What Happens When Friendships Die Without a Burial?
Class and time fracturing men’s closest bonds.
“With all the homeboys around my age
Wasn't no complaints about life in the first stages
In a concrete jungle, so wherever one go
The others'll follow him like a lost dove
And til' this day I still got love for 'em
Though I don't know 'em like I used to
They still my family”
-Kam, Still Got Love 4 ‘Um
Every January, I treat myself to some pampering—a massage, an expensive book, or a Blu-ray box set that I’ve been eyeing. It’s my birthday month, and I always deserve it. As my gift this year, I paid for something altogether new—$30 for a criminal report on someone I used to know.
Who’s got two thumbs and knows how to party?
The ability to recognize unresolved wounds as I enter middle age is a payoff of sorts for the price of getting older. It’s interesting to discover what my brain obsesses over when reviewing life in decades versus the limited years or months of observation available in childhood. When it comes to nearly a half-century of dreams, there are some guest stars that just won’t go away.
Though I think of them during my conscious hours, the most recurring characters in my lifetime of zzz’s aren’t deceased family members or my parents. They’re not my wife or exes (though they make the occasional odd cameo). And while celebrities pop in now and then—Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, in particular, always getting us into a tremendous amount of trouble—they’re not the main cast either.
The most lingering guests in my dreams are Pete, Kamal, and, importantly, Tim—all old friends who I’ve lost touch with.1
All three of these relationships feel more like sunken wrecks than (friend)ships left at sea. After years of no contact, I searched for Pete’s name on Instagram and found that he had stopped following me. Kamal might’ve let me go after I posted about attending a protest. Even with his abhorrent politics, I still mourn this loss. The criminal report I sought out was for Tim, who I long ago ghosted when I suspected that he was up to some shady activity and getting me involved without my knowledge (a few months of random calls from creditors and surly voices looking for him tipped the scale towards friendship abandonment).
We don't accurately interrogate why men stay close to "the wrong men" for too long. Even when you realize your buddy isn't nice to the women in his life. Or when another is full of lies. Then there's the most common and innocuous offense from the catalog of old pals—a relationship based on "remember when" instead of "what's new?"
Yet, the pull of old friendships feels like the deepest of opiates—the calming ease inherent in the shorthand and familiar. Legacy friendships—those long-standing connections forged in childhood or adolescence—carry a unique weight for men, even when they become unhealthy or fade into dreams. These friendships hold memories of a younger version of ourselves—imperfect but pure—when we were smaller in body but expansive in emotional needs.
Pete and I spent time together during our early 20s when access to our first credit cards led to stupid bonding mistakes like closing out too many bars or tattoos designed from Comic Sans. Kamal, whom I met during the bumps of puberty, made reference to my father’s memory a few times a year. With a dad who died 30 years ago, the memory keepers of his legacy are dwindling—how could I not mourn the loss of one more?
Tim and I met in kindergarten. For decades, our language circled around the absurd phrases we invented during that first year of playtime. After years of silence, he once reached out in the ways we often do now—through social media. He commented on one of my posts with our favorite phrase we came up with while playing with toy soldiers. I never responded, but that masculine pinch still shows up whenever I revisit the last words we kind of exchanged.
These men, whether present or not, represent a part of me that feels irreplaceable. Their absence feels like losing a fragment of myself.
As we grow older, the way we form connections changes. It was once effortless to declare, “This is my friend.” But somewhere along the way, that ease was replaced by guardedness, self-awareness, and fear. The shorthand we once had—a single line about toy soldiers that spoke volumes—has been replaced by polite conversations over drinks. New friendships can lack the same depth or purity, not because they can’t grow, but because the innocence and naivety of those early bonds can’t be recreated.
Maybe that’s the real fear: that the people we meet now will never truly know the parts of us that existed in those early friendships. And in turn, we may never allow ourselves to lean into new relationships with the same vulnerability we once did. It's not just the loss of a friend we mourn—it’s the loss of the version of ourselves they reflected.
With Tim, the sting comes from something deeper—the question of whether class differences quietly dissolved our friendship. Tim wanted to hold on; I was the one who left. I quietly judged his grammar. He chuckled too much at the wrong things in Buffalo ‘66. With our mixtape currency, he thought I lost my cred when I started adding Morrissey songs along with my R. Kelly selects (turns out we were both on the wrong side of history there). But it wasn’t just about taste or geography—it was about the ways our bubbles had expanded beyond the tight-knit villages of our youth. I’ve often wondered if my departure was driven by class striving.
I understand now the subtle warnings parents gave about “certain kids” growing up. Not because of behavior, but because of the unspoken divide that ambition can create. And it haunts me most with the friends I left behind in pursuit of something else. Years later, I had a birthday party and looked around at a room full of the New York creative class I’d once dreamed of belonging to—the group I had longed for as a kid. But the absence of friends from my past cast a shadow over that moment, a reminder of the bonds I abandoned along the way.
Everything else in life feels concrete—job loss, literal death, breakups, etc. Even when an ex made our breakup “official” on Facebook, it still signaled an end. But I’ve long had the rulebook (in song, social codes, fiction) for grieving a romantic relationship. No one ever told me how to do that with the guy I first got drunk with.2
Part of that is our inability to process loss, and these are all men whose friendships with me died without a proper burial. There were no final conversations.
My birthday gift this year was something of a cleanse—a background check to determine whether I based my abandonment on a gut level of sketchiness rather than class distance.
Turns out Tim’s criminal record is slight but still troubling.
Tim is alive. I know that. His criminal report tells me where he lives and where he’s likely working. He might find this post or reads it subscribed under a different email. If so, Tim, I still have the last mixtape you ever made me.
Adios, ciao ciao, byeeeeeeeee,
Mark✌🏼
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Of course, these names have been changed.
In Ocean City, Maryland at the age of 16 with four cans of Bud Light.