Friends

 We didn’t drift apart because of time or geography or the natural entropy of adulthood. We didn’t lose each other the way people like to pretend happens—slowly, blamelessly, no fingerprints left behind.

We distanced because of me.

That’s the truth, plain and ugly and necessary. I was the weather that kept canceling plans. I was the silence that followed invitations. I was the one who learned how to disappear without technically leaving.

In college, we were inseparable in the casual, unexamined way that feels permanent until it isn’t. Adam, Alex, Dane, the Nu—names that once felt like a single sentence. 

We moved through those years shoulder to shoulder, arguing about nothing, caring about everything. We loved stories more than reality then, especially the kind where fellowship mattered. 

Adam and I loved The Lord of the Rings with a seriousness that bordered on devotion. We believed in chosen family. 

We believed in staying.

I didn’t keep that belief.

Adam let me stay at his place once when I was trying to get on my feet in the city. His grandma lived there too—small, sharp, British in the way that made every sentence sound like it had survived something. 

She cooked dinner every night, real food, the kind that comes from love and routine instead of desperation. I sat at that table with Adam and his grandma, pretending I was okay, pretending my insides weren’t at war with me.

He’ll remember this …  I had diarrhea the whole time—violent, humiliating, constant—slipping away to the bathroom like a criminal, sweating through my shirt while she asked polite questions in that clipped accent.

It sounds funny. It almost is. But it wasn’t just my stomach betraying me. It was my body waving a small white flag my mind refused to see.

Adam never made me feel like a burden. Not once. We talked about Middle-earth late into the night, about loyalty and courage and how Samwise Gamgee was the real hero. I slept under his roof for days, safe in a way I didn’t know how to ask for anymore.

And later—later—there was his wedding. The birth of his child. Moments that mark a life, that say you were here when it mattered.

I wasn’t.

I have no excuse that sounds good out loud. Just decisions stacked on top of each other until they became a wall I didn’t know how to climb back over. I missed the vows. I missed the beginning of a new life. And no amount of regret turns absence into presence.

Dane lost his mother to cancer.

I still struggle to write that sentence without stopping.

I’ve never seen a more honest depiction of manhood than the way he stood during that time—straight-backed, grieving, unflinching. He carried his family like a man who didn’t mistake strength for silence. He showed up. Every day. No theatrics. No collapse. Just love, expressed as endurance.

I saw it from a distance. I admired it quietly. I never told him what it meant to witness that, how it reshaped my 

understanding of what being a man could look like.

That’s one of the heavier things I carry—not the words I said wrong, but the ones I never said at all.

Alex was different. Alex always is.

He was there for me when I gave him no reason to be. When I was at my worst, not the dramatic worst but the exhausting kind—the kind that makes people slowly stop answering texts—he stayed. Even when I was living in that tiny studio apartment in Flushing, barely big enough to stretch out in, barely big enough to hold the person I was becoming. He came anyway. He listened anyway. He didn’t try to fix me. He just stayed in the room.

That kind of loyalty doesn’t announce itself. It just exists. And I didn’t honor it the way it deserved.

Addiction didn’t storm my life. It seeped in. It taught me how to choose it quietly, repeatedly, until those choices added up to a version of me my friends couldn’t reach without hurting themselves.

So they didn’t. And I don’t blame them.

I wish I had been there. For the wedding. For the funeral. For the ordinary days that mattered just as much. I wish I had shown up as the person they believed I was instead of the one I kept becoming when no one was looking.

We loved stories where fellowship survives darkness. Where the road is hard but no one walks it alone.

I broke from the line. I stepped off the path.

And now, when I think of Adam, Alex, Dane, or any of them… it’s not just nostalgia that hurts—it’s gratitude braided with grief. 

Because once, I was part of something good. Something real.

And losing that wasn’t an accident.

It was a choice I made slowly enough to pretend I wasn’t making it at all.

Whenever I hear Howard Shore’s music—The Breaking of the Fellowship—something inside me fractures cleanly and all at once. It doesn’t ease in. It hits like a memory with momentum, like grief with a running start. The first notes rise and suddenly I’m not where I am anymore. I’m somewhere older. Somewhere louder. Somewhere full.

