At the End of the Night

For William "Bill" Buschel - Feb 23, 2026

We occupied the same space in pixels and paragraphs.

After the Friday night open mic readings, there were Saturday morning emails. A record of what he had marked the night before. I still have them.

He treated finished work like a conversation, not a performance. If something rang true, he stayed with it. If something felt borrowed or blurred, he leaned in.

He didn’t workshop. He didn’t hover. He listened. That kind of listening is intimate.

Now the room is very quiet.

This is the strange arithmetic of digital connection: no last coffee, no closing door. Just an inbox that will no longer deliver his steadiness. The finished pieces still go out into the world, but there won’t be a reply on the other side.

I used to think proximity was overrated. But absence has its own acoustics.

I hear him when I resist explaining the joke, when I let the ending land rather than drift politely into the next paragraph.

I never met him in person, but he changed the direction of my voice.

And last night, in the quiet, I understood that being fully heard — even once, even at a distance — can alter the way you speak forever.