The Friend Who Never Knew How to Play Chess

Some friendships are easiest to remember through accomplishments.

The trips you took.

The exams you survived.

The jobs you started.

The important conversations.

Others survive through nonsense.

Walking around with no particular reason.

Arguing over whether somebody knows how to play chess.

Catching tiny fish by hand.

Singing the same song badly.

Using up an internet quota in two days.

These memories are less impressive.

They are often more alive.

In October 2011, I wrote an entry about a writer named “yksekdag2.”

It was not a biography.

It was closer to a pile of affectionate accusations.

I described him as a sweet, dark-haired, dark-eyed, SpongeBob-like human being who had recently joined us.

Then I started listing memories.

The first one was wonderfully pointless.

One day we were walking around aimlessly.

He stopped and asked:

Why are we walking around aimlessly?

I thought about it.

He was right.

Why were we?

And according to the entry, from that day onward we stopped walking around aimlessly.

That is obviously not a great turning point in anyone’s life.

No wisdom was discovered.

No crisis was solved.

Nothing changed except that two people briefly noticed the absurdity of what they were doing.

Yet this is exactly the sort of thing that survives in friendship.

Not because the event was important.

Because the person was there.

A close friend can make inactivity memorable.

That is a rare ability.

Most of life is not made of dramatic events.

It is made of waiting, wandering, sitting, eating, driving, repeating, wasting time, and deciding what to do next.

The people we remember most warmly are often the ones who made those empty spaces feel occupied.

You did not need a plan.

You needed company.

This is why the phrase “doing nothing together” is not really accurate.

Two people walking around aimlessly are still creating something.

A shared rhythm.

A language.

A collection of private jokes.

A memory that later becomes more valuable than whatever useful activity they could have chosen instead.

Productive culture does not know what to do with this.

It asks:

What did you accomplish?

Nothing.

Exactly.

That was the point.

The old entry then moves to chess.

I wrote that this friend did not know how to play chess.

Then immediately corrected myself.

Actually, he did know.

He simply preferred saying he did not.

This apparently annoyed me enough to turn it into a character flaw.

I accused him, affectionately, of knowing how to play while pretending otherwise.

Then I would somehow persuade him into a game.

And once the game started, another problem appeared.

He took forever to make a move.

According to my exaggerated memory, one move took an hour.

Eventually the result was always the same:

Forget it.

Let’s stop playing.

This is a much better portrait of a friendship than saying:

We occasionally played chess.

The frustration is the memory.

The waiting.

The argument about whether he even knew the game.

The ritual of persuading him.

The inevitable abandonment.

Shared hobbies are often remembered this way.

Not through the hobby itself.

Through the person’s particular way of doing it wrong.

Someone takes too long.

Someone cheats.

Someone refuses to learn the rules.

Someone becomes absurdly competitive.

Someone claims not to care and then gets angry after losing.

The activity becomes a stage on which personality repeats itself.

Years later, you may forget individual games.

You remember the pattern.

He always did that.

That sentence carries an entire person.

The archive gives another strange scene.

I wrote that he used to catch fish beautifully with his hands.

Specifically, tiny fish I called kurbağa balığı.

The description is unusually physical.

He would open his arms wide.

Crouch slightly.

Remain silent because, according to him, the fish would otherwise escape.

Then he would lower his hands toward the water, palms almost parallel to the surface.

Wait for the fish to enter his field of view.

Dip his hands.

Close them quickly.

Lift.

Then count.

One fish.

Maybe two.

Possibly three.

I do not know how technically accurate this description was.

I do know that I remembered the movement.

That is what matters.

When memory preserves posture, it usually means we watched closely.

Arms open.

Slight crouch.

No sound.

Hands low over the water.

Then the quick closing motion.

This is no longer a generic story about a friend catching fish.

It is almost choreography.

That level of detail tells me the image had stayed with me.

It is one of the reasons ordinary memories can become stronger than important ones.

Important events are often remembered conceptually.

I graduated.

I moved.

I started a job.

Small events can remain sensory.

How someone stood.

How they moved their hands.

The exact ridiculous thing they said.

Memory may lose the date and preserve the gesture.

There is something affectionate about imitation too.

When we describe a close friend, we often become them for a moment.

We reproduce the stance.

The voice.

The expression.

The phrase.

This is how people live inside one another’s memories.

Not as summaries.

As performances.

You cannot imitate someone you never really watched.

The entry then jumps again.

Middle school.

Smoking at home.

Trying to prevent the smell by pouring cologne into a metal tea saucer and burning it.

I recorded this as one of his old habits.

Then adulthood apparently changed things.

He became a grown man who, according to my teasing version of events, was now afraid to smoke at home because of his mother.

Later, he quit smoking entirely.

Naturally, I treated this improvement as another offense.

That is friendship logic.

A person does something objectively healthier.

You call him a scoundrel for changing.

Because the joke is not about cigarettes.

It is about continuity.

We become suspicious when friends evolve.

