I'm not sure what the site was called, but when I was in high school, I started chatting with a Japanese boy who was trying to learn English. When he said "English is bad" I didn't realize he was saying "*my* English is bad" because I guess Japanese grammar doesn't need to specify that (which I didn't learn until years after because I'm kinda dumb).

So I went off on a stupid long tangent about how English is good and in his next email he specified what he meant.

And then I never heard from him again. No good bye, nothing.

What happened to him? Did he continue to learn English or did he give up? Where is he now? Does he even remember me? Probably not... Had I known about the grammar thing and responded differently, like "I know English is difficult, but you'll get better with practice" or something, would we have kept talking and become friends? Did we even exchange names?

I can't really talk to anyone about this because who even knows what to say about that? What kind of response am I expecting?

And I guess above all, I wish I could move on and forget about this. Having it periodically torture me for a few minutes every other year is dumb. It happened over a decade ago, he's fine. Nothing I can do now.