My Samsung phone has a quirky habit of intermittently making “stories” out of a succession of photographs. These little slide shows are accompanied by cheesy music, feature random fades, wipes and other effects and are punctuated by enthusiastic pastel graphics with cute expressions that might really delight an eight year-old Korean girl.  Sometimes these stories are wildly inappropriate.  A group of photographs of bloody toilet bowls and urinals, when I was tracking how often I peed blood, and how long each spell took to pass, comes to mind.  Set to a peppy little pop tune with a particularly inane melody, and mischievous winking emojis, it was a classic of its kind. I got a real kick out of the hematuria story.

There are a number of stories with photographs of three people, our heads close together, smiling, playfully holding each other‘s chins, poking each other in the cheek, putting devil horns behind each other’s heads and so on. The three smiles are very genuine, sometimes the heads are caught in the moment one or all are laughing.   They’re set against a number of backdrops.  A beautiful snowy forest, with the three dressed in full winter gear, with hats and scarves and pink cheeks and noses. A summerscape with glittering water in the background, me wearing a Hawaiian shirt, the other two in T-shirts. There are nighttime shots with the Brooklyn Bridge behind us, one with a slightly pissed off camel looking over our shoulders . . .

. . . I saw a few of these Samsung photo stories lately, after I switched to a new 5G phone in a vain effort to restore phone and internet service in my suddenly dead zone apartment. One after another, three happy faces, sometimes pushed against each other, best friends forever.

The idea that this easy, loving friendship could ever not be was unthinkable to all of us, never occurred to any of us, until our first outbreak of conflict and the incredibly painful aftermath.  Now the unthinkable has become the new normal.  Not only are we no longer friends, but I am, to everyone we knew in common, a walking cadaver, stinking, grotesque and scary.  I am approachable on pain of death, as they have made clear to everyone else.   The stories they’ve created and told about me would put the Samsung story bot to shame!

It strikes me now, trying to show our specific friendship, rather than sketch it generically, how difficult it is to describe something so natural, flowing and seemingly right.  It’s as hard as trying to capture my affable, intelligent, witty father’s monstrousness — there was no single snapshot that could illustrate it, no broken bones necessitating a trip to a midnight ER or anything like that.  So it is with my once dearest lifelong friends and their extended social and family circle.  

All I can provide is the Samsung story version of something that seemed so vital, precious and eternal, but which turned out to be as brittle as the thin crust of ice toward the middle of the frozen pond that laughing children are about to drown in.  The best I can do now, looking back with a bitter understanding I never wanted, is make my warning to the other children as clear and memorable as I can.