Have you seen this man?

Even with Myspace and Facebook and Blogger and Google and the million other ways we stay connected in our society, it is still possible to lose people.

Partner wants to use my sad childhood in our next collaboration, so I've started telling him stories to jumpstart ideas. Let me tell you how much fun it is to remember the most traumatizing events of your life for the sake of brainstorming.

But today's story reminded me of a a boy I once loved and have since lost.

For the first four years of my working life I worked at Boston Market. By the time I left that job I could do every possible thing they wanted. I know how to cut a chicken into four parts with three strokes of a knife and how to treat a third degree gravy burn on your finger. That's where I got the nickname "Hurricane Emily" because of my incredible ability to make some small task into a disaster by knocking over everything in my path.

My parents were not always nice to me but they were upper middle class and educated and I was headed for college and always cheerful so nobody knew what I was going through at home. Except for Josh Culbertson. He saw everything. He was the only person who noticed that I stopped eating and he convinced me to have an extra piece of cornbread every night. When my stepfather came to pick me up from work one night and yelled at me in front of all my friends, Josh came to my defense. I'll never forget the look on his face as I rode away crying in the passenger seat while he struggled against his desire to rescue me.

And years later, after I went to college and started on the path to healing, he found me. He saw my easily recognizable car in the parking lot of a different Boston Market (it was a good place to work) and came inside. He had dropped out of school and worked as a dishwasher at some restaurant nearby, but his only concern was whether or not I was okay.

If it had not been for this boy I don't know if I would have survived adolescence. Sometimes people come into your life right when you need them the most.

I can't find him. It's almost like he dropped off the planet. I haven't tried paying for a service yet; I'm not sure how he'd take to being hunted like a wanted criminal, but I might consider that eventually. I never properly thanked him for saving me, or let him know just how much he helped me when I felt the most helpless.

I just wish I could do for him what he did for me.