Lets introduce a character in my past: Kai. Kai was a guy I met last friday, in the incident where I saw those guys in the pub in camden. One of them used to be my best friend in primary school, then we had a falling out. I can't believe how similar he and I are when I saw him. We have the same hair. We have similar musical tastes (and thats very very rare), we even have the same fucking birthday.
I fell out with him over somethign stupid. I never ever talked to him until then, until friday. When I was growng up there were walls of silence. My dad didn't (and still doesn't) communicate with my sister, we in the family don't know why. I get told off for even acknowledging this, and we pretend it's not happening. I don't like how people pretend its not happening. I don't like how everyone pretends its not happening and is okay with it. I grew up being forced to be okay with it, to accept this. Then I started repeating this behaviour. By not talking to Kai.
I had dreams where I wanted to talk to him again, like it was some kind of action film and I'd say 'come on lets team up one last time to get the bad guys!'. He was a real academic smart kind of guy. Then we fell out and we both changed. I began to be the academic one and the studious one. He ended up wanting to be the heavy metal rocker type guy who oozed cool, that I wanted to be as a superficial primary school kid. We kind of reversed roles when we fell out, we reversed our lives.
Now I saw him, I heard he's working in a studio or unemployed or in a band or something like that (the stories simultaneously both blurry, inconsistent and concurrent). I heard he qualified in a vocational studio production thingy. I heard he's in a metal band and all they do is drink and not rehearse. I'm not going to say that I ended up the studious academic one whose doing well. Fuck, for all I know he's doing better than me, and I will say good for him. I can be jealous of lots of people, but not Kai. Kai and I were brothers once. Kai and I were so close people tease me that we fell out.
I feel like many things in my life were attributed to falling out with Kai, and there was a lot of tension and anxiety inside me because of seeing him in that pub. Seeing him reminded me of lots of things. In sixth form he was part of a group of people that everyone ignorantly called the 'grungers'. However grunge music was a movement in the early 90s and a decade on these guys were more into hard rock and heavy metal and far from anything grunge. But it was the foppy hair and rebellion people saw as grungey.
Funny enough, despite my interest in heavy metal now. I had nothing to do with it back in those days and I saw them as similarly alien. They even had a secret handshake. Some of the guys were talking about it and I didn't realise they had this, until I really thought about those past memories. I feel guilty about falling out with Kai. I feel like I'm responsible for him in some way. My mum was a psych nurse in a hospital and Kai's mum was a patient. Kai's mum had schizophrenia as an educated guess knowing what specialism my mum had. My parents looked out for Kai and his family, and because we were also friends it didn't seem intruding when my mum would do nice things like take us out to lunch or something like that. I think my mum felt some sense of sadness about Kai. Kai's family situation was pretty rough. Kai's dad was long term unemployed, and his mum was never around due to the nature of her illness. Kai lived in a pretty dark surrounding. I feel like such a cunt for de-friending him. The reason was so stupid its the kind of thing a 10 year old would ignorantly do.
I remember I made him cry when we stopped being friends. Then he cried for two days straight in school. Then he made a new group of friends, then I was exiled for what I did. We were like bart and milhouse. I know its a really small thing now, years later. My friendship with Kai and the falling out, I think defined many of my relationships afterwards. My friendships with men are now always with some kind of distance and I don't have a true besty like I did with Kai. I hate lots of different kinds of besties, sure, but he was so different.
Its' weird, I'm talking about him like he's an ex lover or something.
Talking to him made me feel like my guilt was released from me. I had a big anxiety moment that night (two nights ago now).
Maybe I'll talk about today in my next post...
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