It was August fourth. My friend Mat, who I had met earlier in the year, invited me to have a fire at his house.

I met Mat a few moths back when I was with one of my other friend Angela. We stopped at Apple bees for our routine half priced appetizers after 9 pm and while we were there Angela invited her friend Morgan who had Mat tagging along. We all enjoyed our food before we left to go to a fire a few towns over. I live in a pretty small town so it is not uncommon for people to have fires every weekend. After Angela and I met Mat and we all had our food, we decide to leave to head to the fire where we spent more time with some more new people we met.

After that night me and Mat became pretty close friends and talked everyday.

Fast forward to August when he decided to have one of his weekend fires that he would tend to ask me to come to. They were always fun, I always met new people, and everyone always had a good time. Until this one night that did not quite go to plan.

Everyone there was having a good time just hanging out by the fire and talking to each other. A while later after we got the fire going, a group of about 10 people showed up from a local town. I did not know any of these people and Mat only knew one or two. As the night proceeded, Mat had said something that one of these new guys did not like. For a while he brushed it off and they managed to deal with each other which didn’t seem to last too long.

Things began to escalate quickly and they decided, with the help of a few fellow friends egging them on, that they would wrestle. Obviously when two guys are angry with other and they decide to wrestle, nothing could possibly go wrong right?

“Mathew don’t do it”

“Mathew this is a bad idea you don’t want to do that”

“you know he is going to kill you”

After about an hour of debate, they agreed on no punches and they could tap out. This plan seemed fair and it seemed to work until Mat won. This made the other guy very angry so he threw punches. I see this as an error in judgment by my friend for deciding to even “wrestle” in the first place. I also think I had an error in judgement for not trying harder to stop this from happening.

Mat found out the very hard way that this was a bad idea. After spending about 13 hours in 2 different hospitals. A brain bleed and a broken nose later he was finally released and able to go home.