I was sleeping in this morning when I got the text. I reached over to my phone on the night stand. It was from my friend Josh. It was an image of a newspaper story and the first line was, “Loren has succumbed to a long insidious illness…” I hadn’t spoken to Loren in more than twenty years. I knew that our lives had diverged significantly but I still didn’t want to read this.

I met Loren White in Mr. Stevens’s fifth grade class in French Road Elementary School. He was one of my best friends in middle school. We slept over at each other’s houses. We played on the same travel soccer team. We bought comic books and baseball cards together.

There’s that line from Stand By Me, “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” It’s true. My friend Jon was in that fifth grade class too. We started hanging out more with Josh in the sixth grade. Calling either of them friends at this point is a bit of an understatement. Loren and I were that close too, back then.

I’m trying to remember him. He was a handsome kid. He had these bright eyes and curly black hair. He was cooler than me. He introduced me to Led Zepplin. I remember sleeping over at his mom’s place listening to Stairway. When the guitar solo came, he’d grab a tennis racquet to play the guitar solo.

He was fearless. One time during a soccer game when our coach Mr. Irving yelled at Loren to get his head in the game, he gave him the finger. He did that. To an adult.

The first time we hung out, we went on a walk around his neighborhood. There was this mysterious building that was on a hill by his house. It looked like a college campus but I think it was a seminary. It had a black iron fence around it so it was off limits but, at Loren’s insistence, we went exploring anyway. An adult found me but Loren was able to hide behind a corner. So, when I was getting lectured, I could see Loren over this adult’s shoulder laughing at me.

He was a difficult kid sometimes. He drove my parents crazy. It wasn’t difficult to drive my mother crazy, I just did my best to make sure I never did. But he actually got my father to yell once (I think he punted a football on our roof), not an easy feat to get a rise out of the calm British gentleman but Loren did.

I guess we just grew apart. I didn’t see him much after I switched schools in the eighth grade. Everything I heard about him after that was second hand, how he stole his grandmother’s car. How he sold drugs out of the back of a restaurant. It was all gossip but the trend that it told about Loren’s life rang true to me.

I saw him one last time when I was sixteen or seventeen. It was the parking lot of Brighton High School. He was tall and big and he had shoulder length hair and stubble and he told me that he had been following the Dead and he looked it. He looked cool but even then we felt like different people.

The other Stand By Me line is that “friends can come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.” That’s true but the ones that are there when you’re twelve, they leave an impression. I never forgot Loren.

I googled him a few years ago and saw that he was in jail. He was on a webpage for prisoners who wanted to connect with people. It said that he liked reading. There was a picture of him on that page. He looked big and intimidating. His black curls were gone. His head was shaved. His arms were huge and tattooed. I could have sent him a care package of books or something but I didn’t. I checked back in a little while later and the profile was gone. I guess he had gotten out.

The full sentence at the beginning of the obituary was, “Loren has succumbed to a long insidious illness, another victim of the opioid crisis.” I don’t know the details but I imagine it’s similar to a lot of other stories with opioid use these days.

The article also said that he had a wife and was an aspiring musician. He was forty-one like me so I don’t know how that music career was going but I hope it brought him some joy.

I double clicked the image of the story to read the full thing and that’s when I saw that there was a picture at the top. He was wearing a Yankees hat and a plaid button down short sleeved shirt and I could see his tattoos. The lines were a little deeper on his face but he had a slight smile that reminded me of my friend.

I didn’t get in touch with him when I had the chance, so, it’s disingenuous to say I wish I could have talked to him one last time or something. We hadn’t spoken and we probably wouldn’t have but sometimes you want to just know on some level that someone who was in your life it out there somewhere doing well. It breaks my hear that that’s not true of Loren anymore.

I’ll miss him.