When do you stop referring to someone from your past as a friend? At what point do you draw the line and say "You and I are too different, and we can no longer be considered friends"?

I've been thinking of N a lot lately. We went through a lot of stuff together, including my father's death and N's journey out of the closet. We even shared an apartment together for a while. He nursed me through my breakup with the man whose babies I thought I would one day have. We were very close.

N was an immigrant of Algerian descent who came to Canada at the age of 10. To me he was like anyone else I had known - a typical kid with braces and bad hair, riding a scooter and going to the movies. His English was terrible, but that's because he was raised in French and we lived in Montreal. I helped him pass his English exams. To my knowledge he was no more or less religious than anyone else we hung around with - that is to say, in Montreal in the mid-nineties, the whole world seemed secular. It's hardly like we sat around debating abortion rights; mostly we just tried to keep from needing one. The Gulf War was over, and Bosnia was just so far away. The Croation guy we worked with didn't look any worse for wear, so what did it matter? Rwanda was a word on the news, along with the painfully silly "Hutu" and "Tutsi". We were more interested in saving up to buy cars.

We worked with a Mujahideen (at least one) at a gas station, pumping gas. A "fuckin' warrior" he was. *shrug* Whatever. We all have to come from somewhere.

How blind.
Color blind, just the way we were taught to be.

I remember my Christmas party in 1995, when I made those delicious pork spareribs my mother was so famous for. N picked one up and was putting it to his lips when I yelled Noooooo! across the room. I warned him they were pork. He shrugged. So what? They taste good! So much for Allah.

N and I spoke a few days after September 11th. I was still in a state of shock. Not hurting exactly, just stunned. There were no conversations that took place in those early weeks that didn't somehow come back to Lower Manhattan. And that's when the rift began.

They deserved it.

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Where was it coming from? How could anyone I shared a home with speak like that about 3000 murdered people and a country in mourning?

We have seen each other since. Had lunch a few times. Talked on the phone every couple of months. He called me at the end of January, when I was picking up Girl on the Right business cards for CPAC. I told him I was going to Washington. He had to hang up, there was an accident on the road ahead. Talk soon? Sure.

He called me three weeks ago. Asked me how my trip went. I told him about dinner with Dick Cheney. I hate that guy. What a bastard. America is so fucked up. This was not the N I knew way back when. The N that loved travelling to Washington with his mom, and brought me back a t-shirt.

I know that he had begun going back to the mosque when his father was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago. He even made the pilgrimage to the hajj with his dad a couple of months before he died.

I don't think N will ever be an extremist in the way we have become all too accustomed to. He's a homosexual. Not very favored in the ummah. He will never strap bombs to his body or shoot people in the street. I don't even know if he would go as far as giving money to the cause.

No, N is more likely to be that most evil of all things: The silent approver. The one who nods his head in the privacy of his livingroom when he sees the news report that 2000 infidels in downtown Toronto are killed.

I wonder if he'll stop to think that I was one of them.