My best friend isn’t real.

Growing up, I always thought the scariest thing in the world was forgetting someone you loved. But recently, I’m beginning to think otherwise.

My best friend doesn’t exist. There’s no other way I can put this. I’m not trying to sound poetic, or dramatic or like I’m a little kid who’s trying to prove that he’s outgrown his “Imaginary friend” phase. I literally mean that my best friend does not exist.

Michael was real. I’ve known him for as long as I can remember. I don’t even remember how we met, it’s been that long. There’s no “Hey man, nice to meet you” moment, I don’t know if we met in day care, or primary school or what. He’s just kind of always been in my memory. He was real in every way that mattered.

He was a bit taller than me, skinny enough that even the tightest clothes looked baggy on him, he had messy blonde hair, a cleft lip scar, and his laugh always ended with a sound that was almost like he was about to start choking. I remember everything about him, which has been confusing me, because nobody else seems to.

And it’s not like he just vanished one day, it started small. Three weeks ago, at around 2:30am on a Saturday. We had been playing Minecraft for hours, on a hardcore realm we had been playing on for months. I had started talking a bit too loud, and it woke up my mother, who had stormed in.

“Jackson! It is 2:30 in the morning, who are you even talking to at this hour?” She shouted at me.

I responded “Sorry, I’m just on with Michael, I didn’t realize the time.”, my mother looked confused for a moment, before asking “Who’s Michael? Is that a new friend?”, I had looked at her almost offended. I could hear Michael chuckling on his end, and he said to me “Dude, your mum doesn’t remember me?”.

I took off my headset and said to mum “Michael. My best mate since forever. You’ve met him a million times.”, but she didn’t really seem to care.

“Whatever, just get off the game. Now.”, she said it in the tone of voice that I had always known to be the first and only warning. She walked back to her bedroom, so I put my headset back on and said to Michael “Hey man, I gotta go to bed, but I’ll talk to you tomorrow, yeah?”, and closed the game. He quickly responded “Yeah fair man, sleep well brother”, and got off the discord call. But I had noticed something strange. Discord had shown me that he left the call before he could finish speaking, yet I still heard the last words after. I had just brushed it off as a sync glitch, discord being discord.

I woke up at around 11am, and logged onto discord to check my messages. When it opened, the first chat I had open was Michaels’, as usual, but I noticed something else strange. We usually did a call every couple of nights, when we’d play, but the chat showed no call history. I scrolled through. All of our chats were there, photos, even voice messages, but no call history. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it, so I ignored it, and left to go annoy my sister.

A few hours had passed, I was out for an early dinner with the family, when I got bored and sent a message to Michael.

JaxNumba1: Bro this place is so fkn boring, like the pinnacle of boring old people

MagicMike: Oh no, you get to go to a fancy restaurant

JaxNumba1: Say what u will man, the only appeal that these places have is the food is slightly higher quality than other places
JaxNumba1: Oh btw, my discord is having a weird glitch, our call history just isn’t popping up, like at all

MagicMike: Fr? Is it just on my chat or

JaxNumba1: Yeah, it’s weird

MagicMike: It’s probably nothing, u gonna be on the realm tn?

JaxNumba1: Maybe, I’ll lyk. I gtg, they finally brought our food out🫩

MagicMike: Bet bro, ttyl
MagicMike: Bet bro, ttyl
MagicMike: Bet br o, t t ly
MagicMike: Bt b t

JaxNumba1: Bro u good?

Michael just went right offline after that. I kind of just told myself that he was messing with me. He’d been watching Black Mirror at the time and was obsessed with it, but something wasn’t right with me. Not knowing what else to do, I just turned off my phone and went back on with family dinner.

After we had gotten home, I decided to hop on the realm, I didn’t really bother checking to see if he was online, I was still gonna play whether or not he was on. The world booted up, and I was greeted with Michaels’ avatar staring directly at mine. For some reason it made me jump a bit. I typed into the game chat.

JaxNumba1: Hey bro, what happened earlier?

Mag1cM1ch43l: wdym

JaxNumba1: u sent me the same message twice followed by like 2 attempts at the message

Mag1cM1ch43l: whatever u say, crazy man

We played for a bit, not really talking, just off doing our own things. My mother came into the room and asked me if I wanted to join her and my sister for a movie night. I told her “Nah, I’m playing Minecraft with Michael”. She looked at me confused again, as if I had only just started talking about this guy. She asked me “Is this a new friend at school?”.

I sighed, and looked at her, frustrated.
“My best friend, since childhood, the dude who’s slept over once month since I was like 10, you’re seriously telling me you don’t remember his name?”. My mum looked at me like I was crazy.
“Honey, you haven’t had a sleepover here for years”, she told me with confidence.
“Mum, he was here just last week, we had pizza and stayed up the entire night”, I told her with exasperation.
“No”, she said. “Your cousin James was here last week, you had pizza and then he went home”.

I sat there confused for a moment. I thought back, and I vaguely remembered James being there, but not completely. Almost like he had stopped by for a moment, but left before we could even exchange words. I just turned back to my computer screen, and saw an in-game message pop up.

