I check on a friend. We haven’t talked in eleven years. They didn’t use social media much, so it takes some sleuthing. I don’t intend to reach out. I just want to know what they’re up to these days. When we were friends – and we were only friends for a few months, really – we talked about My Little Pony at recess, and weird music our other friends hadn’t discovered yet. We held hands once beneath the lunch table.

On your old Facebook account, the one you haven’t used since middle school, I scroll to the bottom. There are posts you tagged me in, and conversations with your other friends. I deleted the account I friended you from. My comments were erased a decade ago.

I search for any mention of you from our mutual friends. It’s all old stuff – tag your friends! and every other form of 2012 engagement bait – and then a slightly newer post, which is how I learn your name later changed. I find your more recent profile.

In 2021, you adopted a border collie. You asked in a Facebook group how to keep her occupied. “trying to find things to do rather than play catch all day,” you wrote. “i love her already.” The post includes a picture of the dog. She’s prone, her face level with the ground, ready to pounce. Her eyes are fixed toward a subject just outside the camera.

Then you died. At the top of your new profile, someone has posted on your wall. He writes about missing you, and how he only just learned the news. On your mother’s Facebook, I see mourners in white, childhood photos, your corpse in a coffin. You were 21 years old.

I scroll through my camera roll for that day. In the morning, I was at work, cataloging maps of 1950s Europe. There was a prayer guide for touring Rome, a parking guide for postwar Vienna, advertisements for Pan Am and the Hotel Astoria. That evening, I returned home, to the professor’s house I was living in that month. My roommate had broken a second plate. We wrote nightly notes to each other, and their note that night was some brief, silly comment, tucked beneath a plate shard. It was an unexceptional day.

In sixth grade, we “dated,” or we did whatever sixth graders call “dating.” That lasted for a few weeks, or a few months. I don’t remember. Any messages we exchanged from that time are lost. The main thing I remember is, when we broke up, a mutual friend sent me a link to a song on YouTube. It was the song “Gone,” by a band called Katatonia, and it sounded like nothing I had heard before. I listened to it on repeat, then became obsessed with the album it came from, then listened to almost nothing but Katatonia for years.

To this day, Discouraged Ones is one of my favorite albums, and Katatonia is my all-time most-played artist on last.fm. I’ve made all my close friends listen to Katatonia at least once.

We weren’t close. I won’t pretend we were. We were friends for a few months, we navigated some confused pre-teen feelings, and then we lost touch for a decade. I thought about you from time to time, in the same way we think about everyone we knew as a kid. I’d wondered how life was treating you – like how I wonder after my internet friend who told me, via Kik, that she was running away from home in 2013 and I never heard from her again, or how I wonder after my Tumblr mutuals from that time period – but I hadn’t followed up on it until last night. In 2012, we thought the world might end, and we made jokes about it. We ran a Facebook meme page with some of our friends, but it was deleted long ago.

What I’m saying is, you were a minor character in one short chapter of my life, and I believe I was the same in yours. But I didn’t forget you, because none of us ever really forget anyone that mattered in some small way to us, and our lost conversations from half a lifetime ago are some small part of who I am now. When I listen to Katatonia, I do occasionally remember that YouTube link from a decade ago, and memories from middle school come rushing back. Their setlist, from when I saw them last November, hangs on my wall. I am selfishly sad that I won’t be able to see what you’re up to in five, ten years. Thank you for your friendship.