In the second grade my best friend since Kindergarten had moved away and I was socially lost (Jenny and I were not yet really that close). At some point that year, I met Mark through a neighborhood friend. We didn’t initially get along that well, but we had a lot of exposure to each through that mutual friend. And eventually we began to hang out together outside of the time we spent with that person.

When I eventually started calling him to see if he could hang out or come canoeing with us I discovered that his stepdad’s name was also Mark. It didn’t come out till later that his stepdad treated him like a stereotypical stepchild (from fairytales). And I think the negative nature of his relationship with his stepdad was part of what drove him to join the Army in 2001.

Eventually we became inseparable, and my parents seemed to view him as an extension of myself. They didn’t question that we did everything together, or that I spent hours at his house on Friday nights watching movies we had rented at Blockbuster, or that when he got his car we would spend hours driving around and eventually come back to my parent’s house where we would retreat to my room and eat jars of olives or some combination of salad and enough toppings that probably negated any health benefits of the salad.

When his baby sister was born he was out canoeing with me and my sister and our dad, otherwise he would have been home alone. He regularly came on river excursions with us after that.

Before we even graduated high school, he got a job at Greenfield Village (the outdoor portion of the Henry Ford Museum). He rode his bike there through summer heat, and winter cold, and everything in between because his stepdad wouldn’t allow his mother drive him…

I remember one winter he rode his bike to a local electronics and appliance shop and bought himself a DVD/VHS player. At the time DVD players were still relatively new, so that large piece of equipment wasn’t cheap, and he balanced it on his handlebars all the way to my house, in the snow. When he showed up he was just beaming! He was so proud of himself for being able to save up for it, and we were the first people he thought to show it off to. He hooked it up to the TV we had and proceeded to dazzle and impress my father. I’m pretty sure my mom even fixed an extra plate for him while he was there. After his demonstration was over and he was ready to go he started to gear up to complete his half ride half balancing act, home. Thankfully my mother intervened and insisted on giving him a ride, bike and all.

Later on he ended up buying his own car, without any help from his mother or stepdad, because his stepdad wouldn’t let his mom co-sign on the financing. He paid insane rates because he was young, had very little credit, and was being charged the penalty rate for auto insurance for not being “previously insured”… which is a huge crock of shit for anyone who if buying their first car and obtaining auto insurance for the first time in their life.

We remained close through school. Every Friday we would go to Blockbuster and rent 2-3 movies and watch all of them the same night hanging out in his room, me, him, and sometimes 1-3 additional friends until 2 or 3 in the morning. My poor mother having to come pick me up because she didn’t want met to spend the night at a boy's house (Insert eyeroll here). My mom called him “Sir Markus” I think it had something to do with his name being Mark Anthony and that sounding so official/formal, but it was fun and it stuck. She also sometimes called him “Sir Markus Anthony”. His family called him “Marky” which felt demeaning in comparison, and I never partook in using that name to reference him.

That summer was the last time we went to Cedar Point together, and I haven’t been back since. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever be able to bring myself to go back. I know we had a good time, even if the force of the rollercoasters did weird things to his nervous system. I’ve never heard of someone losing their color vision. We had just exited the Millennium Force and as we followed the crowd to where we would be able to view and purchase pictures from the ride, he had to stop and lean against the wall for a moment. He explained that he couldn’t see color, everything had gone grayscale. It didn’t last long, but I probably should have been more concerned.

At another point during the summer he got a tattoo and blacked out during that process. The artist thought he was having a glucose dip and ran out to get him orange juice while I sat with him. He recovered before the orange juice arrived. Another time we got tattoos in Canada he was walking down the hallway afterwards, leaned against the wall while talking and laughing and then suddenly started sliding down the wall… still laughing and talking. I thought he was joking around, but his legs had given out and he didn’t even realize it. Again, he recovered quickly. I have no idea what caused any of those incidents, maybe low blood pressure… but as far as I knew he had never been diagnosed with any kind of blood pressure issues.

Early 2002 he and a mutual friend decided to join the Army. We threw going away parties and I made sure he had my address for writing letters while he was in boot camp.

After he got back from boot camp he we started hanging out again, just like old times. Late nights, strange food choices, pool, coffee, and lots of movies and music.

Mark and I still hung out quite a bit independently even if I was dating Joe. But we all hung out together plenty too. Joe’s mom didn’t care if we all stayed the night, and didn’t care if we drank as long as we handed over our keys… which was reasonable. Eventually Mark moved out to Ypsilanti with some other mutual friends and that became the weekend party spot. We got creative with the party themes, and then one day we were playing a drinking card game called Presidents and Assholes and the apartment was REALLY warm (3rd floor apartment in the middle of winter). Little by little Mark started shedding clothing. Him sitting shirtless across the table from me wasn’t unusual, the fact that he was sitting there in his boxers was a bit more unusual. And then he shimmied around in his seat and got this look on his face that wasn’t quite embarrassment but said something more like “I wonder if anyone will notice”. I made the mistake of getting curious about what he was doing and looked under the table. He had taken off his underwear too… and was playing cards naked. When I say I’ve seen way more of Mark than I probably should have as a friend… this is what I mean, and it wasn’t the only time.

Mark led the way and the rest of us followed. Before the end of the night, all of us had shed our clothes. There were a couple of parties that ended similarly, and at one point we all realized that was where the small parties were going and just decided we would start the night in togas made of bed sheets to save us the trouble of trying to keep track of clothing as the night went on. It never really became sexual because we all had our partners there to interact with, it was more an expression of how comfortable the 5 of us had become, that we could engage in casual nudity.

Summer of 2004 Mark, Joe and myself went camping with a group of people up near the tip of the lower peninsula of Michigan. We rented a car, all chipped in on camping supplies and shared a tent. Overall it was a fun time.

Later on that year (late November) I got pregnant and I moved in with Joe. Some time during the first half of my pregnancy Mark was deployed to Iraq. He came back before Kaitie turned one year old, but having a kid inevitably makes one’s childless friends think that you all of a sudden can’t hang out anymore, so we saw each other less. And he moved to Florida before Kaitie’s first birthday.

He came back up to visit a few times and we made it down to visit him 3 times, but it wasn’t the same. Not that our interactions were less connected, more that they were just less frequent. The trip down around 2010 was just me and Joe visiting.

I don’t have any pictures of Mark from my last visit to see him (January 2025). In some ways I’m glad that I don’t, because even though he looked mostly healthy when we visited him there was still something a little off. And I would rather remember him the way he’s captured in the pictures that I’ve included here.

He was my brother, and so much more. And I miss him beyond what words have the capacity to express.