Did you find what you were looking for down there? Or rather, it was a who, right? Where was he? Perhaps he was down in the deepest caverns of the void, where thousand-fanged, multi-tounged beasts chew on the souls of gossipers and instigators and those who fight in the comment sections. Maybe he was in the shadow-covered forests of wires, where technoaddicts are caught and strangled in knots and vines of wires. He wasn't in the Mirrorlands was he? You know, the place where people who take content that isn't theirs and try to pass it off on the internet as original. That's the part where souls are copied an infinite amount of times and they lose track of which one of them came first. Or maybe, just maybe, he was found in the pulpit lands, where those who refuse to back down, those who will not to take the path of empathy and understanding and only assert their own opinions and beat their chests, even when a wave of dead bodies stand behind them, are forced to stand on stilts over lakes of lashing forked tongues and hashtags.

No matter where you found him, I can only imagine what he said to you. Was he sorry for the texts he sent? Did he apologize for ghosting all those people that depended on his response to get on with their day? Did he wished that he shared his Netflix password after lying and saying it could only be on one TV at a time?

My God, it was hard to get you back here. I didn't think that when he texted you "go to hell," you would take it so literally. Yet, wow, you took the plunge. You took the bait. You dove right in after the one who antagonized you and made sure your point was clear, even if you had to raise hell to do it. I'm sure it was hard to resist. It's almost impossible to be the bigger person nowadays when we're all no bigger than a six-inch phone screen.

How did I do it? How did I bring you back to life? I had to sacrifice something. My own world. At least, for a moment. I walked right over to that modem and turned off the wi-fi, our connection to the masses.

And now we're back, together. We're in the dark but in the light.

You sit there, looking out the window, watching the leaves sway in the silent breeze and the sunlight beams through the gnarled branches of the old oaks. The trees are wondering where we all went. I imagine that they think we all must've gone away to some far-off place, instead of diving into a virtual universe, where we all both exist and don't at the same time. Where voices are only significant when heard. But maybe I am kidding myself, and that's always been the way the world worked. We just have better ways to quantify.

Still, though, I wonder and wander. Do you remember how the dirt feels when it gets under your bare souls? Do you remember what it's like to got out there without a jacket? To the raw, unfiltered world?

No, I know. I don't think I do either.