On July 18th, 1999 two kids on my high school soccer team died in a car crash. I remember I was in a hotel room on vacation with my family, and my mom was on the hotel telephone with a family friend who gave the news. My mom, wide-eyed, blurted out loud,

"Two kids from David's soccer team died."

My first thought was I hope it wasn't Jeff, or Phil, or Sully and then she said it was Tyler Prahlad and Chris Anderson. I was relieved for a few seconds--they were two kids a year below me, 16-years-old, and while I had known them for years, they weren't close friends. Then my relief had me ridden with guilt. Chris and Tyler had just died. Their lives were over. Chris's 18-year-old elder sister, Lindsay, had become a short-term friend of mine at Art Camp earlier that summer. She was a bubbly, happy, artsy girl who wore a bandana a lot. Or at least I remember her in a bandana once. After her brother's death, I never spoke or even saw her again, as her family went through the worst thing parents and a sister can go through.

Thirteen years later I was driving on a highway somewhere in Nebraska, moving from Illinois to California after my first year living in China, alone on a 30-hour, 4-day adventure, as an ominous cloud swallowed the highway in the apprehensive-but-beautiful atmosphere. I thought of my friend Taylor (not Tyler), my first roommate and coworker in Zhongshan, whose hometown was not far away in The Great Plains, also in tornado alley. I randomly had gotten a job offer online in Zhongshan the year before, and I had randomly found an email of a teacher at the school--Taylor. And he had taken the time to email me back, and had given me an honest assessment of the school written in a whimsical, adventurous style. That was his style in life too, I was to find out just a couple months after the email, as we hitchhiked to Jiangxi province on a wild, bizarre, memorable adventure. Most rolls of film I shot on that trip were destroyed in an X-Ray scanner at a bus station, the memories lost in an all-engulfing light leak. That adventure had only been one year before, but it was worlds away--no, lives away--from that highway in Nebraska.

Without Taylor, I may never have moved to China. I may also have left China after just a few weeks in the country, sick with a brutal stomach illness that lasted over a month. But Taylor was a reliably-supportive presence throughout, and I stayed.

Ten years after that highway in Nebraska, Taylor died somewhere in Guatemala, an adventurer to the end. I learned of his death from an Instagram post by his elder sister, the days of hotel telephones long having passed.