Hey ‘Friend,’
Long time, no talk.
The tire marks on my driveway still curve in that perfect arc where you peeled out last spring. Your truck left two black parentheses in the asphalt, framing the strange museum exhibit you created – my ladder crushing the spine of The Body Keeps the Score, that navy hoodie spilling from a half-open garbage bag like it was trying to escape. The raccoon deterrent you’d borrowed now lay diagonally across my trauma books, which felt like some kind of metaphor our therapist friends would have analyzed for hours.
We used to measure time in Rocket League tournaments and Letterkenny seasons. Now I measure it by how long it takes morning dew to erase tire marks. The neighbors probably thought we’d had some dramatic falling out, watching you dump three years of friendship onto concrete at 7am. But the truth is, pandemic friendships like ours don’t end with fireworks – they dissolve like the ink on those diner receipts we collected, the ones with our inside jokes scribbled in the margins.
I should correct myself though. That driveway moment wasn’t our last conversation. We both know about the bar incident – that clinical study in avoidance where we became experts in peripheral vision. You perfected the ‘sudden intense interest in cocktail napkins’ technique while I developed the ‘phone tilt’ (45 degrees northwest blocks all eye contact). Our COVID bubble had burst, but somehow we’d both internalized the six-foot rule.
What’s funny is we never fought about the things people assume end friendships. Not about the week we spent quarantined in your apartment eating cereal for every meal, not when you used my Netflix profile to watch seven straight hours of true crime, not even when you spilled bong water on my copy of Modern Loss. We just… stopped. The way you stop noticing the exact day your winter coat becomes unnecessary.
Your sister’s birthday passed last week. I know because my phone still auto-generates those ‘memories’ albums – there she is, grinning between us at that terrible karaoke bar, her hands doing that double thumbs-up she always did. The notification sat unopened for three days before I swiped it away. Some griefs aren’t meant to be shared, not even with the person who originally understood them with you.
The raccoons came back this year, by the way. Bigger family this time. I bought my own ladder.
The Archaeology of Leftovers
The ladder came first – that absurd six-foot aluminum contraption you’d borrowed during the Great Raccoon Siege of 2021. It still had the dent where you’d dropped it fleeing from that hissing mother raccoon, a battle scar from our private comedy of errors. You’d texted me at 2:17AM in all caps: “THEY’RE IN THE WALLS.” Within twenty minutes, I was in your driveway wearing mismatched flip-flops, holding a broom like a lance. We spent three nights as raccoon bounty hunters, eating gas station taquitos between shifts. That ladder became our Excalibur.
Beneath it lay the dog-eared copy of The Body Keeps the Score, falling open automatically to page 83 like a well-worn path. The highlighted passage about trauma survivors developing “a kind of double bookkeeping” had faint coffee rings around it – evidence of our 3AM debates about whether emotional scars fade or just go dormant. You’d insisted trauma was like your sister’s old Nintendo cartridges: “Blow on the connections enough times and the game eventually loads.”
The hoodie smelled like your laundry detergent and the popcorn butter from Regal Cinemas. In the right pocket, a ticket stub from Everything Everywhere All At Once had nearly dissolved into fiber. We’d seen it three times – first for the absurdity, then for the mother-daughter arc that made you silent-cry into your hoodie strings, finally just to memorize Michelle Yeoh’s fight choreography. The concession stand worker eventually stopped charging us for refills on that horrible blue raspberry slushie you loved.
These artifacts formed a museum of our particular friendship language: the practical (ladder), the emotional (book), the mundane-turned-sacred (hoodie). COVID friendships developed their own archaeology – relationships measured in shared survival equipment and accumulated inside jokes rather than years. That blue slushie stain on the cuff? That was our version of carving initials into trees.
What fascinates me now is how these objects became both time capsules and divorce papers. The same ladder that symbolized midnight rescues now leans against my garage like a metal tombstone. The trauma guidebook that sparked our deepest conversations sits unread on my shelf, its folded corners marking chapters we’ll never revisit together. And the hoodie… well, some artifacts belong in storage.
Maybe all friendship breakups involve this quiet repatriation of shared objects. We don’t get dramatic breakup playlists or returned promise rings – just a silent exchange of borrowed sweatshirts and half-read paperbacks. The ladder still works perfectly, by the way. The raccoons have moved on. So have we.
Digital Relics
The stats don’t lie – our 72% win rate in Rocket League Season 3 still glows on my screen like some unclaimed trophy. That pink Octane you insisted we use (“It’s faster,” you lied) now collects digital dust in the garage menu. Forty-six hours. That’s how long we spent drifting across those neon arenas – equivalent to two full quarantine periods or seven of our legendary diner marathons.
Remember how we’d synchronize our boosts? That unspoken rhythm where we’d both go for the aerial at 0:03 remaining, your controller vibrating through the couch cushions? The replays still exist, frozen moments where our usernames sit side by side in perfect alignment. Now they just highlight the asymmetry of everything else.
