Friendship

December 26, 2025

When I was in grade four, my friends started running away from me. As in, I would walk up to them, someone would say, “Let’s run away from Mike!” and then they would all scatter in different directions. This would happen at school during recess and lunch, and also when we were all together at someone’s house. I would have to chase after them, begging them to stop, sometimes growing so upset that I would tackle one of them to the ground. I don’t know how long this phase lasted; it could have only been a few weeks, maybe a couple months at most. But it felt like a long time, back then.

It may seem ridiculous that I refer to these people as friends, but in truth, after this phase was over, they all returned to being my friends. I’m still friends with one of them to this day! I guess I’ve never really talked to him about it, to find out what it felt like from his perspective. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m just imagining a lot of it — maybe we ran away from different people on different days? Did I participate in running away from other classmates, and just don’t remember?

Grade four is when I first struggled to sleep. I would sit up all night, staring at the ceiling. I was waking up at 6:30, then 5:30, and then 4:30. I became a “spaz.” I got really angry at people. Who knows the sequence of events — whether my “spazzing out” caused my friends to run away from me, or vice versa.

One of my friends from back then didn’t like me. We’ll call him Caulfield. He was one of my best friends for a few years, and it took me a long time to figure out that he didn’t like me. I don’t know when exactly it happened. It doesn’t really matter that he didn’t like me; probably, he had some legitimate reasons for it. But it took me a long time to find out, and it hurt a lot. It was all so subtle; he would exclude me from things, and I wouldn’t find out until way later. He probably talked about me behind my back. To this day, I wonder if the “running away” phase wasn’t his idea in the first place, but I feel like that way of thinking is too neat and tidy — as if I had a single nemesis causing all my problems.

So, we can say that it was somewhere around fourth grade that Caulfield stopped liking me. I guess his dislike only grew as we drifted apart, because by eight grade, he disliked me much more passionately. During these early days of Facebook, there was an app called “bathroom wall.” It was essentially an anonymous message board where you could post messages that would only be seen by your friends, and maybe friends of friends. I’m not entirely sure how it worked, but what it amounted to was the perfect venue for cyberbullying, and it was where all the students in our grade got together to anonymously gossip about each other. A thread would be created that was just a person’s name, and everyone would share their thoughts about the person. The majority of these comments were negative. Sometimes, the person’s friends would show up and try to defend them, but this never ended well.

I was not popular or notable in my high school. At that time, I had very few friends. My friends from elementary school had not crossed over into high school. It’s hard for me to say exactly why this is; I mean, they all went to that same high school with me. We just weren’t friends anymore. I was as confused then as I am now; what happened to all my friends? Well, I know exactly what happened with one of them, but we will get into that shortly.

Someone made a thread about me on “bathroom wall.” No one responded for quite some time. No one had anything to say about me. Finally, there was one response: “fag.” I find it likely that whoever wrote that didn’t even know who I was. The original poster of the thread responded with a detailed account of an interaction they had had with me in science class several months earlier. It didn’t take much investigative work to realize that this was Caulfield. He created this thread about me, a person no one cared about, in order to share his story about how much he disliked me. I guess, in retrospect, that’s a little weird.

Caulfield is not the only “best” friend I’ve had who didn’t like me. In sixth and seventh grade, my best friend was Thomas. We lived down the street from each other, and would walk together to and from school every day, most days hanging out at each other’s houses for multiple hours. We took guitar classes together, and talked about starting a band. We were on the same football team. (It might be hard to believe that I ever played football. That feeling is justified; I really never ought to have played football.) He showed me pornography for the first time.

Looking back, Thomas and I were very different. I’m not sure what we had in common, and what we talked about. But we talked a lot, and were together all the time. I often found him too raunchy and crude; he liked South Park, and that was the basis of his humour. He was loud. His parents were divorced, and he hated his mother, who he lived with most of the time. They had two cats, and their townhouse smelled like litter all the time. I’m not sure what this all adds up to; I’m just listing all the attributes I remember about Thomas.

Like with Caulfield, the discovery that Thomas no longer liked me happened gradually. I was really into the idea of starting a band. I wrote songs and I even drew an album cover. One time, he came over telling me that he’d written a song. He showed me the lyrics, and we spent some time going over them together. I didn’t really understand the song he’d written, and he couldn’t explain the lyrics to me, but I tried my best to form it into something we could play. I realized a while later that they were the lyrics to Tenacious D’s “Wonderboy.”

For Christmas, when we were in grade eight, I put a lot of thought into my gift for him. I don’t remember what exactly it was. When I showed up with the gift, he yelled to his mom, “Mom! Where are those socks you bought for Mike?” He handed them to me, unwrapped.

A few weeks later, our guitar lessons were starting up again, after taking a few weeks off during the Christmas break. I phoned Thomas a few hours before our lesson, to check if he was going or not. He lowered the phone from his mouth and yelled, “Mom! Didn’t you tell Mike’s parents that I’m not doing guitar anymore?” After that, we didn’t talk for two years. Then, we never talked again.

When I reflect on all these events, I can’t really hold anything against Caulfield or Thomas. It probably sucks to have a friend you don’t like. How are you supposed to tell them? What are you supposed to do about it? It’s not an easy situation, and we can’t expect adolescent boys to handle it with any tact. But I’ll be honest: these people hurt me a lot. I think they hurt me in ways that I will never be able to understand. My life is fine now. It’s not like they caused everything to go seriously wrong. But they hurt me a lot and I’m probably not over it.

I have a hard time making friends. I’m okay with acquaintances. I get along with my coworkers, and can chat at parties with my wife’s coworkers and their husbands. I’m sure some of these people like me! But it’s really hard to make them my friends. The fact is, I don’t trust people. When they’re gone, I feel like they either don’t care about me or they don’t like me. What I fear most strongly is boring them. I worry that if we start hanging out regularly, there will come a day when we just sit there with nothing to say, and then the next time I call, they’ll yell at their mom and ask why she didn’t tell my parents that they aren’t going to guitar lessons anymore.

Over the past year or two, a couple of my long-distance friends have disappeared. (I should note that these two friends don’t know each other.) They just stopped responding to my messages. They’ve both done this multiple times before; just cut off all communications for months or even a year. One of them stopped responding to a group chat we’re in; he even stopped reading the messages. I know this has a lot more to do with what they’re going through in their lives than our specific relationship, so I try to give them space. I mean, what else can I do? If I bombard them with messages, it’ll only make them feel worse. I just reach out every once in a while, very casually, to see if they might be feeling better.

I’ll be honest: this hurts a lot. I understand it, I accept it, and I know that they are probably hurting too. But it still hurts. I want to talk to them again. I want to make a world where they don’t have to do this.

Maybe my experiences justify my difficulty making friends. Maybe they don’t. I guess the point of this isn’t to justify anything. I’ve had bad experiences with people in my life. That’s a sentence that anyone could write, and I’m someone, and I wrote it. The above are some of the bad experiences I’ve had with people in my life. They caused me pain and now I’m here in the middle of the night writing about it.