Control: Person Focus: Simon

I, Dalton Lewis, remember when I met Simon. I was sixteen, and I hadn’t had any friends for two years after moving to Libertyville, Illinois from West Bloomfield, Michigan. I had sat around in my room, reading The Catcher in the Rye, David Eddings epics, and the like. I watched football on Sundays in the fall.

Events happened to change me. I wanted friends. I had to pick someone to be friends with — I needed to choose someone and have the courage to ask them to hang out with me…I had just finished a summer camp in which we took a college-level class for a week at the University of Iowa. That summer also included vacationing at North Carolina for a few days in which I learned about Magic: the Gathering. I had gained a little bit of confidence and wanted to ask someone to be friends with me. I asked Sal, a weird and unpopular guy, if he wanted to hang out. He’s the person who people made fun of the most — so I wanted to be friends with him. He suggested I go to Sally’s house and role-play with some people there. I went, scared and strangely hopeful.

Simon was there, and he tried to help me create a character for several role-playing games. He was medium-sized, skinny, and wore black. He was kind, clever, and loved all things geeky and British. He was an actor and a director and a writer. He and I then started several role-playing campaigns with Sal, our mutual friend. Our Dark Sun campaign became a local legend — I had a flood in a desert, characters eating dead people, and other exotic storylines.

Simon’s parents had a wonderful basement. It had a pool table, dartboard, table for poker, a nice, comfortable couch, and a television with video games. We spent countless hours during high school down there, role-playing, playing card games, playing video games, and living our lives.

Time passed. Simon went to Illinois State and studied theater. Then, around the end of our college careers, Addison happened.

Addison showed up at a party in Simon’s basement, and Simon told me that he liked her. She showed up again and began to flirt with Simon. She was super-skinny, a geek, a writer and reader, and a wonderful person. He wanted to date her. He loved her.

She chose Sal. Simon and Sal began to disagree. Sal betrayed his friends — us — over and over. Sal owed me money. Sal went behind Simon’s back on a number of things. They stopped talking, and fifteen years later, I don’t think that they talk to each other at all.

A few years later Addison dumped Sal, proclaiming him to be an asshole and a loser, and she started to date Simon. They had ten years or so of happy time together before they broke up. They had time to live, in an apartment in Chicago, where they watched old movies, role-played, and lived their lives. They broke up, and Simon moved to Florida and studied video game design.

He works in Florida, at a museum. He writes novels and works on novels for National Novel Writing Month every November. We play video games online together, hanging out and having fun. He is starting to work out and try to lose weight — he gained a little over the years. He lives a full life, and I am proud to be his friend.

Thanks, and take care, friends.