Mag1cM1ch43l has joined the game.

I was confused for a moment, I figured maybe his internet crashed and he rejoined, but when I checked the chatlogs, there was no system message saying he left. I pressed tab to check the in-game player count, but it said it was just me in the game. It shouldn’t be possible, but at the time I kind of just figured it was a glitch. But then a message from Michael popped up.

Mag1cM1ch43l: help

I immediately responded

JaxNumba1: ???
JaxNumba1: What’s up?

No response. I decided to go and check our private server that we have with a couple other mates. We have a bot on there that allows us to talk to players in the realm, through a specific server chat, and vice versa. But I was shocked to see that Michaels chat logs weren’t on there. Just me, talking to no one. I checked Minecraft again, and suddenly his in-game messages were gone. I had enough of the weirdness, so I did a complete system reset and triple checked that my firewall was on, before joining my mum and sister in the lounge room.

The next day, I went to church with the whole family. Michael has always known that Sunday is the one day where I don’t bother with anything online, he just sends me dumb memes on Instagram, or whatever, so nothing really happened until the next day at school. I rocked up at my usual time and sat in our usual spot in the library. My other friend, Tyler, walked in and sat with me.

“Oi dude, who were you talking to on the server the other night?”, he asked me.
“Michael. The system was being weird, I don’t know how to explain it”.
Tyler looked at me for a moment, as if that name was unfamiliar to him. But he didn’t say anything, and just opened something on his laptop. A few minutes went by, and Michael still hadn’t shown up. I figured he had slept in or something, so I just got up and headed to my period 1 class. But then something weird happened, around halfway through, Michael walked in and sat next to me.

The weird part of this, is not that he came in late, that was a common thing for him, it’s that our teacher, Mr. Pearce, didn’t say anything when he walked in. Mr. Pearce has a reputation for being super strict with late arrivals, sometimes even yelling at students who came in late, so for Mr. Pearce to not give him any shit was weird. I had just assumed he didn’t think it was worth yelling at Michael over anymore. I tried telling Michael about the weird discord/Minecraft glitch, but he claimed that he wasn’t online at all that night, not even for a minute.

I thought that he was for sure screwing with me at this point, but he insisted that he was telling the truth. I kept telling myself that he was screwing with me, but he seemed so honest. I have always been able to tell when he’s lying, and when he’s telling the truth, and in this moment, he seemed to be being honest with me. But I just can’t accept that it’s the truth. I decided to just drop it and move on. But for the rest of the day, when I’d talk to him, people in my classes would give me weird looks

The following Wednesday was when things just got weirder. Michael hadn’t shown up for school all day, and he wasn’t responding to my messages, just leaving me on seen all day. I figured he might be sick or something, so I left it. That was until I bumped into him at the IGA near school, but it wasn’t quite…him? I didn’t recognize him at first, he looked so different. His hair wasn’t blonde anymore, it was more of a light brown, or a tan, weirdly enough like a peanut. It’s possible that he maybe dyed his hair, but then I saw his lip. The surgery scar from his cleft lip surgery. It was gone. Like it had never been there in the first place.

It took me a minute to realize it was him, if he hadn’t spoken, I would’ve just assumed he was any other person. Then I noticed the bags under his eyes, he looked like he hadn’t slept in days, like he had been keeping himself awake. He looked terrified, and confused.
“Help me, Jackson. Help. Me!”
“Wait, Michael? What the fuck happened man?”

Before Michael could even respond, my mum yelled out to me from her car.
“Jackson, who are you talking to?”
I turned to look at her, and as I was about to respond, I turned, and Michael wasn’t there anymore. I looked in every direction, but I couldn’t see him. It was like he just disintegrated. I immediately pulled out my phone, and went to message Michael. I tried his number first, but I couldn’t even find him in my contacts. Then I opened Instagram, and when I went to find his account, there was nothing. Discord was my final hail Mary. I opened it, and luckily enough, his account was still there. I sent him a message, asking him where he went. I waited a few moments for a response, but nothing. So I got into mums car, and on the drive home, I tried my hardest to rationalize it. The only way I could make sense of it, is that he ran off and around a corner after I turned away.

But I kept getting this sinking feeling in my stomach that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t figure it out, but every time I thought about it, that feeling got stronger. When I got home, I went to my room and opened discord on my pc, waiting to see if Michael was going to message me back. After a minute, I saw the “MagicMike is typing…” thing pop up. It kept going for what seemed like forever, then it just stopped. It popped up a few more times, but no message ever came through.

And then he sent an audio message. I quickly played it, hoping he would explain what was happening. I guess wishful thinking really got me, because all I could hear was static. Like TV static. Like the TV at 3am when the signal shits itself static. Just static. I typed back “Dude wtf is going on with you?”, and hit enter. I immediately got a notice message when I tried to send it.

