A week ago, at my Class of 2016 reunion, I stood in a restaurant with some of the few people who still remember the boy I used to be. It was the elementary school memories that surfaced, not the high school ones.

They remember the Marathon gas station runs on our bikes, where we bought Snickers and Polar Pops.

They remember the neighborhood football games, where we challenged each other and didn’t seem to mind how bad we smelled.

They remember the Yahoo email exchanges after class, before anybody had a smartphone, where we wrote about nothing important. Except the record shows I did something worthy of this mass apology:

I’ve redacted their email addresses just in case any are still in use. Note as well: my former “camhasgame” email was in reference to basketball, as that was very much my identity growing up.

[It was common practice to have LONG email signatures at this time]

At the reunion, we laughed the way you laugh at things that are not funny, but where the funny part is only that they happened at all, and that somebody else in the room can prove it.

I have not been able to put it down since.

This is what grief can actually be: the recognition that a real thing existed, was good, and will never be had again. Not that it ended badly. That it ended at all.

It may sound strange, but the accident is easier to carry than this. It has a narrative. There is redemption in it, purpose, a way to be useful to other people. Trauma at least offers you the dignity of meaning. But sixth grade offers nothing to make of it. It was just a good place to be a child, and I was a child there, and I will not be again.

The mundane, when it is truly gone, produces a purer grief than catastrophe does, because there is nothing to redeem. There is only the loss itself, standing there plainly, asking to be felt.

What I am mourning, then, is not really the Yahoo emails or the Marathon runs or my first Facebook account. It is the boy who was doing those things with other people, who never grew out of them at the normal pace, who was fast-forwarded into responsibilities before he was done being small.

I have spent my entire adult life turning what I feel into briefs and essays and arguments. But when it comes to my grief for childhood, I am meant to simply feel it, and that is enough.

Not every ache requires a lesson.

Some aches are just the cost of having lived, and the only honest thing to do is let them hurt. So I am letting it.

Grace was not only what showed up after the Lexus. Grace was the ten years before it, none of which needed redeeming, none of which I knew to be thankful for at the time. I am grieving a boy in a world where nothing had happened yet.

And I am grateful that there are still people alive who remember him. They are the last ones who can prove he was here.

And he was. On a bike, on his way to the Village Pantry with Johnny, with nothing behind him and nothing coming.