My Friend and Joshua Tree

Part 1: My Friend

Before I launch into a description of the rest of my travels, maybe I should set aside some time to reflect on the evolution of my friendship with this particular friend I came out to see.

It's one of my most interesting relationships. We met each other in high school, mainly because our friends were friends with each other, not necessarily because we personally knew each other beforehand.

I bring that up as relevant context for the fact that after we found out that we were going to UC Berkeley for school, we decided to become roommates for our freshman year. And that started off on a terrible note.

Some lowlights I can recall:

• I remember getting into a stupid argument with him about making food in our dorm vs. just getting food from the dining hall. It was so dumb. I didn't understand why he cared so much about wanting to be able to cook for himself in the dorm, and I got so angry over something so pointless that I threw a tantrum where I flipped over a chair and stormed out of the room after arguing with him about this. And this was just the first week of us living together; school hadn't even started yet.
• I then fell in pretty deep with a very high-control Christian evangelical church at Berkeley. My friend was and is a staunch atheist, and he absolutely did not appreciate my attempts to save his soul.
• As a sub-point to this, I still consider myself a devout Christian, but what that actually means has evolved quite a bit.

Things normalized towards the end of our freshman year, but at that point I'd become so involved in that church that we basically didn't really see or interact with each other for the next 5 years because I'd fully thrown my lot in with my Christian brothers and sisters.

Perhaps I might write more about that saga of my life, but this isn't really the time or place for it now.

Anyways, fast-forward to around 2018/2019 era. I was now living in Los Angeles, and so was my friend, though we didn't really hang out all that much. However, another close mutual friend of ours was thinking about moving to Los Angeles as well because he got accepted into the UCLA ophthalmology program and would be living here for the next three years. And this prompted discussions of the three of us living together.

I remember one evening, my friend (the one already living in Los Angeles) inviting me out to dinner so we could have a frank discussion about what it would be like being roommates again, considering just how rocky it had been when we first lived together. I was excited at the prospect of the three of us boys just hanging out in LA together,