My Friday nights are normally uneventful these days. Dan works nights, including Fridays and Saturdays, so I usually spend the traditional “date nights” at home with the furbabies, wondering why I can’t tell the difference between HD and non-HD TV.

(We’ve determined that it’s because I’m blind.)

But this past Friday, I decided to try something new. I decided to write my first ever letter to prison.

I don’t think I’ve ever written about my friend Zack. I’m pretty sure he and I fell out of touch shortly before I really started blogging, but we were close for a very long time. We met during our freshman year of high school, when we sat next to each other in English. We also shared the same reg (that’s code for “homeroom” for anyone who didn’t go to my high school), and made it a point to sit next to each other every day so we could make fun of Mrs. Bogdanoff’s accent as it blared over the PA system.

We spent four years bonding over our shared love of baseball, Saves the Day, and boys. When college acceptance letters came, and he had a choice between San Jose State and Sonoma State, I told him to pick San Jose. I needed him nearby for all the concerts we’d be attending with our new found freedom and lack of curfews.

ZACK AND I AT A GIANTS GAME, CIRCA 2004.

We would take turns visiting each other, sleeping on each other’s dorm room floors, meeting each other’s friends and families and boyfriends, ordering tickets to whatever Saves the Day / Get Up Kids / Alkaline Trio / Dashboard Confessional show happened to be coming up.

I sped through college, graduating in three years, but he stayed in for what seemed like forever. He kept changing his major. First architecture, then kinesiology, and then finally public relations, which landed him an incredibly competitive internship with the Giants. This is around the time he fell off the face of the earth.

I just assumed he was busy. He was in his last semester of college, and working his internship on top of his job with San Jose State’s peer mentor program. I would post on his Facebook wall every now and again to check in, but I never got a response. After a while, I just stopped trying.

Then I met Dan, and we started dating, and a year later, we were engaged. And I realized I had always pictured my wedding with Zack there, standing up with me as a bridesman, rocking out with me on the dance floor to some music that is probably not wedding-appropriate.

So I sent him an email to check in and let him know that I was getting married, and it bounced back. I figured he had just finally changed his email address (it was ten years old and mildly inappropriate, in the way that email addresses are when they’re created by fourteen-year-old boys) and had forgotten to let me know because we hadn’t talked in a couple of years. I went to check his Facebook page to see if he had updated his email address on there, and his Facebook page didn’t even exist anymore. That’s when I started to get concerned.

I put out a call on Facebook to our friends from high school (the ones that I can still tolerate, anyway) to ask if any of them had heard from them recently. A few hours later, one of them sent me this link.

I didn’t know what to do. I IMed Raeann, who had met Zack a handful of times in college, to talk things through. I called Dan and made him take me to lunch, where I moped over my boneless spareribs. I tried to justify to myself, to anyone, how someone I knew, how my friend, could do something like this.

I didn’t want to believe it, but the name and age in the article were correct, and the information had been passed from Zack’s brother to another former member of our high school’s baseball team, who in turn told a friend of the friend who told me. Another friend told me about the Bureau of Prisons website, where I used their inmate search to find Zack in the system. This was real.

But Zack had always dated younger guys when we were in college, usually high school seniors or college freshmen. Maybe he had just gotten caught with a picture of his most recent boyfriend, who happened to be not-quite-of-age. Anything was possible, right?

I searched endlessly. I couldn’t find any details. My brain didn’t want me to. I would later find this article, which detailed Zack’s offenses, but only after Raeann found it first and – after much pleading on my part – reluctantly told me what it said.

I didn’t know how to be angry with Zack for what he had done. More than anything, I was heartbroken for him. For him, for his lost potential, for the friend I could never have back. I thought about writing to him, but I didn’t know what I would say. And I wasn’t sure I saw the point of trying to keep up a friendship with him after what he had done. There was, is, and will be no feasible way to have him in my life. By the time he’s released, Dan and I will likely have kids. And not only will it likely be a violation of his parole for Zack to be around them, but as a parent, I don’t want him around my children. I care about him as my friend, but the person he has become is not someone who can be trusted.

It’s been months, close to a year, since I first found out. I finally had to tell my parents, who knew and liked Zack immensely. And my dad, who is, by all accounts, very socially conservative, surprised me with his reaction.

“You should write to him,” he said. “I bet he could use a friend.”

So I did.

I kept my letter simple. “This is how I found out, I just got married, I wish you could have been there, I have a million cute pets, write me back because I miss you.” I addressed it, I stamped it, and on Saturday morning, I put it in the mail.

It almost feels like closure. But in reality, it’s just the beginning.