A confession to start, the way I always seem to. I spent this past weekend in Jackson Hole at the wedding of a cousin I love, the kind of guy whose life has had more plot twists than most prestige dramas, and I sat through toast after toast watching people who have known him since he was a little kid stand up and tell the story of how he got here.

It was wonderful and fun and illuminating, introspective and fascinating, and it opened up a lot of takes on friendship and family—the family we have and the family we make.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started thinking about Jonathan Goldstein.

Stay with me. I had spent the flight out (again, no wifi) bingeing the new season of Heavyweight, Goldstein's show about the one moment in your past you would give anything to go back and fix. So I was already a little raw, a little tuned to that frequency. But the thing that actually got me was smaller and closer to home than anything on the podcast.

I looked around the room and realized a large portion of people there had been in my cousin's life since he was six years old. Six. They had drifted in and out of cities and jobs and decades, and somehow they were all still here, in the same room, raising a glass and telling stories about kindergarten. And I thought about my own oldest friend, the one I have known since kindergarten, the one I have not really spoken to since some quiet, unremarkable point after college when we just... stopped. No fight. No reason. We just started drifting in life and choices, and suddenly, we were both just…not there.

A wedding does this to you. It makes you look up from your own life for a second, and it made me realize there it was, just sitting there. A gap I could actually close if I took the time. Not a tragedy, not a grudge, just a phone number I still have and a text I have never sent.

Which is exactly what this whole show is about.