The boy who almost dug up the devil in his backyard is dead. He was my first friend, the one I played with every day between the ages of two and seven. I haven't talked to him since. Going to his funeral was like revisiting my earliest childhood. There was the other friend we also hung out with as toddlers, a girl I also haven't talked to since. And there was the lovely old lady who used to look after us all. It was a truly bizarre experience.
( I feel so separated from my childhood self, as if it was someone else. )
And the horror of a young man being suddenly dead. His elderly mother and orphaned daughter crying in the church. It was almost too much to bear, just watching them. And the absence of a father ( my friend's, his daughter's, my own ) was so tangible that it sucked the breath out of me.
I took a close look at a picture of the deceased. Not having seen him for decades, I was surprised to see that he had grown up to be a strong, handsome man. I recognised his small-boy grin and remembered the secrets we shared with nobody else. I knew him so well, once. Today, at the funeral, I talked to some people who also knew him well, but as an adult ( and as such, of course, a complete stranger to me ).
Not a word to each other since we were seven years old. And he still knew things about me that nobody else did.
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