Monday, November 26, 2018
5:45 pm

Guys,

I’ve thrown a lot at you at once. I’m sorry for that. We can talk about the ways I feel Greg abused my vulnerabilities this summer and renegotiate those boundaries later. It feels more important to address this elephant in the room first — just what the hell happened with my friendship with Tony, my once best friend but now complete stranger.

Greg and I have talked a lot about the places we have most felt like we belonged — our personal Gardens of Eden. The space where I felt that truest sense of inclusion was the space I shared with the following people in 2017:

• Kevin
• Greg
• Jeff
• Tony

Truly, guys, I don’t care if you all fucked. I mean, I’m surprised if you haven’t, because, well, Kevin and I have fucked Tony. I care that, for one reason or another, I found myself outside the gates of my Garden of Eden.

Tony is a complete stranger to me to me now, but, somehow, he is among your best of friends. And that’s painful for me. It makes me feel rejected, replaced, abandoned.

Maybe you guys didn’t actively exclude me, and this was a narrative I have been crazily telling myself since New Years’ Eve. While there may have been no active exclusion,I have to say I saw no active effort of inclusion either.
Maybe you could have arranged for him to join on one of your many trips.
Maybe I could have explicitly asked.
Maybe a million things could have happened where the five of us remained a cohesive group.

A family.

But none of those things happened.
He didn’t even try. He never responded when I sent my message back in June about being too afraid to come to Baltimore ever again. He never came to visit, called to check in, he didn’t do anything when I started understanding and talking about the danger that waited for me in the Baltimore area. Nor after I explained to him my severe isolation in Silver Spring in August.

He and I used to talk all the time, but it just stopped suddenly, without explanation at the beginning of 2018. He stopped showing any evidence to me that cared about me in any way shape or form. Now, I am forced to build a home in the wilderness outside of the gates of my Eden, because that community I once called home still exists.
It just exists without me.

It’s a fracture that is taking a long time to heal; it is a wall that I just needed named.
I need some time to forget Tony.

All my love,

Tim Kuhn