Please tell me you also had a “close friend” in kindergarten that you can no longer remember

I’m not sure where this idea came from or even if it’s a new thing, but it recently came to my attention how common it is for people to have a “best friend” from when they were kids that they can’t really remember.<br><br>It all started with my dad’s confusion.<br><br>Over the past year or so, my dad has grown more and more confused about a photo from his childhood that was framed and hung on the wall of his office growing up. This photo is of his kindergarten or first-grade class from when he was growing up back in the sixties. <br><br>As a kid, my dad had the photo framed and hung near the door to his office, and it remained there for years. My dad didn’t give it much thought as an adult until he had children of his own. <br><br>He had the photo framed again and hung it in the room that he and my mother used as an office in the house where I grew up. It sat silently on that wall for my entire childhood and even years after until he had a level of confusion about it that I’ll never forget. <br><br>One day, he just looked at the photo and realized that it had been *years* since he last thought about it. He stared at the people in the photo trying to remember the names of some classmates and teachers but was only able to remember a handful of names in comparison to all of the people in the photo. He thought about the time period and how formative it was in his early life but couldn’t think of anything but a few brief stories that he had heard over and over again at family gatherings.<br><br>There was the story of how he broke his arm in the first grade by falling out of a tree. There was the story of how he got glasses in the third grade but thought he was going blind. <br><br>But there was one other story in particular that caught his attention as he stared at the photo; the story of his kindergarten classmate named Tommy who he befriended after they both had their tonsils removed on the same day.<br><br>My dad’s eyes stopped on a boy that he didn’t recognize. He was sitting in the second row from the back on the left-hand side. It appeared to be a boy with curly red hair. He stared at the image of the unnamed boy for what felt like hours trying to remember anything about him, but every time he tried, he just couldn’t. He stood there for so long that he became lightheaded and almost fainted. He couldn’t even think of one memory of himself and this person being in the same room together.<br><br>The next thing he remembered was waking up on the floor in incredible pain, confused, and with blood all over his face. There was a giant bruise that stretched across his cheek to his nose that turned a deep shade of purple over the next few days. He didn’t tell my mother about the incident; he knew she would just tell him to throw the photo away if it bothered him that much but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.<br><br>Over the next few days, my dad became increasingly paranoid about the photo, constantly looking over his shoulder to see if it was still there and to his surprise, it hadn’t moved an inch. He never told me about this specifically, but I knew something was wrong with him at the time because he just didn’t seem himself. My mom was even asking him if he was okay because of his strange behavior.<br><br>It was then that he did something that he admits was “very strange,” but something he felt he had to do. It was around 8:00 p.m. and the cleaning lady was still there. She was a Hispanic woman named I don’t know, I couldn’t tell you her name, but I know that my dad would sometimes slip her an extra twenty-dollar bill for no reason. I always thought it was because he liked her but I never asked him about it. <br><br>Anyway, at 8:00 my dad called her into his office and asked her to please take the photo down and put it in the trash bin behind the house. <br><br>“I don’t want my family to see me doing this.” He told her. <br><br>The cleaning lady looked at him strangely and said “okay sir.” In a thick accent. <br><br>He watched as she took it outside. He watched as she threw it into the garbage bin. He watched her walk away. <br><br>The next morning at 5:00 my dad did something that he admits was “a bit unhinged,” when he took the trash out early and dug through the garbage looking for the photo. After ten minutes of searching through banana peels and moldy leftovers he finally found it. The photo. <br><br>When he saw the photo, for some reason unknown to him, he immediately ran inside, took a scissor, and cut the head of the red-haired boy out of the photograph. He stuffed the photo into his pocket and walked out the front door. He didn’t know where he was going but he just had to get out for a while. After a five-mile walk, he ended up at the park where he sat on a bench for about an hour before deciding to drive to the bar. <br><br>He didn’t tell me any of this but from what I gather he got pretty drunk that night. So much so that when he got home he had to be helped up the stairs by my mom and one of our neighbors. <br><br>I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and when I opened my door, I saw my dad sitting in the hallway on the couch that we had moved to the second floor as a reading nook. There was a nightlight on the coffee table next to him and he was staring at something in his hand. I didn’t think anything of it until I heard him say “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do.” <br><br>I’m not sure why or how but that sentence has been stuck in my head for years until I realized recently that my dad felt like he needed to cut out the image of a boy that he couldn’t remember from a photo of his kindergarten class because…why? I can only imagine that he felt a deep level of guilt or something. <br><br>Now that I think about it, I can’t think of one memory from when I was in kindergarten. I know I had plenty of friends in school, plenty of fun times with teachers, etc., but I don’t think there’s a single specific memory from that time in my life that I can recall. <br><br>This all makes me wonder, am I blocking out a part of my life the way my dad is? Is there some part of my past that I’m not allowing myself to remember? I feel like I’m going crazy.<br><br>Please tell me you also have no memory of your time in kindergarten.