Dear bro,

I apologize if the title “bro” makes you feel awkward in any way. You were a brother to me, a brother I never had. A brother I never kept.

Remember how we met? It was in Mr. Z’s Pre-Calculus class. I was a new kid, the only new kid in that class. The seats in that classroom were arranged into a v shape, each stroke of the v consisted of two rows of desks. We were sitting face-to-face. You must have sensed my uneasiness. You said hi to me. I said hi back. You asked where I was from. I answered and asked you back.

Our school allowed electronic devices in class because most assignments were completed online. In between the hassle that WebAssign, Blackboard, and Powerschool brought us, you added me on Skype. It was just to create a platform to talk (and multitask) without disturbing the whole class, yet having your Skype somehow foreshadowed that our friendship would go beyond Mr. Z’s classroom. I felt a lot closer to you on Skype than in person.

“Ugh, I am totally going to integrate the slope of my wall to calculate the area of my room,” I complained sarcastically.

“You know,” you replied with a straight face from your desk, “if your wall has a slope, you might need to get that checked out. It’s kinda dangerous.”

I tried my hardest to hold in an explosive laugh. Mr. Z shot me a warning glance.

Due to the difference in our schedules, we barely met in person other than in Pre-Calculus class twice or three times a week. When we discovered our mutual passion in gaming, the already limited physical conversations were turned into a bunch of acronyms that were typed during short breaks in the middle of the rain of mouse clicks.

GLHF

Mid MIA

Gank pls

GG

As time went by, our Skype conversations grew longer, our in-game levels grew higher. What did not change was a number of words spoken between us, but it didn’t matter. The keyboard replaced our lips.

You had a YouTube channel full of guitar covers. You were determined that one day you would be like Sungha Jung.

You followed some professional gamers. You encouraged me to adopt their styles.

And then college came. I lost you.

You finally got Facebook after all these years, but your messages were buried under hundreds of other excited freshmen’s roommate searches, textbook sales, meetup invitations. Snapchat, Instagram quickly came along, keeping me alert with endless notifications.

You stopped uploading covers to your YouTube channel.

I stopped playing games.

Sometimes I wonder if our friendship was solid to begin with. It seems that all our interactions were established on what we call the cloud. I kind of like that name for online storage. Cloud. Just like the real cloud, distant and elusive. It scatters when sunbeams pour through the narrow openings.

We both got busy. With work, academic and social. With the new environment, both physical and virtual. I got selfish — maybe I had always been. I created a mental list of friends sorted by contact priority and pinned new college friends on top. I threw myself at every opportunity my university provided me, leaving behind everything I used to be.

You were like those loyal rocks that lie at the bottom of the ocean. Only when the tide of excitement faded did you poke into my sight again. I clicked on your profile. The last conversation we had was on Facebook.

“Yo! It’s been a while, how are you doing?”

“Bad timing. Catch you later?”