I can’t say much for the rest of you, but friends have kept me alive. I have issues. My friend Dequan died when I was younger. He was one of those people that leave a mark on you. I don’t mean a physical mark. I mean a mark that stays with you forever, Arterial Cancer took my friend, but now I have realized that I have friends with similar issues to my own.


A friend of mine has an ex-girlfriend, she’s a quiet person, but she’s not afraid to tell you something if it needs to be said. I just found out recently that she had a friend who also died. From cancer as well, even. That moment; that thought that maybe I wasn’t a stupid little person crying out against whatever took my friend, alone in the darkness changed me. I began to think about things more. I still haven’t told her, I’m afraid to open myself up to somebody like that for the first time in a long time, it scares me.


My friend from church, he also has issues. He has a great poker face; I’ve got to give him that. He cut himself for a while; he kept every little thing in his life, which has been hard on him, bottled up inside. Finally, like any container overfilled and sealed, he popped a leak. He’s doing better now, and he wears armbands to cover the scars, but whenever I see those scars I think, maybe people do have any idea what I’m going through.


My friend from my old school, I think about him every single day. At one point in time, he meant the world to me. He’s only a few days older than me. I never knew, until recently, that his parents have long been divorced, and they weren’t even trying to be peaceful. As far as I know, his dad got up and walked out. He also keeps his emotions bottled up, but he found a semi-healthy outlet. He hardly ever sees his dad; I’ve never even met his father.


While writing this, I’ve encountered a new person. This young man has had more misery in his life than any of the others I’ve already described. His own family has caused most of his misery. I’m not quite sure how in the name of god he’s kept going all of these years, but if you meet him; you would never know the unimaginable pain that his collective family has put him to. He seems like a normal guy.


After thinking about all of this, I’ve concluded, that people see time differently. I see every second that I don’t have a protective circle of comfort around me to protect me from the brutal knowledge that I won’t ever play a game with my friend, or hear his laugh ever again at a joke I tell as a million years of agony. All of my friends I’ve described, I know I haven’t even begun to describe them, and I never could. Everyone who has seen life itself and stared into the eyes of the brutal truth about life knows sees the world differently from normal people. Normal people are forced to try to be tough to protect themselves, and they still open up to people a whole lot easier than we do. You know these people by the way we carry ourselves. We’re either those people on the corner with that tired look in their eyes, like life itself beat them down, or we’re the people on the opposite corner, who are determined to take every opportunity they get to do good, knowing that tomorrow isn’t promised. If you see any of those people, give us a smile, or a wave.