The unthinkable friendship

By Devin Tran

The feeling of trying to speak up, but more dominant voices overpowering yours isn’t the best feeling. The feeling of being the smallest fish in a vast ocean is scary. 

Although it may seem like it would be impossible to even make any friends as a “small fish” who couldn’t muster up enough courage to speak to anyone, that impossible would slowly become possible.

Back when I was in middle school, I guess you could say that I was the loner with not many friends to hang out with. The guy that wears a black hoodie, sitting in the corner, and successfully being invisible in the class. I was the guy that no one usually ever batted an eye to.

The chance of making friends would seem unthinkable at times, but soon, a group of friends would reach out to me. It was during distance learning at the time, when my teacher put random students into a breakout room to do some group work. The person that was randomly put inside the breakout room with me was a guy named Bao. 

What was to be expected was that the breakout room would be dead silent. Bao broke the silence immediately by asking me a few questions about myself though. All of a sudden, we started talking like we met each other before, or even more, like we were already good friends.

Even though this was all during distance learning, we managed to both become friends with each other during such a time. What really made us click was a video game called Roblox. After finishing all of our online classes, we would finish homework then play Roblox together. 

Something as insignificant as a video game has made it so that I would eventually find my best friend who would be the person that I could really open up to.

We would later introduce all the friends that play Roblox to each other and manage to make a group with all of these people. We all called each other after finishing homework and all hopped on Roblox to play together. 

Even when we met each other in real life in 8th grade, we were still all friends, hanging out in a group. Once we graduated middle school, we slowly started drifting apart but luckily, I still keep in contact with two people from that group, James, and my best friend, Bao. 

Still in highschool, I try to play Roblox with him every weekend when I’m free or have no homework. Once I really opened up to him I wasn’t the dark and gloomy boy that it seemed like I was. He said I was actually pretty funny and made him laugh sometimes.

Roblox was the reason why I became friends with him in the first place and ended up also being the reason for why we still keep in touch. Distance learning has changed my life, for the better.

For the Warrior Times, this is Devin Tran.