Remembering my best friend -(

It usually takes me a few hours to fall asleep. I'm not the kind of person who can just instantly fall asleep in a few minutes. After making passionate love to my wife, I usually lie there just staring at the ceiling, thinking about things. This is when I do most of my thinking. I like to think of my

mind as a library full of shelves. Each shelf represents a different era of my life, and each shelf is full of books. Each book represents an individual memory of my life. As I lie there in the darkness waiting to fall asleep, I enjoy exploring this library of memories. I enjoy checking out each shelf, flicking through different books.

The idea of forgetting something that happened to me, forgetting one of my memories, scares me a little bit. Each memory is precious to me. It's something that happened to me in my life, and I want to hold on to that. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about my childhood, my teenage years in particular, and someone who played

a major part during my teenage years was someone who I consider to be one of my best friends, Jay. I first met Jay all the way back in the year 2000 when I was 11 years old. It was a rainy afternoon and my mum was driving me home from school, and we saw a small boy walking home

by himself. He was wearing a bright red Manchester United raincoat with a matching bright red Manchester United school bag. My mum asked me, who's that boy? And I said, I don't know. She then pulled the car up next to him, opened the window, and asked him if he wanted a lift home. He said yes, and he got

into the car. I didn't like it when my mum did things like this. She would often invite strange kids off the street to eat sweets and cakes in her house, or she would offer lifts to random kids that I didn't even know. This made me feel very uncomfortable. Anyway, we took Jay to his house and dropped him

off. He lived quite nearby to our house in the same village, and from the next day onwards, me and Jay became very good friends. We started walking home together every single day. We had to trek through a field, climb through a hole in a chain-link fence to finally reach the A20 road, which led straight to our village.

And during our walks home, we used to talk a lot. We spoke about video games, Halo, Star Wars, sci-fi things, movies. We had lots of things in common apart from one thing. Jay really liked football. Manchester United in particular, whereas I didn't care. I remember going to his house for the first time. His mum made us dinner.

She seemed very happy that her son finally brought home a friend. She called me a bit weird, a bit strange. She asked me what my favorite food was, and I answered pot noodle. She also told me off for not saying please or thank you. She said, didn't your mum ever teach you how to say please or thank

you? We played PlayStation in his bedroom. Which was about half the size of my bedroom. It felt pretty cramped. He also had a dog, and his whole house smelled like dog. He started showing me his collection of tiny toy soldiers. He said that you glue them together and then you paint them, and then you fight other people's

soldiers. I was very interested, and I came to learn that this game was called Warhammer 40K. We started going to Games Workshop together every Sunday, which is where they sold the plastic toy soldiers for Warhammer 40K. I started a Chaos Marine army, and me and Jay would spend a lot of time together painting and gluing, building our

armies, and then fighting each other. Jay used to come over to my house a lot after school as well so we can play video games. We used to really enjoy playing Halo: Combat Evolved. Co-op mode was our favorite. We also did other things together. For example, during the summer we would ride our bicycles around the village. We

also went skateboarding, and we also had a paper round job together where we delivered newspapers around the village. During the winter, we would go sledging if it snowed. Jay lived on a farm, so there were lots of hills that we could ride our plastic sledges down. We also used to break branches off trees and make bows and

arrows using fishing wire. After several years of friendship, I started to feel like Jay was slowly drifting away from me. We only shared one class together, science. And during science, we would always sit together until one day when he decided to sit with 2 other kids, Sean and Ryan. I didn't like Sean or Ryan. Sean was a

bumbling imbecile, and Ryan was a racist little shit who enjoyed making fun of me because I looked Asian. I felt so angry. I felt like he betrayed me after all these years of friendship we had together. How could he do this to me? How could he go and sit with 2 kids who I absolutely despised? Things would

only get worse when we reached the age of 16. In the UK, when you're 16, you can get a driving license and you can ride a moped on the roads. And Jay got a moped and he started hanging out with the other kids who also had mopeds. He started hanging out behind the gymnasium with the other moped

kids where they would show off their mopeds to each other and rev the engines up and be loud and irritating. I didn't like any of these kids. They were rough and noisy and uncivilized. I begged my dad to buy me a moped as well, but he said no. I guess he was worried that I would get into

some kind of road accident. I was really upset that Jay got a moped because it brought an end to the days where we would walk home from school together. And have lengthy discussions about video games and Halo. I started walking home with his brother and this other kid called Rob, and Jay used to whiz past us on

his moped beeping his horn, and it used to irritate me. I also noticed Jay was starting to show an interest in the opposite sex. There was this girl called Louise. He seemed to be very interested in her. He would often make crude sexual jokes. About her, and he would act differently in front of her, as if he

was trying to get her attention. I didn't like this behavior. It made me feel uncomfortable. I wasn't interested in girls yet at that age, and I missed the old nerdy Jay who would talk about video games and Halo. Now it seemed like he turned into a different person. He was into cars and riding motorbikes and getting tattoos

and drinking alcohol. The last time I saw Jay was in 2005, after we both graduated from secondary school. I went over to his house one last time to see if he wanted to play video games. He was outside with a bunch of other kids I didn't recognize, messing around with mopeds and motorbikes, riding up and down, revving

their engines, being loud and irritating. Jay took me into a shed and he showed me his weightlifting equipment. He had lots of different weights for muscle building, and I noticed Jay's body looked a bit more bulky than it used to. He also started to grow a beard. I felt like I didn't know who this person was at

this point. What happened to Jay, the skinny, shy, socially awkward, nerdy, video game obsessed Jay who I first became friends with? I wasn't really interested in his weightlifting equipment or motorbikes or mopeds. And I decided to go home. I felt sad. I felt disappointed. I felt like I lost a friend. The friend that I knew, the Jay

that I knew, was no longer there, and the current new Jay was going down this path that I didn't want to follow. And that was the last time I ever saw him. We kept in contact for a bit on Facebook. I think the last time I spoke to him was a few years ago. We spoke briefly. He

seems to be doing very well in life. He got himself a good job, a decent job, as a mechanic, which pays very well. He also moved out of his parents' house, got himself a girlfriend who he lives with now. He might be a bearded, tattoo-covered, buff mechanic now, but in my memory, I will always remember him as

this little nerdy kid wearing a bright red Manchester United coat who loved video games and Halo and Warhammer 40K. Sometimes I can't believe that I'm 29. How did time go by so quickly? I used to be a kid. I used to be a teenager. Just a normal teenager playing video games, going to school. For some reason, I

thought I would be a kid or a teenager for the rest of my life. The idea of growing up terrified me more than anything else. And now I'm 29, living in Japan with a strange Japanese woman. I wonder, how did things turn out this way? Even to this day, the idea of growing up terrifies me. I don't

see myself as an adult. I don't want to become an adult. I don't want responsibility. I refuse to grow up. In my mind, I still see myself as that teenage boy. I cling on to memories of the past, thinking about them, dwelling on them every night. As if they're the most important things that I have. I think

one of the main reasons why I felt so upset with how my friendship with Jay ended was mainly because I witnessed him grow up right in front of my very eyes, and I was incapable of doing the same. I felt abandoned. I felt left behind. I also felt sad. I felt sad to see that era, that part

of my life, come to an end. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time. Just so I could punch that little shit Ryan right in his pointy rat face.