My Most Beautiful Goodbye, or: How to Properly Inhale Nitrous Oxide

This is the story of the most beautiful goodbye I have ever experienced.
It started, of course, with a hello.

I was having a rough time in school. I was 8 or 9 years old, and my third-grade class had two kids in it, five if you count the children from other grades that shared our classroom. I was at the bottom of the social ladder (did you know totem poles actually place the highest status faces at the bottom?), mostly because I was part of a different sect of Orthodox Judaism than everyone else in my class, because I was not part of the Chassidic dynasty the school was a branch of, and because I wasn't very good at basketball.

One day, that changed. There was a hustle and bustle in school, and rumors spread around frantically like a partially deflated basketball passed around our lopsided schoolyard. A New Kid was coming, they said. We were to have a New Kid in our tiny class. “He looks kind of like you,” the most popular kid in class said in my direction. This excited me, but my eyes rolled in frustration when I did see him, though - the only visual similarity this new kid had was that he, too, was chubby.

He was a huge 9-year-old. Taller than any of us, and wider too. He had a giant smile and curved sidelocks, and he said “ah” a lot. I had never heard someone say “ah” like that before. I've said it like that ever since - one of the many mannerisms I've picked up from loved ones over the course of my life. He was Russian and spoke it fluently. His mother was a Refusenik in the Soviet Union back in the day - which meant she refused to adhere to the Soviet ban on Judaism and mocked, annoyed, and generally messed with the secret police when they put her under house arrest for it. He rarely spoke of his biological father, and when he did, his smile faded. His name was Alex. (it wasn't really Alex, it was something else).

But here was the awesome, game-changing thing about Alex: he was a nerd. A true nerd, like me, so we became friends, friends at the bottom of the status ladder, friends who ‘looked alike’, friends who didn't fit in the class, but fit in with each other. He introduced me to true nerd euphoria. Because his family was less strictly religious than mine, he had access to something I didn't - an Xbox. And on the Xbox, Halo. When Alex talked about Halo, his entire demeanor changed. He would regale me with the universe's lore, make sound effects, and beam with joy as he did. I was enraptured. We'd talk about that and everything else together, and learned our senses of humor were similar, our taste in stories and sci-fi guns were similar, and our frustrations with life were similar. We were friends. Friends in the way only two nine-year-old boys can be.

We stayed that way throughout middle school. And then came time for high school, and we had to say goodbye. But this was not the most beautiful goodbye of my life; that would come later. This was a sad goodbye. Alex was staying in our hometown and attending a high school that, and I couldn't believe this part- was not gender segregated. My respect for him plummeted when I found out. I knew then with righteous certainty, that such a person could not be my friend. Talking to girls? Unthinkable. Touching them? He might as well have declared himself a goy. I, meanwhile, was off to a different state, to live in a compound in the hills, shielded from the city, from girls, from the unclean nations, so that I could study in peace and become the rabbi I knew I needed to be. So it was time to leave Alex behind.

I didn't hear from him for years, and he didn't hear from me. I did find out one thing about him that filled me with rage - at some point, while I was gone, he had… my god, I was so furious - he had befriended my sister. I sent him a furious text message about it, which I don't think he responded to. Something about insulting the honor of not just me and my sister but of my entire family.

Half a decade passes. I'm 20 years old, I live in Jerusalem now. My entire world is shattered. I came to Jerusalem to debate the rabbis who had convinced my parents to become Orthodox and to conceive me. It had not gone well, save for the fact that I had managed to lose my virginity to one of said rabbi's daughters, who then promptly and, in retrospect, understandably, broke my naive anxiously attached 19-year-old heart. I had told my parents I was no longer religious, and that broke their hearts, and we weren't really speaking. So I was short one god, one community, one religion, one context for existence, one family, one virgin heart, and many friends. I was not doing great.

My apartment was filled with garbage I couldn't be bothered to throw away, which I sequestered in my cabinets. Most days, I sat on my couch and smoked weed from a tiny bong I bought for 10 shekels at a shuk, and delved into my chest, realizing with horror that poets and singers were not being metaphorical when they described their hearts as broken. It was a literal description of a somatic truth - my heart was broken.

My sister, who was attending an Orthodox seminary nearby, visited and became concerned about my situation. I didn't know it, but she reached out to Alex, who was attending a yeshiva near where I lived. She asked him if maybe he'd be willing to reach out and rekindle our friendship, because lord knew I needed it. He said sure and texted me. We hung out, smoked weed, and watched Rick and Morty. "Well," I thought to myself, "he's still kinda religious but - if he gets Rick and Morty, he must be cool."

Our friendship rekindled immediately. I apologized for haranguing him for being friends with my sister, and we laughed about it. We saw the new Star Wars movie in theaters. We'd go to a smoke-filled arcade and play Halo and Call of Duty together while stoned out of our gourds. We drank Khat smoothies and Jameson-spiked iced coffee and Tubi 60 and gallivanted around Jerusalem.

