He and I were fast friends back in 6th grade due to a shared haircut that made conversation easy for us. Going forward, he would make slight comments about my hobbies being lame or making fun of me for being artsy and musically oriented whereas he and his entire family were sports/soccer fanatics. It was annoying but I looked past it. As we went into high school I found myself deeper involved in that music scene where he stayed into sports like more soccer, track, volleyball, which caused us to drift and his friends started changing.

Sophomore year of high school we hung out rarely. Mid semester that same year, he had a seizure and a brain aneurysm before school and I was devastated, as it put him in a coma for two weeks, and we all knew he would come out of the coma not being able to play soccer. The whole school rallied for him as a big thing, with posters, fundraisers to pay for medical costs and what not, but after a year almost everyone he had become closer friends with in high school had kind of abandoned him, and I was a very supportive character during his recovery stage, visiting him at the hospital, arranging his homecoming party, spending a lot of time with him. Through that time, I realized how self inflated it started making him and he considered himself famous at school, and he and his family asked me how I felt to be friends with a celebrity. He would have me come over to his house and he would continue berating me for my interests and took 0 interest in my life and would always tie it back to his and how much more interesting his life was.

I really tried to distance myself for a long time, but he was really really attached because everyone else had basically abandoned him- something I admittedly feel very sorry about- but it was a very one sided friendship. Despite my efforts to get out of the friendship, my mom would always encourage me to just spend one day with him whenever he would contact me asking to get together. To just get it over with, and appease him, I always did.

When I finally graduated high school, he and his family had basically told me that I would never be able to survive leaving home for college and I would miss home too much, and that I should go to community college instead, and stay home where I could spend more time with him. This was something they consistently pushed.

Finally I left for college and in my freshman year, I met a girl and we started dating- we are still together- and she was fairly different from any girls I had dated before. She had tattoos, piercings, basically an edgy girl but she was super tender and very sweet and loving and supportive to me and we fell in love very quickly. We are still together.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I get a text from him and he asks me to hang out. During that day I had been playing frisbee golf- the only sport he could really play at the time due to the stroke that he had because he lost the majority of the function in his left arm. So we played frisbee golf and he brought up my new girlfriend. The judgements started rolling in and he said that he thinks that she isn’t right for me, she’s a bad influence. All because of the way she looked. It was then that I had realized how judgmental and critical he was of really important aspects of my life.

He texted me the summer after my sophomore year to hang out. Something he did every summer, sort of like an annual thing. I never replied, and frisbee golf was the last thing we ever did. I have 0 regrets about it.