The Day I Realized How Much I'll Miss My Friend

“You saved me,” I say to Sean. We hug. Sean replies, “You saved me, too.”

Let me explain.

We met in high school. I don’t remember the details as well as Sean, but I do know that we met during P.E. class, and I remember a scattered handful of moments together, such as working at Ikeda’s Grocery, the Young Life meetings we went to with the Christian kids and going to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, twice.

Then Sean went to UCLA and I went to Sonoma State.

We stayed friends through summer vacations and winter breaks, he and I always finding time to meet up if we were ever in Auburn at the same time, not to mention a trip to Bodega Bay or two, where I first took mushrooms among the sand dunes and the ocean turned purple.

Neither of us really expected to have Auburn in our lives after college, going into our expensive four-year educations with the illusion that careers and big adventures were waiting on the other side. The reality was worse for Sean, I think, having to move back in with his parents, although he took control of reality by writing an iPhone App that kept him wealthily unemployed for the past two years. I got into a long-term relationship that dropped me into a Carmichael apartment with a commute to Auburn every weekday to work at a coffeeshop where college grads went to die.

This is how we saved each other.

Sean lived in Auburn and tinkered with his iPhone App and tried to learn the secrets of the market to better advertise his dating guide. He watched a lot of Netflix and reworked his philosophy of the world and mastered a few first-person-shooters and went to Europe for about a month and bonded with his cat, Bob, and tried his best not to let his parents drive him insane. There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Auburn. Not a lot of our high school friends were around, and after college you don’t really want to hang out with most of the people from high school, anyway.

Usually after an hour-long commute via public transportation, I sat for hours inside a small nook nestled in a business park where my only other friends were Heather from the financial advisor office, and Karen and Bunny, the building manager and her receptionist. I tried writing. I tried reading. I didn’t have the internet. I drank a lot of soda and my teeth, like my soul, slowly began to rot. I made less than twenty drinks a day and maybe ten sandwiches and hated every time a customer came up to the counter and the tips were laughable and most of the time I just wanted to shut the gate and sleep on the couch in the lobby. It didn’t help that I was in a serious relationship built upon a rocky base of dishonesty and defeatism. It didn’t help that going home wasn’t always the best part of a bad day.

Sean would come by and keep me company at work, sitting in his usual spot behind the door, and afterward we’d go cruising and smoke pot and laugh and ignore the troubles of our current lives. He’d try to convince me that my relationship was doomed and I’d try to convince him it wasn’t, knowing it was. He’d bounce ideas about new Apps off me, see what I thought, and I’d encourage him to move out of Auburn and get a job with some tech company somewhere. We were sure that YouTube fame was the best route, though we never got around to filming anything. We took trips to Hidden Falls, to Best Buy, to the mall, and sometimes down to Carmichael to refill our weed supplies from Jason. Sean was my only real friend during those long months commuting to Auburn and I think it’s safe to say that I was the same for him. He had the good advice that I didn’t want to hear and the humor to make the mundane bearable. His absence at the coffee-shop was always noticeable.

When I was fired from Creekside, my tie to Auburn was severed. I got the job in Midtown. I broke up with AJ and moved out and life began to blossom. 

As I started to create a new life for myself, I noticed a slight change in Sean’s outlook of the world. There was more urgency in his planning. We’d been college graduates for more than a year and though his dating guide was still selling consistently, he’d also been relatively unproductive during that time, and living with his parents was really starting to wear him down. I was tasting freedom and independence and life in such a new, exciting flavor and all I wanted was for him to know what that tasted like, even if that involved paying rent and bills and getting a day job.

He wanted me to move to San Diego with him. Or LA. Or anywhere. He wanted me to sublet my room and sell my shit and quit my job and just go. He wanted to become musicians, though neither of us have any musical talent.

I’m all for spontaneous adventures, but I could never quite fathom escaping from my lease or leaving the little world I’d formed in Midtown. Not yet. I was actually enjoying myself now. I was happy again. So rather than pack up and leave with Sean, which I’m sure would’ve been a great experience, I kept living the way I wanted to live and tried to be a good example for him when it did finally come time for him to leave the nest, again.

We continued to see movies and joke around and get stoned and go to bars and hang out and eat a lot of Chipotle and talk philosophy and laugh and plan for the future and visit nature and drink wine in the parking lot outside of the mall and play videogames and I’d bring him out to socialize and meet people and there were bonfires and there was blog drama and stuff about Dexter and we’d sit on the windowsill and people-watch and wake up hungover on weekdays and make sense of the water-stain on my ceiling and agree that Sacramento wasn’t the greatest city, but it wasn’t that bad, and I think I got to prove that to him, a little, before he decided to leave Northern California entirely, expectedly, but suddenly all the same. 

After we saw Sucker Punch and I’d dropped Sean off at his house for the last time, Jenny and I headed back down the hill toward Sacramento in an unusually heavy silence as I couldn’t help but catch a lump in my throat as all the memories of Sean sped through my mind like flip-book images. 

“Are you bummed?” Jenny asks, and I lie, “Not yet.”

I’ve said goodbye to a lot of people in my life, moving around as often as I did as a kid, and I got pretty good at it. But that was before I recognized the value of friendship. Before I realized that friends and family are all we’ve got when everything else comes crashing down. Sean saved me when I was unhappy. I will always appreciate that. I will never forget his presence during this tumultuous, unpredictable and slippery section of my life, when I barely had any idea what the hell I was doing and yet had a stable ear to share it with and a friend to push me forward.

Now Sean is moving to San Diego with his sister. He leaves on Thursday.

It’s not goodbye forever. It’s just…

Hard.

And did Green Day's "Time Of Your Life" really have to start playing as soon as Jenny and I pulled away from Sean's house? Really? I'm not even making this up. I about burst into tears. 

But it’s been great. It’s been better than great. It’s too much to put into words and I’m admittedly teary-eyed just writing this. But I have to. I’ll miss him and it’ll be weird to not see him around, sharing joints near my open window or taking hikes through Hidden Falls. But this is life and it’s not always easy and people come and go and things change and that’s just part of it and it’s really a beautiful thing, when you think about it, how we effect the lives of others and how we learn and how we grow.

It’s a beautiful thing.

I’ll miss you, friend. Have fun at the beach.

-  Left to Fry.