MISSING PERSON?
Young Man Reports Childhood Best Friend Erased From Contacts, Servers and Memories
A Reddit user says a friend of a decade has vanished from every record and from the recollection of all who knew him, leaving only manga, game cartridges and a photograph.
THE INTERNET — A 22-year-old Reddit user posting to r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix reports that his closest friend, a boy he knew from school, appears to have been removed from the world as completely as a name struck from a ledger. The post, published on Halloween, describes the friend as Genzou, called Gen, who the author says grew up in Hokkaido and moved to the author's country at age ten.
According to the post, the two met at a new school around 2013 or 2014 and grew close in Year 7. The author describes Gen as the first person he came out to, a comfort after the death of his grandmother, and his first kiss. A group of five friends, he writes, spent nearly every weekend between 2015 and 2017 at one house or another, or gaming together online.
The trouble began, the author says, when he resolved to message Gen after more than a month of silence and found no trace of him in his contacts. He reports that Gen's Minecraft username belongs to no registered account, that his PlayStation Network account is gone, and that the Discord server Gen created is now owned by another friend. Three mutual friends, asked individually, reportedly did not know whom he meant.
His boyfriend of almost six years likewise did not recognise the name, except as that of a character in a visual novel, "Our Wonderland". The author says he once joked that the character was short and gay where his friend was tall and asexual.
Some relics remain, the author writes: a run of Dragon Ball manga on his shelf, photographs of his bright pink hair, which he says Gen suggested, and a set of Japanese Pokémon cartridges Gen bought on a visit to Rankoshi. One photograph Gen took at a school event is now credited by its subject to another friend.
The author offers no theory and says only that he needed to talk about it. No commenters' explanations were included in the post. Readers inclined toward the mundane may note that the post rests entirely on the author's own account. The author closes simply: he misses his best friend.