I didn’t think of you all that much until we happened to end up in gym together during high school. By that point, you had gone silent – for whatever reason, you refused to ever speak. It’s one of those odd mysteries, the type of thing that makes people strangely compelled. Of course, I knew the answer – you had a disarmingly high-pitched voice for a boy.

I didn’t think much of it then, your embarrassment. In fact, I found it kind of amusing. How oppressive masculinity is, that you literally went quiet to hide an apparently feminine flaw. More than likely, you were terrified people would hear you speak and assume you were gay.

I briefly reached out to you – we met at a Mexican restaurant along with our mothers and caught up. I questioned why we stopped hanging out, it seemed clear it was the silence. I had read into it, but you had gotten that way with everyone in your life. There had to be more, for you to never reach out – but I didn’t really care.

I had found other friends, ones who spoke to me in ways more than just literal. We could have started to hang out again – but that dinner, that was all I needed. I got the best answer I would get, I could move on from you. Every future encounter would be from a distance, morbid curiosity as I checked out your social media. Our friendship officially ended with what was supposed to be a reunion.

A few years had passed, and your family had moved to a bigger house with a large backyard. We must have been ten or eleven, just hanging in your room playing Yu-Gi-Oh or something. Your younger sister by about two years came in, pest that she was, more than likely to poke fun at you as she tended to do.

Siblings fight and it sometimes gets physical. I recall the time when I was six and my sister got pissed at me for walking too slow to the car – she grabbed my hand and dragged me along, causing me to trip and scrape my forehead against the concrete of our drive. The hilarious thing is how pointless it was – my mom hadn’t even stepped outside yet, so it’s not like my dawdling was delaying us.

The less fun part of that was my mother’s panic over my kindergarten teacher potentially reporting this as a sign of abuse. I thought this was an overreaction, but later learned she had been threatened with the idea of having us taken away after my father was arrested.

I’d seen you get a bit physical with your sister before – you were quick to anger. But usually it wasn’t much at all – or perhaps with how little I had encountered such things before, it didn’t seem like much. But this time, you knocked her to the floor and climbed on top, punching her in the face. I was terrified. This was actual, dangerous violence. I’m not even sure how the rest of that day played out, it’s all kind of a blur after that point.

This isn’t where our friendship ended, but I quietly grew afraid of you. Your sister was a nice girl, she didn’t deserve that. No one did. We drifted apart – I used to think it was because you literally grew silent, but this is the real reason. The new friends I was making as time went on, they weren’t violent like you.

I hope you grew out of this.

I was happy to be invited to your birthday party – I didn’t have many friends, so it was a bit of a new experience to me. My mom made sure we got you a nice gift, though I can’t remember what it was. I’m sure we were happy as always to just spend time together.

After you opened your gifts, your mother handed me a gift bag. It wasn’t my party, I didn’t understand. Inside was a copy of Pokemon Red – and despite my memory lacking in this regard, I’m certain this was a bigger gift than what I had got you.

I was happy to have it, but I remember leaving with this strange mix of confusion and guilt. My mom seemed comparatively confused. I think they were thanking me for being there. Because despite having few friends myself, I think you might have only had me. Just me.

Every time I look back on us, I have this similar feeling. I don’t understand you, how we split apart so distinctly from one another. It’s almost nauseating to look back on someone you were once so close to and realize there’s nothing there – certainly not a desire to reconnect. I’ve gone through several friendships that didn’t work out, but I guess the first stings the most – or maybe it hurts so bad because you’re one of the few things I’ve hung on to from those desolate early years.

I can’t remember the specific moment we met, though it was certainly in grade school. Were we ever in the same class, or did we simply get to know each other because we both were stuck in the same after-school program since our parents worked late?

Many of my fondest memories of my early childhood were with you. Our mothers turned out to be childhood friends, which might have made it easier for them to let us stay over. We played Pokemon together, fantasizing about making our own adventures using the system. Rollercoaster Tycoon was a shared hobby, and I remember one night where we stayed up late watching a bunch of Power Rangers episodes on VHS.

It was an innocent time – though we were naturally mischievous. I remembered learning a new word one day, one I didn’t know the meaning of but through context knew it had to be bad. Of course I shared one day, when we were standing in line for some reason or other. “Masturbation.” You repeated it, and then said it again. You could tell it was bothering me as we neared the adults at the front of the line. You knew to stop before they were in earshot – and I learned to keep the bad words to myself.

Back then, I couldn’t imagine anything better.