That music makes me want to run through walls. Not out of anger, not exactly—out of urgency. Like there’s a room on the other side of the drywall where everything still exists as it should, and if I just move fast enough, hard enough, I might get there before the moment passes again.

Because that song isn’t just about endings. It’s about standing in the wreckage of something good and realizing—too late—how much it held you together.

I hear it and I think of Adam, and I start 

laughing before I realize why. I remember us losing our minds one night over the revelation that raw dogwas just another way of saying no condom. That was it. That was the whole joke. No clever layering, no irony. Just two idiots discovering synonymy like it was forbidden knowledge. We laughed for hours—hours—tears in our eyes, stomachs hurting, the kind of laughter that leaves you weak and stupid and absolutely alive.

That’s the version of us the music brings back. Not the distance. Not the missed milestones. Just joy, uncomplicated and loud, the kind that doesn’t ask what comes next.

Then the melody shifts, and I see Dane.

It was one of the worst moments of his life—his mom dying, the world cracked straight down the middle—and somehow, in the middle of that heartbreak, he was still talking to me about crypto. The absurdity of it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Grief makes strange room for normality. He talked, I listened, and somewhere in that conversation—somewhere between loss and distraction—I told him to go for it. To tell her how he felt. To stop waiting.

She’s his wife now.

That knowledge hits me every time like a small, quiet miracle. That in the middle of devastation, life still reached forward. That I was there, briefly, helpfully, when it mattered. That I wasn’t always the ghost.

And then there’s Alex.

There’s always Alex.

The music softens and I’m back in that tiny moment where everything in me had collapsed. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe right. Words were useless. I was past dignity, past self-control, broken down to the bare wiring. And Alex stayed on the phone. Didn’t rush me. Didn’t get uncomfortable. Just let me fall apart in real time.

At some point, he took the phone and talked to my mom.

Like it was nothing.

Like of course he would. Like that’s just what you do when someone you love can’t hold themselves together long enough to explain. He bridged that gap without asking for credit, without making it a story. 

He carried the moment for me when I couldn’t.

That’s legendary. Not in the loud way. In the way that actually matters.

When The Breaking of the Fellowship swells, it’s all there at once—the laughter, the grief, the loyalty, the timing. The knowledge that we were something rare and real, and that breaking didn’t mean it wasn’t sacred.

The fellowship didn’t end because it was weak.

It ended because life is heavy, and some of us dropped the load before we were ready.

The music fades, but the feeling doesn’t. It lingers in my chest like a hand pressed flat, reminding me of who I was with them. Who I still might be, if I’m brave enough to walk back toward the sound instead of away from it.

Because some bonds don’t dissolve.

They just wait.

And every time Howard Shore’s music plays, I can feel them—still there, still solid—on the other side of the wall, daring me to remember.

There were so many too—whole constellations orbiting that time—and they matter, even if memory holds them in shorthand.

Jeremy aka Jer Bear, fueled by Red Bulls and vodka like that was a sustainable ecosystem, nights blurring into mornings we pretended were still nights. The Ni*gie-said the way it always was, half-joke, half-password—woven into those same hours, laughter buzzing and reckless and young. 

Jake or Bromo, forever linked in my mind to the parfait poopy cutter, a phrase so stupid and perfect it still makes me smile like muscle memory. 

Fuzz—Grammy-nominated, no less—somehow still finding the time and energy to produce something called brown cheese, arguing passionately about carpet popping and Jiff like it was high art, which in its own way it absolutely was.

And Joba. Always Joba. The kind of friend you don’t quantify or explain. The kind you’d go to the mat for without checking the calendar. Any day of the week. No hesitation.

They were all part of it—the noise, the love, the chaos, the warmth. Proof that my life wasn’t empty even when I was trying my hardest to hollow it out. Proof that I was surrounded, once, by people who saw me clearly and stayed anyway.

That’s the thing the memories keep reminding me of.

I was never alone.

I just didn’t always know how to stay.