Member-only story
corona viruse.
I Lost Six Friends During Covid. All of Them Are Fine.
Pharmacy queue, last month, and there he was. A guy from my old five-a-side football game. Thursdays, four years of them, give or take the odd rained-off week. He was holding cough drops and a phone charger, and he looked a bit older, which, fair enough, so do I. We made eye contact. He nodded. I nodded back. He paid and headed out to the car park. I just stood there holding my little paper bag of pills with this weird sense that a door had shut, one that'd been jammed half-open since 2020 without me even noticing.
We never fell out. No argument, nothing I could point to. The pitch closed in March that year and the group chat went silent around May. Neither of us ever sent the message that would have started it back up.
I keep replaying that nod. I know he isn't the only one, and when I actually sat down and counted, I got to six people (seven if I include a cousin, though that's its own messy story) who were a regular part of my week before the pandemic and are now just names I scroll past.
The friendships that were really about a place
Here's the uncomfortable bit. I'd have called the football guy a friend back then. Looking back, we were Thursday friends. Our whole relationship lived inside a fenced rectangle of artificial grass and the twenty minutes…
