With a "Y" the Stages of Friendship.

The Introduction.

“Y” is one of my oldest friends; I met him shortly after my first remembered city to city move. It was the first day of the 6^th grade, and for me it was a new town, and new school. Till then school had not been overly pleasant for me, I was bullied at both of my previous schools, didn't really fit in and at that point I was thinking “at least I knew people at my old school, and here I don’t know anyone.” But it being elementary school in a small town, and me being in french immersion it didn’t take long for “Y” to come over and ask me first if I was “Brooke” as what I thought was a joke to which I only responded with a shake of my head in the negative. Then he asked if I was “Tommy”, and once again I shook my head except this time in the affirmative. And from there he told me to come and wait with him because we were in the same class. It was a grade 6/7 split, which I don’t think is actually all that uncommon for French immersion classes, he was grade 7, and as mentioned above I was in 6^th.

The beginning.

Now the friendship between me and Y didn’t grow out of geography, where we went to summer camp (because we went to two separate summer camps), it didn’t grown out of me thinking of him being an older or younger brother type thing, it wasn’t a matter of me being inspired by him or aspired to be him, or for any of man other reasons. But our friendship had sprung from something much simpler. Our friendship came from having similar interests, things like Lego, Legend of Zelda, collecting things, the first Matrix movie, as well any number of other RPG video games. And we complimented each other quite well.

But then I moved. And I had thought that was it. It was another friendship that had ended because I had moved again. It wasn’t nice, it was by no means good in my eyes, but at that time I had accepted it.

The Return.

Then an opportunity for me to return to the town I thought I’d said goodbye to. And so I jumped at it, not because I expected to see the people I knew but because I enjoyed the town itself. (Also not just because visiting also happened to mean that I would be missing school.) Then by pure coincidence during some of the, well I guess you could call it, free time, I went out with a couple other people for what was supposed to be a brisk walk. But who should I come across, but Y himself and his at then girlfriend. And we got talking, only for a short while because we were both busy for the rest of that day. But before I left, we proceeded to meet up again several times that weekend. Before the weekend was over we had agreed to keep in touch and so we did, electronically of course, at that time meant through MSN messenger and myspace. This time when we parted I had no doubt we would see each other again.

And we have seen each other since, several times in fact. And on more than one of these such occasions happened to be instances where we stayed at each other’s houses for days at a time.

Post script: He had this nickname in a somewhat self-imposed manner. Because though he had a somewhat common name, rather than it being spelled normally it unconventionally had a “Y” where commonly there is an “I”.