2014
When we were four years old, our parents stood us underneath the mistletoe at Christmas, and you told me that the red berries above us scared you because you thought they were poisonous. I laughed, high and obnoxious, but you whispered this against the sleeve of that ugly green sweater you wore every winter, eyes laser focused on the cracks in the tile floor. And as I took your hands after, pressing small fingers to small palms, I told you, “Everything will be fine.”
They laughed, I think.
They laughed and you were scarlet, flushed skin receding all the way to your hairline, the tips of your ears stained pink.
And I think I had fallen just a little bit in love.
•••
We moved when I was seven, and I remember you cried like a lost kitten in the rain, waiting to be held by warm, mittened hands—left instead in a cardboard box on the side of the road.
I told you then that I would never say goodbye, because we had spent evenings watching television together in the dark, sneaking into kitchens to taste bitter coffee like the grownups, sliding across the wood floors in woolen socks, drawing swords on stick figures, crinkling paper into hats, stitching crooked grins and gap-toothed smiles on our faces, dancing on the carpeted living room floors. Our shared memories pressed against one other like flowers pressed to paper, preserved between love and listlessness.
I told you this, and you said that we were friends–that even though I left the small town like I left you, you would come to visit. I looked at you, overwhelmed with joy, because for the first time I had a childhood friend. I was already looking back when I should have looked forward.
We would send letters, I said.
We would call, I said.
We would stay together, I said.
And you believed me.
You shouldn’t have.
Because time rotted through those pages, object permanence yellowing the edges of my memory, and we never saw each other again.
•••
You appeared again in high school.
Thrice, actually, but I never knew.
There were stolen glances and murmured promises against the backs of plastic seats, braids and curls slipping through my fingers, but I always felt left behind, a gaping wound on soiled skin, refusing to close. Papercut words littered my arms, not physical wounds, but ones with scars like caverns, and I didn’t say anything even though you asked.
I lost two of you, that year.
When I left the last, I pressed low piano keys into the grooves of your self-doubt, and I can still say that sometimes I wish I could say that I’m sorry—the words lodge in my throat, sandpaper tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I would realize later I had been selfish for thinking I could graft new skin onto the bullet wounds I left on your heart, and I would clench my hands into fists until my fingernails bit into my palms.
I lost faith in myself.
And then I lost myself.
•••
You left two months ago.
I asked “why,” and you said “no.”
You sat on my couch and cried in front of me, pressing your hands together in apology, but I didn’t let myself grieve until you left, sitting on the tiled floor of my bathroom, the porcelain toilet seat lodge against my crooked back.
But when I think of you now, instead of broken windows and ashes, I think of rose bushes on the side of a house in the spring time—the way they flourish in the summer and wither away at the end of fall. I think of the watercolor splashes of light in the church we forgot when we were sixteen, stained glass window panes shattering our faces. I think of chased dreams just out of reach, whispered lullabies in the dark, hanging threads attached to sleeves, stifled laughter in the park, sliding socks on tiled floor, burnt bread in the oven, crying in the car, skinned knees and cold noses presses against foggy glass.
These were futures we never had.
They flew away at the drop of a hat, spilling over the edges of a full rain bucket, washed away by time and frustration and just plain giving up.
And you will stop in the crowd on a Sunday afternoon five months from now with two packs of gum and a soda in your hand. You will be on the way to your car on the soggy parking lot, under a rainy sky, your nose running. And you will stop and drop the gum, leaving it to the puddles to become one with the earth, to pull out your phone and say, “I think I love you.”
But the message will never be sent.
I remember now, that you never existed.
That silence deafens.
And I know now there is an end for everything.
Sam