I want to tell you about my life before I started disappearing, because the contrast matters. For ten years I had been, in my own estimation, one of the lucky guys who actually had a close-knit group of male friends into his thirties. We were "the guys." We had a group chat we had named, in 2013, "The Degenerates," a name nobody was particularly proud of anymore but that we had not updated. We met once a month for poker. We did an annual ski trip. We had gotten married, all five of us, within a three-year span, and our wives had, to varying degrees, become friends too.

I had been the kind of man who used the phrase "my best friends" without hesitating, and who would have told you, any day up until about April of last year, that Jake, Derek, Ben, and Sam were my brothers. I had also, starting about two years ago, begun to notice things about three of them that I had previously found ways not to notice. And I had reached, somewhere in that long noticing, a breaking point that I did not have the courage to confront. So instead, I had done the cowardly thing. I had started disappearing.