In Memory of Jonathan
When I was little, my parents didn’t send me to pre-school regularly. I didn’t really play with other children very regularly or make a friend until I went to kindergarten. In my first year of school, I made a couple friends. My first friend was Jonathan. Like many boys, we shared an interest in running fast and playing games, and that was enough to form a solid friendship. While my parents were at to the hospital for several days for my brother’s birth, I was doing my first sleepover at Jonathan’s house. Those first few years of school, we played so many games together. I remember playing with Legos in Jonathan’s room. I remember eating pizza by the pool as we celebrated Jonathan’s birthday. I remember running around his house playing with a home laser tag kit.
While we had fun playing, there emerged quickly signs that I can look back on now and see that Jonathan was different than many of the other kids that we played with. Something about his mental state was different. He always had a fierce attitude, and while he always defended his friends to all extremes, that same energy would sometimes manifest itself in small acts of violence. Hitting girls, even a teacher, was a recurring disciplinary issue from what I remember. Eventually, Jonathan left our elementary school and I didn’t hear from him for a couple years.
In seventh grade, I was transitioning to a young adult and I was not at the top of the social hierarchy, though I had a good group of friends. One day, Jonathan showed up at our school, visiting for a day in order to prepare to return the next year. The change in him was astounding. Gone was the athletic and fiesty boy who frequently got into trouble. Jonathan wore suits and ties, and had his hair heavily gelled back. I was mortified to be the object of ridicule as he tagged along with me.
He came back to our school the next year and wore those suits and ties for several years. I was one of his few friends, but I was still embarassed to hang out with him at school. It was clear that a transition had occurred from elementary to middle school and in some sense Jonathan was on a different path. We were discovering new social situations, popularity, girls, and puberty. He was wearing suits and ties, greasing his hair back, and reading history books. He didn’t do anything athletic, the school allowed him to consider walking his dog as his sports credit.
In high school, video games was what we had in common. Jonathan’s approach to growing up was to acquire new things. When he discovered something new, he bought it. He had an enormous TV with a nice sound system. He had many, many Xbox games, many hard rock CDs, and a big DVD collection. As a teenager you would never have as much stuff at your disposal as when you were hanging out with Jonathan.
One thing remained constant about the Jonathan that I knew from kindergarten: if you were his friend, he would do anything for you. I had a LAN party when Halo 2 came out and Jonathan brought two televisions over to my house, including his gigantic flatscreen. I didn’t need to ask him for things, he wanted to share his latest interests with me. DVDs and Xbox games were loaned, and when I got my own Xbox, he gave me an old TV so that we could play together. Jonathan was indeed a person who made extreme choices, and nothing was more extreme than his willingness to share.
Sadly, as high school progressed, some people took advantage of Jonathan’s kindness to ask him for favors under the pretense of false friendship. With his desire to be accepted, he got involved with whatever was proposed to him, namely marijuana. He ended up crashing his BMW while under the influence and severely injured himself, requiring metal plates and screws in his legs, and was out of school for months. Nearing the end of school, his grades were poor and he didn’t get accepted to many universities.
As our high school friend groups separated to go to different colleges, Jonathan didn’t complete orientation at his new school before he was arrested on a drunk driving charge and kicked out of school before it had even begun. We didn’t have much contact as I was off at university. I believe he eventually joined another university, but after I graduated I saw in the news that he had been arrested for various mischief.
It’s been 16 years since we graduated high school together. That wasn’t the end of Jonathan’s story, but it was the end of our time together. Over the years I occasionally scanned social media and the internet to see how he was doing, but there was no trace. I hoped that someday we would have a class reunion and that I could shake his hand. Perhaps he would be a completely different person than the teenager led astray that I last knew. That reunion never happened. Recently I received news that Jonathan had just ended his own life.
To say that I am sad does not adequately describe my feelings. Jonathan was my first friend. It pained me to see him different than his peers, and it pains me to think about our time together and wonder if I was a good friend to him. I wish that we had remained in contact. I can’t imagine his feelings, seeing that his path was different than so many of his classmates and peers, and dealing with that into adulthood.
I want to cry but I can’t. It seems like I shouldn’t feel much of anything since I have not heard from Jonathan in so many years, but the fact remains he was my first friend, and one of a very few people who I have known throughout my school years. I shouldn’t feel guilty since we have been out of contact so long. And yet, I believe few people have known Jonathan as long or as well as I. It makes me sick to think that he spent his last moments alone. It was a privilege to have gotten to know him, despite his flaws, but I wish there were more good times to come.