Maybe your secret friend was someone who you thought others would not approve of. Or perhaps that person didn’t quite fit your style because he or she was quite different from you. It’s not an easy thing when loyalty confronts conventional expectations.
One of my secret friends is a student I teach in the parole office. Give him some hair and remove his head-to-toe skinhead tattoos and he’d be your best next door neighbor. Thoughtful. Kind. Caring.
But with tattooed skinhead symbols, skulls scrawled all over him, and “5150” (“a person deemed to have a mental disorder that makes them a danger to him or her self, and/or others and/or gravely disabled”) around his neck, and he appears to be a social persona non grata. Not the sort of fellow you might want to be perceived as being your friend.
I’ve known him for over two years. He struggles to progress toward the academic goals I’ve hoped for him in my literacy lab at the parole office. Medications cause him to slump over his computer terminal frequently. I wake him up. Sometimes he leaves the class in a drug-induced stupor.
If he stopped taking the drugs, he would resume cutting his legs with his pocketknife. His legs are numb from nerve damage, making it difficult for him to ride his bicycle, his only means of transportation.
He started taking drugs to control his psychoses at the age of five. Growing up, he regularly battled his violent father, who soon left him and his mother. Now he now lives with a girlfriend in a motel, which, because of his disabilities, is partially subsidized by the parole department. Ironically, his girlfriend works as a security guard.
At age 15, he was incarcerated. He served 15 years for attempted murder and for assaulting a corrections officer while in prison.
Once enamored with skinheads, he now disdains them, recognizing that he gave up much of his life to remain loyal to their errant beliefs. An iron cross now covers the swastika tattooed on the back of his hand.
My friend believes in God, in many ways to God, and in many gods. He asks me to pray for him, and I do. He is glad for it, and he tells me so, and he tells me he prays for me.
In time, our paths will inevitably part. And when they do, we both will have benefited from our journey together.