Not seriously.

But emotionally.

You used to do this.

You used to be like that.

Where did that person go?

We want people to grow.

We also want our private version of them to remain available.

These desires conflict.

That tension appears all through old friendships.

Somebody loses weight.

Stops drinking.

Quits smoking.

Gets married.

Moves.

Becomes serious.

Starts sleeping early.

Reads different books.

Stops going out.

You are happy for them.

And somewhere inside, you also mourn the person who used to be available for the old ritual.

Friendship contains nostalgia even while it is still happening.

The old entry catches that beautifully.

The friend is still there.

Yet I am already saying:

His voice used to be good.

He used to jump like a gazelle.

He used to do this.

He used to do that.

The past tense had already entered.

That is striking.

We often imagine nostalgia begins after separation.

It can begin during change.

The person is beside you, but one version of them has already disappeared.

The entry continues like an uncontrolled list.

He loved Hakan Taşıyan.

He liked the song “Eskici.”

He sang constantly.

I remembered him as someone who once had a good voice.

I called him the Maradona of the Balkans in the neighborhood.

He supported Beşiktaş.

He was not part of Çarşı.

He did not like sleeping.

He read constantly.

He wrote poetry.

He watched documentaries.

Sometimes he would get bored, accelerate, and fill the surroundings with smoke.

He had a particular movement or expression from childhood that he used to scare me.

And then, for no defensible reason, I made sure to record that he wore woolen long underwear in both summer and winter.

That final detail is essential.

Not informationally.

Portraiture-wise.

A person becomes real through unnecessary details.

Formal profiles remove them.

Name.

Education.

Career.

Achievements.

Interests.

Clean categories.

Friendship remembers differently.

The thing he sang too often.

The ridiculous clothing habit.

The way he played chess.

The fact that he deleted an entire television series from his computer one day after I copied it there because it occupied too much disk space.

That last incident appears near the end of the entry.

I wrote that he might have been the only person among us who had never watched Lost.

I had personally copied all the episodes to his computer, complete with subtitles.

The next day he deleted them.

Too much space.

I interpreted this as arrogance.

Of course it was not arrogance in any serious sense.

It was an outrage against the effort I had invested in transferring the files.

That kind of disproportion is central to close friendship.

Tiny offenses become theatrical betrayals.

You copied something for someone.

They deleted it.

How dare they.

Objectively, nothing happened.

Emotionally, a comic crime has been committed.

This is another way friendships create private law.

Certain actions become illegal only inside the relationship.

You do not delete the series I copied for you.

You do not claim you cannot play chess when I know you can.

You do not take an hour per move.

You do not quit smoking and become responsible without accepting ridicule.

The rules make no sense outside the friendship.

They do not need to.

Friendships are small countries.

They develop vocabulary, borders, crimes, legends, repeated stories, and historical grievances.

Most of these grievances are not meant to be resolved.

They are meant to be retold.

This is why old friends can spend an evening repeating stories everyone present already knows.

Nobody needs the information.

The retelling itself is the activity.

One person begins:

Remember when…

Everyone already remembers.

Still, the story proceeds.

Details are corrected.

Exaggerations challenged.

Somebody insists it happened differently.

The argument becomes part of the story.

Memory in friendship is collaborative fiction with a factual core.

Not fiction in the sense of lying.

In the sense that stories are edited through repetition.

The funniest version survives.

The strongest gesture becomes larger.

One chess move eventually takes an hour.

Maybe it really felt that long.

Accuracy becomes secondary to recognition.

Yes.

That is exactly what he was like.

This is what affectionate exaggeration accomplishes.

It captures personality more effectively than measurement.

A friend who takes twelve minutes to move in chess may, in memory, take an hour because “an hour” communicates the experience.

Literal truth and emotional truth are not always identical.

Writing from an archive requires keeping that distinction visible.

I should not turn the exaggeration into a factual claim.

But I should not sterilize it either.

The exaggerated voice is part of the source.

That voice says:

This person drove me crazy.

I clearly loved having him around.

The insult and the affection are inseparable.

Many male friendships, especially in the culture and period reflected in these entries, often expressed closeness indirectly.

Praise might arrive disguised as mockery.

You could call someone terrible names in one sentence and describe him with enormous tenderness in the next.

An outsider reading literally might misunderstand the tone.

Inside the relationship, the insults could function as evidence of permission.

You can say this to me because we are close.

Of course, context matters.

Insults can also be cruel.

But affectionate teasing has its own grammar.

The 2011 entry is written almost entirely in that grammar.

I call him sweet.

Then ridiculous.

Then dishonest about chess.

Then skilled with fish.

Then a fool.

Then cultured.

Then lazy in one way, energetic in another.

Then badly dressed.

Then impossible with internet bandwidth.

This contradiction is the portrait.

We do not experience friends as consistent character summaries.

We experience them as collections of things that somehow belong to the same person.

That is one of the pleasures of knowing someone for a long time.

You accumulate versions.

