, when I was seventeen, it proved that safety wasn’t just a feeling.

I woke in the night to a sound that turned my blood cold—a scream-growl that didn’t belong to a deer. I unzipped my tent and saw a mountain lion crouched about forty yards away, watching me.

Before I could process it fully, the big guy appeared from the shadows.

It didn’t attack.

It simply stood, drew itself up to full height, and roared.

The sound was deep enough to vibrate in my chest. The mountain lion took one look and vanished into darkness.

The big guy turned back to me, met my eyes, as if checking Are you okay?, then settled down about twenty feet away like nothing had happened.

I didn’t sleep much after that, but I felt completely safe.

That same year, it led me somewhere new—deeper into the forest than I’d ever gone. An hour of climbing through steeper, rockier terrain until we reached a hillside near where our land met the national forest boundary.

A cave entrance hidden behind vines and sword ferns.

It pulled aside the vegetation and gestured inside.

I followed with a flashlight.

The passage opened into a chamber that made my breath catch.

Bedding made of moss and grasses arranged in piles. Alcoves where food was stored—dried fish, nuts, roots, berries. Marks on the walls high enough that no human could reach without help. Some looked deliberate, like symbols.

The cave branched deeper than my flashlight could reach.

And there were multiple sleeping areas.

Evidence of others.

A family. A group.

My friend wasn’t alone in the world.

For reasons I still don’t understand, it always met me alone.

That knowledge changed something in me. It made our friendship feel chosen—not accidental.

And it made the future feel like a looming problem I didn’t have language for.

9) Leaving: The Promise on a Branch

I got into a university two states away on a full scholarship. My parents were proud in a way that made them look younger. They talked about opportunities and futures and all the things parents are supposed to want.

All I could think about was the big guy.

How do you tell someone you’re leaving when you don’t share words?

How do you explain that you’re not abandoning them when you don’t even know if you’ll be able to keep your promise?

My last visit before college was late August, right before my nineteenth birthday. The air had that first cool hint of fall. I went to the stream with a tight chest and a throat that felt like it was holding back a storm.

The big guy was there, sitting on our flat rock with its feet in the water.

I tried to explain through gestures—pointing to myself, toward town, making a walking motion, circling arms to indicate a long time.

It watched intently. I don’t know what it understood. I don’t know what it guessed.

When I stood to leave, it stood too.

And then it walked with me all the way to the treeline.

It had never done that before.

It stopped where the woods ended and the yard began, standing in fading light, watching as I walked backward across the grass, not wanting to turn away.

Then it made that sound.

Low and drawn out and unmistakably sad.

It echoed across the yard and into the forest beyond. It sounded like grief.

My vision blurred with tears.

I took off my favorite denim jacket—old, worn, stupidly important—and walked back to the treeline. I hung it on a low branch where it could see it.

I pointed to it. Then to myself. Then back to it.

A promise I didn’t have words for: I’ll come back.

The big guy touched the jacket gently, then looked at me one last time and disappeared into the trees.

I cried the whole drive to college.

And for a while, I did come back—Thanksgiving, Christmas, spring break, summers. Every time, I went to the woods. Every time, the big guy was there.

The jacket stayed hanging on that branch, fading and weathering, but never gone.

Then life did what life does: it filled up.

Papers. Exams. Internships. Dating. Career plans.

The woods began to feel like childhood—something I loved, but something I was “supposed” to outgrow.

I visited home for holidays and told myself I’d make time.

I didn’t.

There was always something else. Helping my parents. Seeing old friends. Catching up on sleep.

The truth was uglier: I convinced myself that part of my life was over.

I told myself the big guy would move on.

And I carried the guilt like a stone in my chest.

10) The Return: The Forest Doesn’t Forget

When I was twenty-eight, my mom called and said she’d found some of my old stuff in the garage. Childhood books, toys, and—most painfully—a box of stones. The stones the big guy had given me over the years.

I drove home to pick them up. I told my wife I wanted to go camping alone for a couple of days. She thought it was an early midlife crisis. She didn’t argue.

I hiked into the woods and tried to find the stream.

Everything was more overgrown. Trails had shifted. Familiar landmarks looked different, like the forest had changed clothes while I was gone.

I found the old fort site: just rotted logs and a memory.

And I found the branch.

The jacket was still there.

