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Preface // Time Changes

I still can’t be sure how or when it began. I can’t even give you a vague or indescriptive time frame that won’t help you understand the situation at all. But the ‘when’ isn’t important; not here. Not even the ‘why’. What is just is. And that’s what’s important.

The ‘what’.

I was a firm believer that time changed all of us. It was inevitable. No matter how hard we fought, no matter how strong we resisted, we all changed in one way or another. It just was. And we both changed. It was as simple as that.

Well, I wished it was as simple as that.

I have a feeling it began on my birthday all those ten years ago. Ten years. Had it really been that long? It was a cool autumn afternoon and all of my friends had gathered to celebrate in the rather large New Jersey home. The leaves were falling; I remembered thinking that morning how different it was from Florida weather. Down where I once lived, in Southern Florida, we would be lucky for a dip into seventy degrees in the fall, whereas in New Jersey, you had to bundle up as early as August. It was a nice change actually, the brisk, fresh air, compared to the stuffiness of the place I once called home.

I had wondered all morning just where he was. He hadn’t called or even sent his younger brother to deliver a message. It was the strangest thing. He had been invited; in fact, he was the first one who had been. He was the only one who I really counted on showing. And ironically, everyone had shown up but him. So where was he?

He’d never once missed my birthday. He’d come at least for a few minutes, and there was only one occasion where he’d stayed for a brief time before leaving. And that time hadn’t been optional. He had been bed-ridden for weeks with a serious case of the flu, and it took his mom showing up to fetch him and his passing out before he finally left. Again, not his choice. He’d been dragged away and taken home to receive his antibiotics. But I digress.

It was my seventh that year. Not too important in itself, but still, I was growing up by one annum, so it was a pretty special occasion to me. And usually my birthdays were a celebration for him too.

As my friends were eating cake and I was half-heartedly laughing at someone’s joke – to this day I don’t know who told it – my mom came up to me and told me discreetly that Gerard had something come up. But she wouldn’t give me exact details. Fearing the worst and being a panicky little kid, I pressed for more but she wouldn’t tell me. No one would. It wasn’t until three years later that I actually found out what had come up.

Only that time, the ‘what’ hadn’t been important. It was the ‘who’.

The ‘she’, actually, and more specifically Mary-Ann Johnson, the little girl who lived two houses away from him, had wanted to go to the park with him. He was smitten with her, and agreed to do so, completely forgetting his obligation to attend his best friend of now seven years’ birthday party. It was only when he’d been brushing his teeth later that night that he remembered. At the time, he was unsure of why his mother had been ill at ease for letting him go with Mary-Ann to the park, and why his dad had been a tad cold to him, launching into a strange lecture on the importance of good friends.

He still hadn’t recalled.

But he said he’d been brushing his teeth, and felt horrible about being so forgetful and stupid as to forget about my birthday. I was still steamed with him, and hadn’t quite forgiven him. He’d noticed too, and tried his best to make it up to me.

From that point on, there had been a wall between us. We were young, and we’d had a three-year age difference between us, something that, as time went on, people noticed and didn’t let us forget. That was when the wall got taller, and as more friends and realizations came, it got even taller again, and finally, no matter how high you jumped, you couldn’t see the other side.

I said I hated him. I thought I hated him. At one time, I knew I hated him.

But I could never hate him.

Time had simply changed us. The birthday incident had only been the tip of the iceberg. And when we got older, and blew each other off more, and found we had less in common than we thought, we knew we weren’t the same people who had shared their sand in the playground when they were still considered ‘babies’.

In a way, we were through. The bond was broken, and we were free to be left to our own devices, something that hadn’t gone unnoticed by our peers, but our parents had remained oblivious to. It was done – all over.

Any history between us would be forgotten, we would lead our lives, and we would ‘hate’ each other from that point on.

That was it.

And nothing was left of the friendship between us – Pamela Rose Daughtry and Gerard Arthur Way.