The Absence of a Friend

                My friend, Carlos Jimenez, was my best friend from age four to ten. We did absolutely everything together. He was what I considered my best friend. We would spend the day together anywhere from eight in the morning to nine at night. It did not matter what we did, we were friends through it all. In fact, we made up an entire universe for us to spend time in without any regard for other people it was just us two. I never would have thought that we would be separated, we would be friends throughout our adulthood and I wished it to happen. But then, one day, the unthinkable happened which would lead to the end of our friendship.

                I was in fourth grade at the time at the meager age of ten years old. Each day I would wait for my friend, Carlos, after school and we would walk home together. Since this was elementary school we were given a very low amount of homework with the difficulty being nearly none. Carlos and I would do our homework and hang out each and every day, sometimes to the point where my mom would tell me that I live more at his house than my own. Each day we would be together and do what ever pleased us at the time. We went through phases, one phase was the skateboarding phase, another was the Lego phase, computer games, “chemistry” phase (more like mixing random things to see what happened), and swimming phase. No matter what we did, we both shared an interest in it and had fun doing whatever it was.

                Hanging out one day, Carlos dropped the bombshell. He said he was moving. I couldn’t believe it we had been friends forever, why did it have to stop so soon? Carlos was pretty much the only person I hung out with, sure there were other kids who lived by me but they seemed too weird for my taste. Carlos said he would be moving in about a month. I had        seen the unmistakable red ‘For Sale’ signs in his garage but I always assumed the signs were there from when they bought the house. This did not seem possible, Carlos moving away. I learned that he was moving one town over, into the city of Farmington. I tried to make it seem not so bad that Carlos was moving but now I would have to drive for fifteen minutes to hang out with my best friend.

                My life changed; there wasn’t anything I could do. I could not hang out with Carlos more to compensate for when he moved because we hung out every chance we got.  I didn’t know what I was going to do or what was going to happen. I just wanted things to stay the way they were; my life was good at the time.

                The day Carlos moved was a somber day. I helped him pack the items of their home into the giant moving truck. I said my goodbyes to Carlos as he climbed into his van with his parents and brother and watched them leave my neighborhood for good. I watched them go north up the road followed by the moving truck and knew that our relationship would never be the same.

                After Carlos had settled into his new home in his new neighborhood, did we hang out once more. This house was extremely different, it was a lot bigger than the last one, giving us plenty of room to do whatever we liked. Though hanging out with Carlos became less and less frequent. Sometimes my parents could not drive me over to his house or Carlos was not able to hang out at the time. After a period of about two years we had stopped hanging out altogether. We were both starting in different junior high schools and our lived became increasingly busier. Carlos and I had no time to try and get rides to each other’s house and spend hours upon hours over there. Carlos ended up getting new friends over at his new school, friends who I did not know who lived closer to him and our relationship came to an end.

                I had not gone to school with Carlos for six years, it was only when we got into high school did we see each other again. Carlos had made friends with some people who were not the nicest of people. I knew from some of my new friends that had come from Farmington that those people were the ones who experimented with drugs and alcohol. I felt for Carlos, he did not realize that the people he was hanging out with were bringing him down with them. He did not know that the friends he had chosen were having a huge negative impact on his life and I did not want that for Carlos. Yet once again, I could do nothing I barely recognized Carlos and he recognized me even less.

                After seeing Carlos, for the first time, I was glad that I had not continued to hang out with Carlos longer than I did. I knew that if I had continued our friendship, his friends would have become mine, and then where would I be? I didn’t want that for myself or for Carlos but at least I could control what I did even if I couldn’t control what Carlos did. I watched as my best childhood friend continued to steep towards the negative and I realized I never wanted to be that person. I wanted to be someone who had friends with positive influences on me instead of those who did not even care that we were ‘friends.’ I realized that the person Carlos had become could have been me. I could be one of the people that the D.A.R.E officers talk about how I was critically affected by negative peer pressure. I wanted to be the person who I wanted to be, not the person my peers wanted me to be.