During my freshman year of high school, I found a free online game that I used mostly for socializing. The game had private messaging as well as clans, and I met a lot of people I consider good friends in my clan. One of the friends I met had the screen name Ezequiel330, or Eze for short.

I never got the chance to know him as anything else.

I met Eze in my clan and we became friends pretty quickly. He was a few years older than me, but that doesn't matter as much online. We talked a lot in private chat and clan chats, and even made up a secret code for fun (using every 3rd letter in a jumbled message). We grew close, and he told me that his foster parents were abusive, he was depressed, and his girlfriend was his light in life and one of the reasons he kept going.

Not long after he told me that, his girlfriend broke up with him.

For a while, Eze was depressed but still around... until I came home one day to a message from him saying goodbye.

His game profile had a long post saying goodbye and he was going to commit suicide. The message was four hours before I got home from school. It read, "Goodbye crystal (my screenname)....forever....I wish you the best of luck in life." His post on his profile also said goodbye to me specifically and that I was his best friend on the game. The last message I had sent to him was about the fact we hadn't talked in a week.

I messaged him after seeing everything, but I don't have much hope he will ever message me back. I was hopeful for a few days, but after months and months of no response, I've stopped believing.

Somebody once told me they consider knowing somebody online for a year as only really knowing them for a few months, but I believe what Eze said, even when I hope he didn't mean it. I keep hoping I'll go back to the game and he'll have messaged me that it was all some big, sick joke and he got me, though he wasn't one to joke like that.

It's been over three years, and I still occasionally go back to the game to look.

One thing that's always bothered me is wondering if I could have stopped him, had stayed home from school. I wonder if he would have stayed if I had been able to talk to him when he messaged me. I lived only a few blocks away from my high school, so I could have even gone home at lunch and had a chance to at least talk to him one last time.

Another thing I've struggled with is the Catholic idea of suicide as a mortal sin. Committing a mortal sin and not repenting for it (as you wouldn't be able to with suicide) causes your soul to go to hell with no chance of Heaven. Eze was one of the kindest, sweetest people I have ever met, and it doesn't make sense to me that an all-loving, all-forgiving God would damn a good person to hell because they felt suicide was the only way to get out of the pain life was giving them.

I don't know what it's like to have a friend I know in-person kill themselves, thankfully, but that also brings me to another realization: I never even knew Eze's real name. He may have told me the state he lived in at one point, but it was so offhand that I don't remember now. I don't remember if I ever knew his favorite color, his favorite food, his favorite type of music. I don't know if it's more important that I didn't know his name or if I do know why he killed himself. I don't know if not knowing his name makes him less trustworthy, so less likely he actually killed himself. I don't know if he did kill himself or not because I don't know how to find him. I don't know if any of that even matters in being a real friend.

My last struggle was that for a long time, I was angry. Angry that we hadn't talked for a week before, angry that he hadn't given me any time to try to talk him out of it, and angry at myself for not sending any messages sooner and not staying home that day. I was angry that he hurt me by doing it and I felt like he was being selfish. It took me a long time to get over being angry, and now when I think of it I feel a reluctant and defeated acceptance.

I don't think deeply of him much anymore. Sometimes I'll have passing thoughts, but not enough to bring me back to thinking about how I feel about it or how it's affected me, mostly because I've tried thinking and talking and writing about it and never get any answers to my questions.

It's easier to ignore the questions than agonize over them and wonder if I could've done something more than just be his friend.