Growing Up and Moving On.

Fittingly, the way myself and my best friend parted was after gaming Halo 3. So many memories of Surmsauce, Steven, and myself, ripping it up in the wilderness of multiplayer, playing deep into the night, arguing, calling out "One shot S3! One Shot S3!", calling each other retards, idiots, and dumbassess, yet loving every second it. Arguing over who should get the sniper, strongsiding, listening to music while we were playing, beaking the other teams we played relentlessly, going clutch with 30 seconds to go trying to pull off a victory. So much stupid small stuff that is host to some of the greatest memories I have. I'll never forget staying up till 4:30 in the morning practicing our BR's in a map called The Octagon, a featureless thing in which scores were racked up to the point of ridicule. Halo 3 was awesome, something that bonded us and to this day no game has ever stacked up to that one.

I remember 8 years ago, this kid came to the end of my street walking his dog with his mom. And my mom made me go outside and say hi to this new kid, someone whom, as it turned out, hadn't met a single kid our age since he had arrived. This kid's name? Surmsauce. I was the first person he knew and over time, he became my best friend. Someone whom I could be myself around, someone I could say stupid shit to, someone who didn't give a fuck what I said or did. It was some sort of connection that was largely wordless, as we were as comfortable sitting in silence as we were watching whatever movie had been downloaded earlier that day. Someone who at first, didn't share my appreciation for rap, but over time, became the person who probably had the most love for the music. He and I would talk about whatever album we had recently listened to and argue over what was shit and what was gold. We would make countless top ten lists (ranging in topic from Greatest of All Time to Best Songs on My Ipod That Start With G). We went to Jay-Z live, we shared a love of Jay and Kanye, even tonight, we were killing ourselves laughing over Ghostface Killah's review of Watch the Throne and also his website, which pretty much just beaks Drake (or Aubrey, as Ghost likes to call him).

Proud to say that Surmsauce was the person I called first when I was just bored or felt like doing something. It was so easy to drive the "root 2" minutes that it takes to get from each other's places, and there was never any pressure to do anything.

Good luck at university, my friend. All good things come to an end. Yeah, I got a couple tears, so what? It's the end of an era, my best friend gone.