I had a best friend when I was a kid. Let's call him "Rodney".
Rodney was the class clown, charismatic as hell, blew into a room like a force of nature. Liked to cut through the woods on his way home from school and like the follower I was, I let him drag me along.
One day, there was this sort of silver disc, about the size of a small house, sort of "skipping" across the sky like a rock on a pond. Fools that we were, we followed it deep into the woods.
After fifteen minutes or so, we came into a sort of clearing, looked like something straight out of a painting, too perfect for Nature, like it'd been placed there by a painter's brush stroke. And there, captured perfectly in a beam of sunlight, was the flying saucer.
Just sitting there, purring like a kitten. Rodney's eyes were big as saucers. He pulled me toward the saucer, but something about that ship just made me not able to breathe. Like the closer we got, some dead weight was pressing down on my chest. I stayed at the edge of the trees, hunkered down low, like a soldier hiding from enemy fire.
Rodney, though, whether through dumb bravado or some alien tractor beam, he seemed pulled toward that ship like a magnet.
About ten yards out, and this sort of porthole opened in its side, though there'd been no outline of a door beforehand. A little green man came floating out, just floating on air, like a balloon. Now, I'd like to tell you he was something other than a little green man who looked like an extra from Mars Attacks, because seriously, how cliched, but by God, that's what he looked like.
Anyway, Rodney said "bruh, that's a *****ing costume", and the little green man said (well as I can figure) "barada nahk chu zolo!" and fired his ray gun (yea I know, I'd like to say it was something different, but it wasn't), and Rodney just evaporated like the morning mist.
I must have passed out or something, because I woke up in that clearing a few hours later, no Rodney, no little green man, and no flying saucer.
I walked home in a daze, not sure what I'd seen. By the time I stumbled blankly in the door looking like a freshly-turned zombie who hadn't started decaying yet, I'd just about convinced myself I'd imagined the whole thing somehow.
Rodney didn't show up to school the next day, nor any day after. His big dumb face graced every milk carton in the area for years afterward. Everybody thought he'd just up and ran off one day, just got it in his head on one of his fool treks through those woods.
In my weaker moments, I almost believed it too.
Years passed. I became a man and went to college. Rodney slipped my mind.
One day, I was going for a morning jog around campus, and I tripped over this lump of dirty laundry bundled at the bottom of some steps. The bundle emitted a loud grunt and I realized it was a homeless man. A face, though scarcely recognizable beneath the congealed snot and hair that made the GEICO caveman look like the spokesman for Gillette razors, emerged. Our eyes met and recognition hit me like a rock. Thrown really hard. Into my temple.
"Rodney?!" I gasped.
His hair blew dramatically in the cool morning wind. Eyes regarded me dully. "Who the hell is Rodney?" he intoned blankly.
For a second I tried to high-five him for the badass Winter Soldier reference, but then I realized, this was no joke. Rodney had no idea who he was. Who I was.
"Rod-Man, what happened," I asked, settling beside him on the step. Then quickly standing, because it was cold and Rodney kinda smelled. "Where'd you go, all those years ago?"
Now, I wish I could tell you I learned something about the universe that day. I wish I could tell we're not all alone out here in the stars. That Rodney had seen things and been places none of us, not even Doctor Who fans, could possibly imagine.
But life is no fairy tale.
Rodney just said "I don't know you, man" and then started screaming for me to get away from him, and then campus security came and made him leave because he was causing a public disturbance.
I searched for a long time for Rodney after that day. Almost twenty minutes. But then, well, I had class and.....it got boring and my feet were tired from jogging.
But that was the weirdest end to a friendship I'd ever experienced.
I know, I know, it was pretty awful of me. But I made it up to her a few months later by saving her butt when she fell over in a mosh pit and got half trampled on. 
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