The first time I remember seeing you was at Awana in the Bible church in Three Rivers. I was in fifth grade. You were born a couple month before me, but were in third grade because, as you later explained, you broke your leg in first grade and didn’t go to school for most of the year. The other year you got held back? I’m not sure what you said happened with that, whether you were just behind or a teacher didn’t like you. It wasn’t anything you took responsibility for.

But you loved the Christian metal I had you listen to. You loved horror movies and so did I. The next three years of my high school you were at my house nearly every weekend. Cheech & Chong and MTV and Shark Week—you were obsessed with sharks and wanted to become a marine biologist. By my senior year, we’d been to all the Christian rock or metal concerts and festivals together. We went to church camp together in Upstate New York. Another female friend of ours who was there asked me about you. One summer’s night blanketed with sweat and mosquitos, this friend of ours looked out over ledge, stared into the stygian deep of the lake in the middle of nowhere. She was the preacher’s niece and was apprehensive about you. I told her we were friends, but if there were anyone I knew capable of murder, it was you. We’re still friends now. I wonder if she remembers Schroon Lake?

Every weekend, we’d head to our youth pastor’s house and ask him for the video camera his in-laws gave him to record their baby, but he let us have it because he thought he was keeping us out of trouble. We went back to my house and made comedy movies and music videos: we put on old band marching uniforms and lip-synched Queen and serenaded the cows in the field behind my house to Bon Jovi’s “Always.” We watched so many movies together, that I we received our incomparable cinematic education together. We educated ourselves and bad-mouthed Kevin Smith and Martin Scorsese movies because we were passionate and just knew a real auteur when we saw one.

On Halloween in 1995, we were supposed to hang out, but when I got a hold of your mother on the phone, she told me that you were in jail and that you’d have to explain why once you got out. You did: you got in a fight with your step-father and you punched him. Sheriff’s deputies carted you off to the county lock-up. Nothing much came of it, because you were seventeen at the time. But you swore upon The Bible and John Carpenter’s oeuvre that you’d never get in trouble enough to go to jail again.

We sang DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” at my graduation high school party as my other best friend—the one who isn’t now in prison for murder—played the drums.

I went to Bible college, came back after a year and got married. You were my best man. I encouraged you to go to Bible college too that next year. You did, but dropped out after a semester. You came home and were even more out-of-touch than when you were seven hundred miles away. You called me up one day to tell me you spent all night drinking and spent the next few days not being able to move. The crowd you were running with took you to the hospital where a doctor told you that you might have muscular dystrophy. Turns out, it was just alcohol poisoning. You swore to me, you’d never drink again.

Meanwhile, I became what our faith would call an apostate. I left the church of our youth. Meanwhile, you took the church key they had given you and snuck in at night to wrack up thousands of dollars in one-nine-hundred calls. I heard that our old church excommunicated you—no small feat for a small independent Baptist church; major news in those circles as the only excommunication I’d ever heard was performed by the Pope. Also, my brother had to fire you from his security company because you used an apartment complex office to download pornography. And call one-nine-hundred numbers.

You helped me move a few times, too. We exchanged music and movies. You started dating one girl and she kicked you out of her house for striking her. The cops were called. She filed a restraining order. She said you emailed threats to her. You told me that the IP address would prove you never sent any threats. I believed you, of course. This was right after JC Penney fired you for stealing money from the till.

When my starter marriage ended, you were there for me. I do not forget that at all. We were better than brothers those days. We wrote a horror movie script and talked late into the night like we used to.

But I was done with college and ready to move on and out of the state. You had a hard time keeping a job and had finally found an easy security gig that didn’t know about your past. I went to California and within a month, you told me that you got a twenty-dollar blowjob from a hooker in Kalamazoo, refused to pay her, so she called the cops and filed an assault charge against you. You rode a bus to San Francisco to visit me while charges were pending. You thought about staying, because there wasn’t any way Michigan would extradite. While we were there we drank and you made moves on my girlfriend while I was at work.

When it came time for us to go to the concert for my favorite band, we’d already had the tickets for months. My girlfriend wanted to come with us and I was too drunk to care. I just knew I didn’t want to be around you or her anymore.

You went back to Michigan and got some jail time and two years’ probation.

