An Abrupt, Unceremonious End (19/30)

Thirty essays in thirty days, number nineteen

My best friend growing up—we’ll call him Steve—fell off the face of the earth. The last time I saw Steve was sometime during college. We went to his family’s lake house one summer with a small group of friends, a group which included a girl he was seeing. It wasn’t long after when he got that girl pregnant. As I understand it, he moved out to California and mostly cut ties with his family. My information is secondhand because, like many of his friends, I didn’t hear from him again.

Steve was the first friend I made in kindergarten, and we would be there for many of each other’s subsequent firsts. This included the first time we drank, when one night in seventh grade we stole a bottle of his dad’s Stolichnaya, gulped down a plastic water bottle’s worth, and wrestled until we puked. We did everything together: chased girls, stayed up all night playing Halo, went on snowboarding trips. We even had the same first job, working at a coffee shop run by an Orwellian Arab who spent his downtime watching the various cameras he’d hidden around the place. Steve also introduced me to what would become two great loves of my life: classic rock and lacrosse. It’s one of those friendships that was so formative that it doesn’t even make sense to try to imagine what life would have been like without it. In many ways, from the ages of five to eighteen, that friendship was my life.

And yet its abrupt, unceremonious end felt strangely…right.

Our lives had diverged sharply after we went off to different colleges. The few times we did get together during those years—a handful of college visits and lacrosse alumni games—felt more like nostalgic reunions than friends hanging out. It was as if the friendship, an entity all its own, knew that its life was drawing to a close and had moved itself into hospice care, spending the time that remained reminiscing on what once was while waiting to die. Its eventual death, while bizarre in its mechanics, was something of a non-event.

This is not a bad thing, nor an unnatural one. The significance of a relationship, of anything meaningful in our lives, is not defined by the manner in which it ends. The shape of its imprint remains unchanged. We still carry with us that which is absent.