Every time I hear this song, I feel a little bit of shame.

I had this friend that I knew online. I knew he was really nice and we used to spend quite a bit of time online messaging back and forth about nothing terribly serious. Everything was very surface level, I didn’t know a thing about him.

Until the day he said he wasn’t logging into the place we had been messaging anymore, it didn’t bring him any value anymore. But he said he’d like to keep in contact with me and I said yes. So we moved to a different platform and we started actually getting to know each other.

And I was surprised. I hadn’t realised how much he cared about his family, how much effort he put into his career, the ambition that he had. When we were surface-level friends I thought he was sweet and funny. But seeing the depth in him I knew him to be determined and hard-working and incredibly loving to those he cared about. It wasn’t a massive circle of people but it was clear to see in how he spoke about those in his life how much they meant to him.

And it was all so appealing to me.

We were talking about music once and he told me that he’d had lots of thoughts about song and music recommendations for me that he’d never shared with me. Intrigued I asked like what?

At the top of my head, he said, I’d say Call My Name by Lukas Graham.

I wasn’t familiar with the song when he said that. But I did immediately go to listen to it. And I remember feeling so emotional listening to it that first time. I remember thinking how has this one person so clearly seen straight into my loneliness?

The song is about recognising the hard work of someone else but reminding them that they don’t have to do things themselves. Lean into me, I’m here for you. And I cried listening to it, thinking that that were words he’d heard and thought of me.

Briefly, we did a minor foray into something more romantic. But he was so intense in everything that I almost felt overwhelmed by the pressure he brought with him. I knew that if things remained in the shallow end of things, I’d be fine. But I also knew he’d never settle for that and at the time I didn’t know how to bring that up, how to deal with that. To deal with him.

So instead I didn’t. Bless him, a very toxic person came back into my life and I used the distraction of him as a reason to ghost this other lovely, gorgeous man. Instead of having an adult, mature conversation with him I just …stopped messaging him. I feel bad about it to this day. He didn’t deserve that. He deserved so much more than me. I’ve often thought about reaching out to find him to apologise. But too much time has passed and I know any apology I could give him would be more for my benefit than his, so I won’t.

He’ll never come across this blog so I won’t use his name. I’ve made a promise to myself to protect the anonymity of people I write about here. But if I could, I’d tell him that even though we weren’t in each other’s lives for long the short time he was in mine he made a big impact and I think about him still years later. I’d apologise for the truly shitty way that I treated him. He saw into my soul in that brief period of time and I definitely did not appreciate him enough.

So if you need a friend someone to hold your hand call my name and I won’t be far away