Filing a Missing Person Report When You Don’t Really Want to Find the Person Who’s Missing

Report Type: Whatever happened to my buddy?

Name: John

Alias: Johhhhnnnnyyy

Relationship: Best Friend, once

Alcohol, Drug Conditions: Oh yeah

Medical conditions: Carried an inhaler for asthma, but that never stopped him from drinking hard, climbing mountains, or running a chainsaw on a crew in the Gallatin National Forest after he settled in Montana after visiting me there after I moved to get as far from our hometown as I could.

Scars: A 5-inch jagged scar at his hairline from when I totaled my dad’s car when we were seventeen and he was in the passenger seat yelling “go faster” (or he might’ve said “slow down.”)

DOB/AGE: Same as me, approximately.

Last Known Location: Eating breakfast at The Oxford Saloon & Café in Missoula, but it’s been a good twenty years now and I heard once that he moved back to Boston.

Narrative: I last saw him when I was leaving Missoula. We’d spent the night closing down the Press Box drinking pitchers of Lowenbrau Dark screaming at the TV as the Celtics played the Pistons two-thousand miles away. After they kicked us out (with a hearty, “See you guys tomorrow!”) we slipped, slid, and stumbled to his apartment. The bitter cold blowing through Rattlesnake Canyon roused us and he called a friend—who wasn’t really a friend but a friend with a wink and a nod—to bring his wares so we could stay awake like the zombies we were and greet the dawn with brains and eggs before I sped away to find my own peace somewhere that wasn’t a bar and a series of headaches and hangovers and hope maybe he could do the same.

I don’t really want to find him. I just want to know if he made it.