Not really a jacket anymore. More like a weathered remnant of denim and thread clinging stubbornly to wood.

But it was there.

The big guy had kept it.

I set up camp and waited three days.

No big guy.

The woods felt empty in a way they never had before, like the silence had teeth.

On the third morning, I packed up. I found stones scattered around the old fort site, arranged carefully like someone had been tending them.

But no sign of my friend.

I drove home convinced I’d waited too long.

That I’d let the best relationship of my life die quietly because I was too busy being “grown up.”

11) Two Years Ago: The Call in the Night

Two years ago, my parents started having health problems—not immediately life-threatening, but serious enough that they needed help managing the farm. My wife and I talked, and we moved back. I work remotely now. We bought a small house about a mile from my parents’ property.

The first night in our new house, I couldn’t sleep.

Around midnight, I heard it.

A low rumbling call, echoing from the direction of the woods.

My body recognized it before my mind caught up. My heart started pounding like it had been waiting twenty years for permission.

I got dressed, grabbed a flashlight, and told my wife I was going to check on something. She was half asleep and mumbled something about locks, then rolled over.

I ran into the forest like a man chasing his own childhood.

The big guy was waiting by the stream.

Even in darkness, I could see the changes. Gray around the face and shoulders. Slower movements. A carefulness that wasn’t just stealth—age lives in the way bodies negotiate ground.

But the eyes were the same.

Amber. Intelligent. Familiar in the way that made me feel like I was splitting open.

I didn’t know what I expected. Anger. Resentment. A turning away.

Instead, the big guy approached slowly and touched my face with one massive hand.

So gentle. So deliberate.

I started crying immediately, right there in the dark by the water.

We sat together until dawn. I didn’t try to explain. It didn’t try to force anything. We just existed together like we had when I was ten—two beings in the same place, alive in the same silence.

When the sky began to lighten, the big guy stood to leave. Before it stepped away, it picked up a smooth round stone from the stream—like the very first gift—and placed it in my hand.

Not punishment.

Not forgiveness exactly, either.

More like: We are still us.

12) Now: The Journal and the Time We Have Left

For the past two years, we’ve met regularly again. Not every day like when I was a kid, but several times a week.

It’s older now. It stays closer to the cave system. Sometimes it seems tired in a way that scares me. I bring food—fish, fruit, sometimes cooked meat. I’ve brought basic medicines when it looked unwell, though I don’t pretend I understand what helps.

We sit by the stream. I talk. I tell it about my life—work stress, marriage, the weirdness of being an adult who still feels like a kid in certain moments.

I don’t think it understands my words.

But I think it understands my presence.

Sometimes it makes that low rumbling purr when I arrive, and it’s the closest thing I’ve ever known to being welcomed by the world itself.

My wife found out.

She followed me one evening and saw us together from a distance. When she confronted me, I expected disbelief, fear, maybe anger.

She surprised me.

She took my hands and said she believed me.

She didn’t treat it like a scandal or a symptom. She treated it like a miracle that had chosen me.

Now she helps—packing food, reminding me to go when work gets busy, asking how the big guy seems, like you’d ask about an elderly friend.

She doesn’t come with me. We both agree that would be pushing boundaries the forest has tolerated, not invited.

I started keeping a journal—not for fame, not for proof, not for the internet. For myself.

Because I know, with a clarity that hurts, that my friend won’t live forever.

Creatures age. Creatures die.

Someday, I’ll go to the stream and the big guy won’t be there.

Last week, I brought the old box of stones—the gifts I’d kept all these years. The big guy examined them one by one, touching them gently like they were precious.

Then it stood and walked to the old tree where my jacket had hung for so long. The jacket is long gone now, rotted away to nothing.

But it gestured to the branch. Then to me. Then placed one hand over its chest.

Remembering.

It remembered the promise. It remembered that I came back.

And that’s why I’m writing this now.

Not because I need strangers to believe me. I’ve lived too long without that kind of validation to start craving it now.

I’m writing because I want this to exist somewhere outside my head—because one day, when the forest is quiet in a way I can’t bear, I’ll need to know I didn’t just dream the most important friendship of my life.

I regret the years I stayed away. I regret letting “busy” become a kind of betrayal.

But I’m here now.

And I’ll keep going—every week, sometimes twice—until the big guy isn’t waiting by the stream anymore.

Because that’s what friends do.