“Error. This user does not exist”

I couldn’t make sense of this. I tried to send the message a few times more, but I kept getting the same notice message each time. I scrolled through our chat. Surely, if this user didn’t exist, then our messages wouldn’t exist either, right? So I kept scrolling, for what seemed like forever. That was when I noticed it. Michaels messages were being deleted, in real time. Each one, disappearing, one after the other. I thought Michael had to have absolutely been screwing with me, but I thought back a bit. His Instagram account not being there? He could’ve maybe just blocked me as a part of this prank. His hair being a different colour? He had to have dyed it. His cleft lip scar? Maybe he covered it with makeup or something. But his contact disappearing from my phone? There’s no way he could’ve done that. He doesn’t know my phone passcode and he isn’t nearly that good with computers. And even if he did somehow figure out my phone passcode, there’s no way he could’ve snatched my phone, unlocked it, deleted his contact, and slipped my phone back into my pocket fast enough for me to not notice. I know the guy well enough to know that he isn’t that smart.

I was getting more and more worried by the second. I needed answers. I needed to figure out if this really was a prank, or if something seriously wrong is going on. So on Thursday, pulled a sickie. I told mum that I had a really bad headache and felt like I was going to throw up. I played it well enough for her to let me stay home. Shortly after she left for work, I grabbed my phone, my bag, and headed out. I went straight to his house. His mother doesn’t work during the day, so I knew I was going to be able to speak to her, and I was hoping she would give me answers.

I knocked once. A couple minutes passed, and no answers. I knocked again. Another couple minutes had passed, and still, no answer. I knocked a third time, and louder. After a few seconds, she had opened the door.
“Hey Lauren, sorry to bother you, but is Michael home?” I asked, hopeful that she’d say yes. She looked at me with this horrified look, as if I had just asked her if her recently deceased family member was still alive.
“Who are you? How do you know my name? How do you know that name?” she asked me as tears rolled down her cheek.
“It’s me, Jackson. Michaels best mate. You’ve met me a hundred times” I told her. She wasn’t having it.
“Mate, I don’t know who you are, or who you got that name from, but I suggest you drop it. This isn’t funny. You don’t know Michael, you’ve never known Michael, and I’ve never known you. So drop it!”

I was getting more agitated, so I snapped at her.
“Ok look, I’m getting sick of this. Is he just playing some prank on me or not? Things have been really fucking weird, and I just want answers…sorry for my language ma’am”
This just made her angrier.
“Mate, if you don’t drop it, I will be calling the police. Get off my property. Now”
“Lauren, I’ve known Michael my whole life, I know he has blonde hair, I know his favourite show is Black Mirror and that he loves anything and everything horror, and I know that he was born with a cleft lip. I don’t know if you’re in on some prank or not, but I’m not leaving until I get answers”

She looked at me, for a moment, it seemed like she recognised me, but then she didn’t. She started sobbing.
“How did you know about that? Nobody else knew about his cleft lip but me and his doctors.” She said, trying to make sense between the sobs.
“Believe it or not, the scar is very noticeable. That kid has had it his whole life”, that really seemed to set her off more.
“He never got to be a kid!” She shouted. “You have 30 seconds to get off my property before I call the police!”

Defeated, I left. But what she said really stuck with me. “He never got to be a kid!”. I repeated it in my head the whole walk home. When I finally got home, I went straight to my bedroom, and curled up in a ball, and just cried. I ended up praying to god for answers that night. I messaged other people who had known Michael, asking if they remembered him, but no one even seemed to recognise the name, and every time I described him, they’d just get more confused. I looked through my photo album on my phone, that I had labelled “Good memories”. I had it filled with photos of me and Michael, from year 6 camp, to our last sleepover. I hoped that maybe if someone saw a photo of him, they’d remember. But he was in none of them. Not a single photo of him. Every moment that I remembered being with him, that I vividly remembered having photos of, was only a photo of me, and a big space next to me where Michael would’ve been.

I’m lost here. This guy that I’ve been best friends with, my whole life, is just suddenly a distant memory to me, and seemingly non-existent to everyone else. There seems to be no trace of him anywhere, his accounts are all gone. Every last one. His name isn’t on any of our shared classes roll calls, and his photo has disappeared from all of our yearbooks. Even class photos from primary school, he isn’t in them anymore. He’s just gone.

I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m scared and confused. I’m hoping that by posting this, someone can give me answers as to what happened, where Michael might have gone, or simply if anyone else has gone through this.
So please, if you’re reading this, and you have an answer. Tell me. I just want to know what happened to my best friend.

I typed the above about a week ago, and I’ve been debating whether or not to post it since then. I’m typing this final paragraph here, before posting, as just a sort of current update. I’ve started to forget all the details about Marcell…or was it Max? I can’t even really remember his name anymore. I’ve been reading through this whole thing, trying to remember details about him. But now I’m forgetting him, and for some reason, my brain won’t LET me remember him either. I read his name over and over. I can see it, I can read it, and I can understand it. But then it just gets fuzzy. As if my brain is just rejecting the idea of this guy. I keep trying to think back to moments I’ve had with him, but it’s like trying to draw a connection to a false memory. I can’t recognise them as my own anymore. As I type up these last words, I keep trying to grieve the loss of a friend, but my brain just won’t allow me to feel for someone who never existed.

So to Marcell, or Max, or Mason, or whatever your name is. If you are somehow out there somewhere. I’m sorry.