We lived together, built routines, worked together, got on each other nerves, and got rocket ship mistake high over and over again, and it never got old. We pet dogs and chased girls and ate food, so much food, and smoked spliffs while we stared at sunsets. I showed him what had pulled me away from Judaism and closer to the things that actually felt like god to me- with him, I did mushrooms for the first time, acid for the first time, both times on the most beautiful beaches I had ever been to, camped out on the sand laughing until the stars came out. On one such occasion, he lost his faith when he realized he had broken the sabbath in the most biblical way- tending to a fire- but felt no less holy. I had seen it coming a mile away- after all, he had laughed at all the jokes in Rick and Morty.

We hitchhiked and normal-hiked and camped and sang and smoked and laughed and did research chemicals in soccer fields. We leaned on each other hard during hard times and shot the shit in easy times. Eventually, the time came for me to leave Israel, and we parted ways for a year or so, but that still wasn't the most beautiful goodbye of my life.

He joined me back in America, in our hometown, and we had more fun together there, and more gritting and bearing the hard times together as well. We shared a COVID bubble, and gathered the last bits of our quarantine-addled brains together. We played video games not in the arcade now, but in our homes, with much more potent American weed. If we did not have that escape, I genuinely wonder if we might have lost our minds to the pandemic.

One of the most blessed things about a childhood friend is the instantaneous access it gives you to your child self. You can just click back into play, because you know the part of you is known and accepted. It's always been like that for me, with Alex. Our senses of humor overlap so often it can seem like the Venn diagram of our tastes is a circle. It's not uncommon for us to enter into cyclic laughing fits that are as satisfying as any workout I’ve ever completed. There is a deep conversational safety- anything is on the table, anytime, however long it takes. When we find something we haven’t discussed yet- we rejoice and yell “its a gap!!!”. We dance together, stealing glances of euphoric bewilderment at our good luck, and when we get tired, professionally laze around.

And then the time came to say another goodbye. Different cities called to us, on different ends of the country. A long hug and some heartfelt words didn't feel like enough, so I sat us down on the carpet of my bedroom for a small ritual. Between us, I set up a whipped cream canister and several balloons. I turned on my subwoofer and speaker setup and played a fast-moving song. I filled the balloons wordlessly, and then we began to simultaneously and dramatically hyperventilate while staring into each other’s eyes. Sets of one giant inhale, then a machine gun bursts of rapid exhales and inhales. Then repeat. We did this until our bodies filled with tingles. Then I switched to the song I had selected, one where the peak of the nitrous would coincide with the peak of the track, and we began to inhale the sweet gas of laughter.

There we sat, cross-legged, eyes locked, hearts softened, tickets bought, seat belts on, and we could feel the lurch as our souls began to move along the tracks the music had set before us.

The song went like this:

I heard about this frog

It's a very tiny frog

But it's also very special

You can only find it in the jungle

So far away from me

But if you find it and if you touch it

Your world can change forever

If you touch its skin

You can feel your body changing

And your vision also

[At this point, this became true for us; the nitrous turned our bodies into fireworks and our vision into a creamy river of tiny rapidly moving crystals. The NMDA induced euphoria filled our psyches, expanding our awareness past the usual limits of our attention, and that familiar feeling of having pulled one over on the universe arose triumphantly as we began pulling our internal levers of bliss like kids in a candy shop, with massive drooling grins on our faces as the external world melted into sprinkles]

And blue becomes red and red becomes blue

And your mommy suddenly becomes your daddy

And everything looks like a giant cupcake

And you keep laughing and laughing and laughing

[we did this too]

Nothing is ever quite the same really

And after you finish laughing

It's time to turn into a frog yourself

It's very funny to be a frog

You can dive into the water

And cross the rivers and the oceans

And you can jump all the time and everywhere

[Flashes of our time together played before my tear-filled eyes. The song led us into a single delicate moment, and our voices arose to align with the song:]

Do you want to play with me?

[our eyes filled with tears at this point as we spoke this part aloud to each other, voices cracking.]

We can be a whole group of friends

A whole group of frogs

Jumping into the streets

Jumping into the planet

Climbing up the buildings

Swimming in the lakes and in the bathtubs

We would be hundreds, thousands, millions

The biggest group of friends the world has ever seen

Jumping and laughing forever

It would be great, right?

Laughter mixed with tears as the song launched into an orchestral celebration, violins screaming with cinematic delight. ‘Goodbye’, we said, ‘I love you’ we said. We rode out the song as we had ridden out our adolescence together. It was perfect. It was perhaps the only time I felt as if a goodbye was a complete phrase, not a title for a tear in my psyche. It was a goodbye.