So, train home from uni the following day. Look up, see a guy who looks vaguely familiar. He goes "<REUDH> MATE IT'S BEEN FUCKING YEAAAAAARS HOWZIT GOING YOU CUNNY FUNT". Lo and behold, it's one of the members of the ragtag misfits group I briefly associated with in year eight when I was teetering between popularity and nerdosity. Seems so petty now, but it meant a lot at thirteen.
A bit of background here: In year eight, I had a shit of a teacher. You know the kind who hates dealing with students who are outside the norm in any kind of way and picks out their favourites and lavish attention upon them? The dimwitted type who basically became a teacher because they didn't have really anything else they were good at? (Not that teaching is a crappy thing, but it seems to be a "default" option for some groups of people who have no other skills in life. I am absolutely not disparaging all high school teachers; some I have had were fantastic and were born teachers.)
So this old friend, and a couple of the rest of us eventually formed this kinda coalition: me with my smart mouth and supposedly outrageously high IQ (fat lot of arse sniffing good that IQ did me), this old friend who had ADHD and struggled with his anger, another old friend who was Jamaican, also highly intelligent, but deeply troubled (in ways I will later expound upon), and another one who was fickle, one of those types who had high intelligence but zero engagement because of poor behaviour (he also was a diagnosed ADHD person), so any intellect he had was atrophied from years of teacherly neglect. We'd argue with the shitty teacher, point out where she was wrong. We looked out for each other in the yard; the two ADHD guys were our "muscle", me and the Jamaican bro would talk people into walls or get them to swing first through speech. For that year, I had this brief cohort of people willing to look out for me at school, and it was a heady, strong feeling.
For simplicity's sake, from here on out i'll refer to them as Boganbro, Jamaicanbro and Ficklebro.
So one fine day, the shitcunt of the teacher and I were having some stupid fucking screaming match over the fact that she was trying to teach us scientific concepts (and being totally wrong in the process, even pulling a textbook out to show her her incorrectness), when she basically went "You keep talking back like that to teachers and you'll never amount to anything." As the first member in my generation in my family, I had to "carry the flag" academically, which only had more pressure put onto me after i was found to be "gifted" at age 6, and formally assessed IQ wise at age 12 to have 148 IQ (99th percentile).
So you can understand how much that line would cut to the core someone whose entire identity at that stage revolved around being "the smart kid". I hated that teacher with a passion. Imagine just how overjoyed I was when I got her as a teacher again in year 11 (age 16)!
With that background out of the way, we resume our catch up.
So yeah, me and my old friend Boganbro have a good ol' yarn on the train. Shit turns really dark really fast when he mentioned how he got told the same sort of thing by that teacher too; and indeed many other teachers. Boganbro dropped out in year 11, broke his back badly, got onto drugs, got onto worse drugs, was a meth-head for much of the 10s so far, went to jail for brutally bashing a guy while high on meth, and basically got out like a year ago. He was always this bright, cheerful sort of guy, friendly to everyone, whereas now he's visibly aged more than 24 would suggest, and sorta "bowed" looking I guess. It's really sad. So we reminisce about our old little ragtag bunch of misfits, and Boganbro reminisces about the time where "Ya got jumped by a year ten and put in a headlock and me and Ficklebro broke the guy's nose for ya."
He then goes a bit misty eyed as he and I both remember Ficklebro. Ficklebro stabbed a guy in a fit of anger (he never was good at controlling it), and got sent to juvenile detention for three years. He came back broken and quiet. (With the recent, horrifying revelations at what happened in the Don Dale centre-
institutionalised brutal torture of youth imprisoned in juvenile detention, because apparently Australia is a land of sub-human savages who treat their own citizens worse than they do their enemies.)
It makes horrifying sense what happened to Ficklebro. While Don Dale was in the Northern Territory, it is very very likely that he went through similar trauma in juvenile detention to what the youths in Don Dale did.
So yeah, basically, Ficklebro came out of juvvie broken and quiet, and never the guy he was beforehand. He hung himself the year after highschool finished. It's not a day I'll ever forget: I showed up to his funeral; his brother who i was on good terms with seized me in a bone-crackingly strong and sad hug as the behemoth of a guy cried like a baby over his brother's death. The shitheads who Ficklebro hung out with, oft times people who'd wished me ill or even injured me in high school, crying and commiserating. Fuck, even the principal was there, who stupidly tried to make small talk with me. Not the time and place, you rampaging dumb cunt of a principal. He and I hated each other.
So yeah. Out of the four of us misfits, I'm the ONLY one who's even remotely functional. Ficklebro's dead, suicide; Boganbro's an ex-con former meth addict, and then I hear the news about Jamaicanbro who'd fallen off the radar when he'd moved to <Shitsville>.
Turns out, Jamaicanbro got onto weed after bouts of anorexia. Yeah, it affects males too, but you never hear about it. He'd been (supposedly) prescribed it (I think that was a lie; it's only just now that medicinal marijuana is tentatively being legalised in my state) to treat his anorexia, given that THC interestingly functions similarly but more strongly to the hunger promoter hormone anandamide.
So, presumably that went all well and good for a while, but his mother kicked him out because he was smoking it around his younger (then-12 and 9) siblings. He moved in with his uncle, seesawed dangerously weight-wise, presumably began hearing voices, and was committed to a psychiatric ward for schizophrenia. That's terribly sad, but Boganbro shows me his facebook account, then goes white in the face.
Turns out that in the midst of a psychotic episode, Jamaicanbro's gone missing. No one knows where he is, he's not remotely well or sane right now, and he's been missing for a few days. His sister's put out a public call for help on his account.
Jesus fucking christ. My heart sinks. I stammer "I hope he's alright." Boganbro just nods weakly.
Then as we're heading home, Boganbro smiles and hits me with this armour-piercing statement:
"Ya know, Reudh; you never were socially retarded like you thought you were. You just had trouble trusting people. You socialised fine with us guys back when, and you socialised fine now. Take care of yourself, for fuck's sake."
I laughed bitterly and said "Boganbro, mate, after nearly eight years of no contact and in a single line, you've read me better than any fucking psych ever did." He just looked really sad at that, that even I had had my own respective mental problems.
"See you around, Reudh. Look after yourself."
So that was last Wednesday.