The middle-school version.

The version who smoked.

The version who quit.

The version who sang.

The version who read all the time.

The version who deleted Lost.

The adult version who carries traces of all the others.

Long friendship is partly the privilege of having access to someone’s obsolete editions.

New people meet the current version.

You remember previous releases.

That gives old friends a special kind of authority.

They know things about you that no longer appear in public.

Your old haircut.

Old fear.

Old obsession.

Old nickname.

Old bad habit.

Old dream.

Old failure.

You may become respectable.

They still have evidence.

This is both dangerous and comforting.

Dangerous because nobody can destroy your dignity as efficiently as an old friend.

Comforting because someone remembers you before your present identity became fixed.

They know that you were always becoming.

That can make adulthood feel less rigid.

You may have a title now.

A profession.

Responsibilities.

A polished public self.

Then an old friend says one phrase from twenty years ago and the entire structure collapses.

You are fourteen again.

This is good.

Adults need occasional evidence that seriousness is temporary.

The entry also contains the early broadband detail.

A four-gigabyte quota.

YouTube consumed it in two days.

Then he apparently waited for the next month.

That small technical limitation dates the memory better than any elaborate historical description.

Four gigabytes.

Enough to shape behavior.

Today, numbers like that can disappear almost invisibly during ordinary use.

At the time, a quota was something you could feel.

You knew when you had burned through it.

The internet had borders.

Consumption had consequences.

This is the sort of mundane detail that gives an era texture.

Not a major technological milestone.

A monthly limit.

It tells you what daily internet life felt like.

The same is true of copying Lost manually with subtitles.

Streaming was not yet the universal assumption.

You collected episodes.

Stored them.

Moved them from one computer to another.

Disk space mattered.

Deleting a series could feel like destroying a small library.

And someone had to put it there in the first place.

The act of sharing media was physical in a way it often is not now.

A drive.

A copy process.

Files.

Folders.

Subtitles.

Storage.

Time.

The younger version of me had invested effort.

Then my friend deleted everything because it took too much space.

Unforgivable.

Even now, I sympathize with the prosecution.

But the entry is not really about technology.

It is about attention.

I had paid attention to this person.

Enough to remember how he moved near water.

Enough to know what music he liked.

Enough to know his football team.

His sleeping habits.

His reading.

His poetry.

His television habits.

His internet usage.

His strange clothing preference.

That is what friendship is made of before we name it.

Attention accumulated over time.

We know people because we witness them repeatedly.

Not during interviews.

During ordinary life.

And most of what we learn has no practical value.

This is important.

Knowing that someone wears woolen underwear year-round is useless information.

Its uselessness is part of its intimacy.

Professional relationships collect useful knowledge.

What does this person do?

What are they responsible for?

How can I reach them?

Friendship collects unnecessary knowledge.

What song do they repeat?

What stupid thing scares them?

How slowly do they play chess?

What do they delete from their computer?

What did they do in middle school?

Useless knowledge is one of affection’s luxuries.

You spend memory on things with no external value because the person has value.

That may be the central idea hidden in the entry.

It is a long list of things that do not matter.

Together, they show that someone mattered.

This is why personal writing becomes weak when it tries too hard to extract lessons from every memory.

Some memories do not need lessons.

They need preservation.

The friend catching fish does not have to symbolize patience.

The chess game does not have to become a philosophy of decision-making.

The Lost deletion does not need to become an essay about digital impermanence.

Those readings are possible.

But sometimes the right thing is simply:

This happened.

He was like this.

I remember.

That is enough.

I want to preserve that restraint here.

There is no reason to turn a friendship portrait into a universal theory.

The archive already did something more valuable.

It caught a person sideways.

Not posing.

Not introducing himself.

Seen through the irritating, funny, affectionate details another person had collected.

This is how many of us would prefer to be remembered, I think.

Not only through achievements.

Through peculiarities.

The impossible habit.

The song.

The joke.

The movement.

The thing we always said.

The friend who could tell the story correctly.

Formal memory is too clean.

Friendship leaves fingerprints.

It remembers embarrassment.

Contradiction.

Ridiculousness.

And because of that, it often feels more loving.

There is one final line in the old entry that captures this tone perfectly.

After saying I copied all of Lost onto his computer and he deleted it the next day because it occupied too much space, I called him arrogant.

Completely disproportionate.

Entirely appropriate.

That is how the whole entry works.

Every accusation says the opposite of what it appears to say.

You annoyed me enough that I remembered you in detail.

You were ridiculous enough that I wrote all this down.

You mattered enough that your smallest habits deserved archive space.

Years later, the entry survives.

Not the aimless walk itself.

Not the abandoned chess game.

Not the tiny fish.

Not the burning cologne.

Not the songs being sung in the room.

Those moments are gone.

But their outlines remain.

And that is one of the quiet gifts of writing about friends while life is still ordinary.

You do not know yet which details will become precious.

So you record the stupid ones.

Years later, you discover those were often the right ones.