Today I had a 2+ decade-old best friend formally cut ties with me. We hadn't really been in touch since Covid. Whenever I came back to Canada I would DM, to grab a coffee / lunch, and would get a run-around which I chalked up to busy lives. I suspected other issues were at play, but I thought I was being over cynical - even for myself.

In anticipation of coming back for the holidays, I reached out yesterday with a humorous "Are you still alive" (the thought that my friend has actually died did occur to me). The response was a terse and formal "I have no interest in catching up" (paraphrasing).

It was weird. An emotional gut-punch that I could actually feel physically.

We hadn't been in touch for years, so there is no actual day-to-day loss. It's not even the formal death of the potential "we're friends and will catch up when we catch up" type thing that hurts so much either.

It's trying to understand what happened in the mind and soul of a 25+ year friend who knew and knows me in a way few people do.

The reply was so bizarre it actually felt like maybe the account was hacked. But it wasn't.

What's most depressing about this is not really the loss of a "friend". It happens all the time, and by the time it happens, the friend is - almost definitionally - no longer a friend. It's just how it happened in this case. No cheating. No broken promises. No drunken fights where someone said something that can't be taken back.

Just politics.

Just the fruits of the destabilizing forces we have been living under for years.

What evolution - no, devolution - has to go on in someone's psyche to unfriend a lifelong friend over politics? And unfriend in the real sense - not in the superficial social media sense?

What level of trauma... of demonization... of perceived fears. Perceived evil.

In the mind of my former friend, I had become so bad - so wicked - so evil - that 25 years of memories had been recreated in his mind.

All the shared memories of friendship replaced. Replaced with a manufactured perception of evil so evil it required a formal rupture of decades of lived experience.

I forgive my friend. He is my friend and if the next time we see each other is at a funeral instead of Christmas, I will forgive him, hug him, and forget the insanity.

But I will never forgive the entities that did this to my friend. And to so many others.

How weak and fragile are the souls of those who have been conditioned to fear their friends.