Perhaps I glorify this club too much. Perhaps it isn’t really the club at all that matters, but the people it brought together at a specific time and a specific place.

The structure was always quite odd – board games, television, movies. It’s the remnant of a group of friends who wanted to hang out and simply threw together whatever would keep them engaged from 5 in the afternoon to whenever everyone felt like leaving, on the best nights not until the next morning.

There was something undeniably organic about the nature of Techfront, and inviting new people is kind of like telling an in joke to an outsider. Anytime it’s brought up on Quad Day, the same questions are repeated. Why Techfront? Why all these things mashed together? How is this queer? Everything here makes sense to us, but did we fall into a hole so niche that it only appeals to us?

Yet it still remains. Perhaps it’s smaller than I would like, but a new group has formed. This does matter to some people; they show up every week just like we used to do.

So even if Techfront eventually dies off, we’ll always have the memories. Those oddball foreign films I inflicted upon you all, Arkham Horror all-nighters, passionate discussions about Chelsea Manning. Techfront bent to whatever the current members needed it to be, and god, I really needed all of you. Your consistent Saturday night presence was a lifesaver during my hectic experience known as college.

Though I hang around to this day, I decided I should stop meddling in the affairs of Techfront once my then-partner graduated. As a student organization, we were floating in an endless abyss among one thousand like-minded clubs. How do we reach those that might need a club like this?

I reached out to our LGBT resource center. If the previous president had put in the effort to make this a queer-friendly group, I wanted to be the one to finalize that transition, make it official.

I’m not sure if it’s worked – despite being officially associated now, I feel we haven’t made much use of that connection. The first week of that following school year, the resource center had a welcome back event, where clubs were allowed to introduce themselves. Unfortunately, the new president likely wouldn’t make it, and I somehow got talked into the role of presenter – the president ended up arriving anyway, but our battle of who is the more anxious forced me to the front. I sort of froze – how do I explain what Techfront is? Why the hell were we still calling ourselves Techfront after all this time?

But maybe it will linger. All we need is one lucky moment where a couple people check it out and decide to come back the next week.

But I keep thinking to myself – why do I specifically care so much?

I always wanted to be Techfront president – the unfortunate fact being I was in the same graduating class as the first. It simply wasn’t an option for me.

When we hung around for your grad school program, you seemed to be the natural fit. Really, I wanted you to be president because I realized that would give me the closest thing to having power.

And as we all know, there’s nothing more empowering than having a tiny bit of control over some small college club (specifically after having graduated).

Yet I can barely even remember those years. We were so caught up in us that maybe we let things fall to the wayside. The wedding and everything surrounding that time…we were far too busy for you to be in charge of anything.

I think around this time Techfront started to crumble. We had already encountered the unfortunate situation with my class – it turned out most of the regulars graduated together, and a bubble burst. We went from regularly having a couple dozen attendees each week to less than ten. None of us were in a place to build it back up.

Is Techfront going to die? Did we kill it? Or do things just fall apart sometimes?

…I thought there’d be a place for what we all built.

You took over as the second president of my time at Techfront, though you seem to have been running it from the shadows for a while before, the figurative and sometimes literal showrunner.

The previous president was your typical straight white nerd, alarmingly conservative considering the people he surrounded himself with. Yet our choice of subject matters became increasingly, subtly queer under his rule.

I remember when you came out; it was the day after you hosted a Techfront at your apartment over the summer – or could it have been a winter? All I remember is you tended to host over breaks. For whatever reason I felt guilty about misgendering you the night before, even though I obviously didn’t know until the following day. I had met plenty of transgender people by that point, but you were the first who I saw go through the coming out process.

I don’t think I began questioning myself until watching you navigate this territory. Despite my previous encounters, the idea of being transgender felt like this distant thing until that weekend.

We collectively jokes about there being a radical queer agenda taking over Techfront – but it wasn’t really a joke. It was an active effort on the part of several members. So many of us had tried out other nerdy clubs on campus and found ourselves out of place among largely straight and unfortunately unwashed men (though a few of our members were admittedly lacking in hygiene as well…). There were plenty of queer clubs on campus, but they carried it as a focus that similarly rubbed many of us the wrong way. We wanted a halfway point – a place to just chill on the weekend while carrying an actively accepting atmosphere.

So I joined Techfront when it was a general nerdy Saturday evening affair, but it’s your influence that really made Techfront what it is in my mind. It was so relieving to have a place that was queer but not about being queer.