My belly fat is loose enough that sometimes I can feel and hear (yuck!) it slapping against me when I am on the elliptical.

I just don't have a good outlet for this anywhere right now- so here goes.....

He was the younger brother of my friend. He really liked me and I really liked him but I was a senior and he was a sophomore. Although he asked me out several times, I always said no because of the grade difference. Actually, I never dated anyone in high school. We did end up hanging out a lot because we were in band together and I was friends with his sister. He was also a state championship wrestler. He was still a state record holder a few years ago even after all of this time.

After he graduated high school, he enlisted in the armed forces. His sister and I went out to visit him at the base where he was stationed. It was a great trip and we had a lot of fun. At one point he literally proposed marriage; he even bent down on one knee. It was said in a serious tone and I answered yes in an equally serious tone. After that the subject was treated with much jesting. When he was deployed, I wrote to him every week.

Then the story gets fuzzy. I only remember the letters started coming back unopened and I heard he was seeing someone. Life just moves on and I started seeing someone. He did come back once to visit but I can't remember if that was before or after the other relationships entered our respective lives.

By that point, my friendship with his sister had fizzled. She was being really weird during that visit and was literally trying to ditch me. She grabbed him by the arm and tried to get him to run out the door with her before I was ready to leave. This left her brother and I very confused. That was the last time I saw him decades ago.

The way my friendship ended with his sister was really painful to me. So painful, it has colored every friendship I have had since then. She pretty much invented ghosting leaving me to wonder how I went from being a close friend to being nothing to her. Needing closure, I did send her a poorly worded letter essentially saying I was sorry our friendship was over and I would be interested in hearing from her but if I didn't, I would understand.

He was the closest thing I had to a high school sweetheart. Sometimes I wonder how it would have been if we did date. He is someone I would have loved to see at a reunion to catch up. I would have enjoyed hearing how his story was going. Now I know that it ended far too soon! Turns out he was less than a year younger than me. He was two years behind in school because of how the birthday cutoff worked. I also learned he lived about an hour and half from me (not our home state, nor where the above mentioned base is).

Even though he passed away last November, his family is having a memorial event for him this Saturday in our home state. I am assuming the delay was due to the pandemic. Now, I am wrestling with whether or not to send a sympathy card to his mother. I think I will because I don't think it will hurt. I am also trying to decide if I should include some old pictures I have of him.

I wanted to pull out my yearbooks to reminisce and I can't find them. I also thought I had a few notes from him still saved even after all this time but I can't find those either. It is possible I tossed those. However, I am really upset that I don't know where my yearbooks are. They should have been in my memorabilia trunk but weren't. I am not sure where to even look. Weirdly, I had a dream about my yearbooks several weeks ago.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. He was a really special person and it is so hard to believe his life was cut short.