Our Letterkenny rituals became physiological. You’d start doing that Wayne head-tilt during Season 3’s hockey episode, your shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter before the punchline even landed. The cadence of “Pitter patter” still lives in my muscle memory – I catch myself mimicking your exaggerated Canadian accent when rewatching alone.
Those digital metrics became our intimacy calculus:
- 3:17 AM: Latest session timestamp
- 14: Consecutive episodes watched
- 32: Inside jokes about “Allegedlys”
Now the numbers just quantify absence. The pink Octane’s paint finish remains pristine – no more scuffs from our reckless corner boosts. The “Continue Watching” prompt on Letterkenny expires after 30 days. Even the diner booth where we howled over poutine fries got remodeled last month.
Funny how pandemic friendships measured time differently. We marked eras in Rocket League seasons, counted closeness in shared YouTube tabs (“You HAVE to see this Shoresy compilation”). That week we spent feverish and couch-bound became “COVID Season” – your sweatshirt doubling as my blanket, your PlayStation charger permanently tethered to my outlet.
All those digital breadcrumbs remain:
- The Spotify playlist where our “Super Soft Birthday” songs still intermingle
- Your gamer tag forever linked to my achievement for “Perfect Chemistry”
- The screenshot from when we finally hit Diamond rank, your text floating beneath it: “EZ Clap”
These artifacts outlasted us. The servers don’t care that we’re strangers now. My Octane still waits in the garage, forever tuned to your preferred boost frequency.
The Silent Control Group
That night at the bar felt like a poorly designed psychology experiment – two subjects conditioned to avoid eye contact at all costs. Your fingers rotated the wine glass precisely 90 degrees clockwise, turning the stem away like a steering wheel veering from collision. I mirrored the avoidance by fumbling with my phone in my left hand, creating a pixelated barricade between us.
We’d perfected this dance during quarantine when personal space became sacred. Those six feet of separation had somehow stretched into emotional lightyears. The bartender kept glancing at us – he remembered how we used to share nachos in that corner booth, how you’d steal the jalapeños from my plate claiming they were “too spicy for Connecticut girls.”
On my lock screen, a notification popped up – your sister’s birthday reminder from last year. The photo showed her blowing out candles, your arm slung around her shoulders. I noticed the smudged edge where my thumb had swiped left too many times, trying to delete what I couldn’t forget. That was before we learned grief could be a bonding agent or the ultimate wedge.
Three stools down, you laughed at something the guy next to you said. It was that particular chuckle you reserved for polite company – two notes higher than your real laugh, the one that used to shake my shoulders during our 3am diner runs. I counted the ice cubes melting in my drink, each crack sounding like another hour disappearing from our Rocket League stats.
When you finally stood to leave, your jacket caught on the barstool in that familiar way. For half a second, your head turned – just enough for daylight to hit your profile. Then the door swung shut behind you, taking with it all the words we’d rehearsed but never said.
Maybe some experiments aren’t meant to reach conclusion. The data remains inconclusive – was it the pandemic that stretched our friendship thin? The new relationships that shifted priorities? Or simply the cruel arithmetic of adulthood where time subtracts more than it adds?
The control group has disbanded. No peer review. No published findings. Just two people who became experts in looking everywhere except at each other.
The Unanswered Question
The last tangible evidence of our friendship still clings to my refrigerator door – that neon pink Post-it note with your messy handwriting marking “Day 7” of our quarantine countdown. The numbers stopped there, frozen in time like our relationship. I never had the heart to take it down, just like you never responded when I texted months later: “Did the raccoons come back this year?”
That unanswered question hangs between us heavier than all the returned items piled in my driveway. The ladder we used to fortify your attic against urban wildlife now collects dust in my garage. Your sweatshirt that smelled like cedar and citrus sits folded in a donation box. The trauma books with your margin notes about your sister gather dust on my shelf.
Our digital artifacts remain suspended in cyberspace like insects in amber:
- The Rocket League stats showing our 72% win rate as teammates
- Our shared Letterkenny quotes document (last edited September 2021)
- That blurry diner photo where our laughter made the camera shake
COVID proved more loyal than we did – it stuck around for years while our friendship dissolved in weeks. Maybe pandemics make strange bedfellows, forcing connections that can’t survive normalcy. Those seven quarantined days felt like seven months of intimacy, yet seven months apart erased it all.
When I pass our old bar now, I sometimes catch myself scanning for your car. Not to stop – just to note its absence. The bartender still asks about you sometimes. I’ve perfected the art of the noncommittal shrug.
That raccoon question wasn’t really about wildlife. It was about whether you still needed me. The silence answered clearly enough. Our friendship now exists in past tense – something that was rather than is. Like your sister. Like my best friend. Like the pandemic that brought us together before tearing everything apart.
I finally understand what those grief books meant about ambiguous loss. Some endings don’t need dramatic fights or tearful goodbyes. Sometimes things just… stop. The countdown freezes on Day 7. The text goes unanswered. The ladder gets returned.
And life, stubborn creature that it is, keeps climbing anyway.
