Nobody prepares you for the loneliness of being the friend everyone calls when something is wrong, and realizing you don’t actually know who you would call back

A friend named Daniel told me last spring that he’d been the one who drove to the hospital when his college roommate’s marriage ended at three in the morning, the one who flew out for two funerals in eighteen months, the one whose name appears on three different emergency contact forms across two cities. He said it the way someone might describe a job they didn’t apply for. Then he paused and said the part that actually mattered: he had been sitting in his car in a grocery store parking lot the previous Sunday...