Dear Tom

Dear Tom,

I miss you. A lot of people miss you. It seems like so much longer than seven months. I hope your family is doing well. I haven't heard any news about you in a long while. Nobody seems to really notice much that you’re gone. Or maybe they just don’t show it.

To some it might seem weird that I’m even writing this. But I'm doing it in part because the last few months have been stressful. I was doing pretty good at writing everyday, but my job got crazy for a while. We kept switching around schedules through the holidays. Then we had some incidents that made our day to day harder. I’m just now getting back to normal.

But you’re probably wondering why I’m writing to you. I’m writing to you because I miss you. I know it might sound odd to some people, because we didn’t know each other very long. But we knew each other long enough that I still miss your presence. When I’m having a rough day, I’ll go back through some of your old posts or I read one of your pieces for some positivity. I don’t think you ever realized how impactful you were on the Vocal community.

Unfortunately, the community feels like it is falling apart. I wish I was over exaggerating this. In the last few months I have watched people fight and squabble over things big and small. Sure, there’s still the usual grumblings over contests wins. But there’s also just the general experience that people have been getting from the company lately.

The downturn in the frequency of Challenges seems to be causing this. I’m not sure how true this is, as you know I didn’t get super involved with Vocal until June of last year. I hope you know that you’re one of the people that got me more drawn into the community. Sometimes when I talk to the other people that I got to know around the time I started being more involved, it makes me miss you.

You were one of the most positive people I’ve met in the writing community, much less the Vocal community. I’ve done my best to keep that up in your absence. A lot of people still have the same grumblings they always seemed to have. But there’s been some good parts too since you’ve been gone.

In November, I started working with a group of nine other people to write a series together. It was a lot of fun. I really wish you had been here to see that. I think you would have liked it. Not just for the story, but the cooperation too.

Speaking of working with other writers, I still haven’t gotten to do that video chat we talked about. I’m hoping to be able to host it sometime soon. Work has made it complicated. But hey, that’s life.

I hope wherever you are, that you’re happy. I know we talked about the afterlife occasionally. I hope that it’s a nice place, with plenty of room for you and your sheep. I hope you’re still writing. You were always better than I could ever hope to be. I think about your unfinished stories sometimes, and what you might have been thinking towards the end. I hope you were reflecting on the positive.

I hope your family is doing well. I don’t think you ever realized the impact you had on this world. Anyway, I’m starting to ramble now, so it’s probably best that I close this, before I go too far off on a tangent.

Give your sheep some love.

Until next time,

Eric

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