I took a job in Nashville; I met my now-wife and stumbled through my own turmoil and joy. I had children. By then, every so often, we would reconnect via Facebook, but nothing substantive. In 2013, on the way to drop my kids off at school, my brother called me from Michigan. The fact he was calling me in the morning was a sign of something catastrophic. I answered steeling myself for the death of a loved one.

No. He had been watching the local morning news and saw that you’d been arraigned for the murder of your roommate. I went to work, scoured the local news sites reading up on the event. I read that you lived with a guy ten years younger than us. You’d gotten fired from the security job finally so were working as a personal trainer. You lived close to the university campus in Kalamazoo. We were in our thirties, but you were entrenched and immobile at twenty; madcap and a swift-to-wrath Peter Pan. The newspaper article stated your girlfriend was in her early twenties.

And as the story goes, your roommate and his girlfriend were arguing. You and your girlfriend spent the evening drinking and, according to the narrative in the article, sought to end the argument. When your roommate became belligerent, you took one of your twenty-pound dumbbells and cracked it against his skull. Twice. Your roommate was still alive when the ambulance got to the scene but expired soon after. The article spoke of pools of blood. You spoke of your innocence, despite the eyewitness testimony of the two women present. And I felt myself shedding vestiges of my own youthful innocence.

My former best friend killed someone. It was not in war or self-defense, but in cold blood. And the thing of it was yes, you had called me the month before because you were headed down to Florida—where my family and I now lived—with some friends. You wanted to meet up. When it comes to messages, I’m neurotic. I always reply. Almost always swiftly. But this message I let sit; inert with a radioactive half-life that I had to wait to decay in order to handle. Days passed. Finally, I replied and said if you’re headed to Orlando, Tampa is close. Maybe we could meet up for dinner, meet my wife and children. He said to call him when he was there and gave me his number. I never called him. I called it a pocket veto. I didn’t want you near my family.

You were found guilty of second-degree murder. The Kalamazoo Gazette asked you why didn’t take the stand. You said, “My attorney advised me that I didn’t need to do it. He said I would be fine without it,” and then, “I would have liked to share my side of the story.” In the same article declaring the jury had found you guilty, you declared, “I will fight to prove my innocence…I do plan on exposing the injustice of the legal system.”

You were sentenced to twenty to fifty years in prison. At the sentencing, the Gazette quotes you as emotionless and defiant. “I am not a murderer,” you said. The prosecutors, though, had no problem pinning it on you—with your history of aggravated assault on a girlfriend and a hooker, and your own girlfriend testifying against you—it was academic. And I couldn’t say I was surprised by any of it anymore. As long as I’d known you—going back to getting held back those two years in elementary school—you never took responsibility.

In 2015, your appeal was denied, but it didn’t make any news stories. Your fate was sealed up tight.

Today is July First, your birthday. You’re forty-one now and live in a penitentiary in Michigan. The earliest you could get set free is when you’re fifty-five. Or you might be in prison until you die.

Sometimes I wonder if I had called you back when you were making your way to Orlando, that if  we were able to rekindle some of that old friendship, then maybe the events of that night would have turned out differently for you. That maybe I could have been the good angel on your shoulder shouting at you to quit being such a dumbass. But in the chorus of your own demons, your pride and doubt and rage, would have drowned out that imagined voice of mine.

I still have our old VHS tapes in my garage. I think my VCR still works, too. But I don’t watch those old tapes. I don’t know if I ever will other than to show my kids what I looked like as a young man beyond the strict confines of a four-by-five faded photograph.

And every so often, I feel like I should write a letter to you in prison. But I’m not sure what I would say to you anymore and not have it come off as condescending or judgmental or a hollow gesture.

I picture you sitting on the edge of your bunk bed in a painted white concrete prison cell—a composite of Hollywood scenes—and flip through a Bible. I imagine you’ve gotten right with God, that you have renewed your devotion to Jesus Christ. I also wonder if living in prison insulates you from feeling middle-aged (this is something I had to embrace a few years ago after a week full of dreams in which I popped bubble wrap)—and I wonder if you’ve reached that epiphany yet or if having no children or job or spouse has allowed you to continue that fanciful view of yourself. I wonder how often murderers contemplate mortality?

Though I see that Bible—leather-bound and with tissue paper-pages—hang limply in your hands, I wonder if you know I no longer share that faith? Still, I still love you. And a part of me hopes we can get together for a coffee and talk about all the great movies and TV shows you have missed. And a part of me hopes they never let you out.

– Aaron Buchanan