In the three weeks leading up to my departure to college, I walk around more of the city where I live than I have in the past seven years.
It's all because of this boy I re-met and talked to in a graveyard in the middle of the night, in the suburb with the partial picket fences. But specifics aren't important. I realize this—and more important things; realizations and acceptance flood into my mind like water down a hill—as my Converse-covered feet cross yards and yards of concrete, matching step with him.
When we aren't walking, we're in his car. When we're not moving, we're on his basement couch, watching The X-Files and crappy horror movies and Fight Club. And when we're not doing that, well, there are other things to do. Always, there are other things.
We avoid talking about the way the clock ticks more loudly with every day, and how, even when I come home, he will be leaving. Six months from now, he will be 1,300 miles and one timezone away from me. Add this distance to the six years he was alive before me, and you have one hell of a hole to try to fill.
Except we don't. There is no gap in the way we talk to each other, no empty space when our hands link. The only hole there is can be found in the silence, in the way we avoid talking about the inevitability of the word “end.” When we do talk about it, we treat it as if it's something that can be escaped, worked around, though we both know there is no such solution.
Four days and three nights before I leave, we finally crack the eggshells we've been walking on. The light is out and we are alone, lying on his bed, drifting.
“What do we do next?” I ask.
“What do you mean?” he says, but I hear it in his voice anyway: he knows exactly what I mean. Or maybe I just feel it inside his head. We're both good at answering things neither of us asks out loud.
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, and there it is again—silence. The only place where there's a hole.
We do talk about it, though. Finally. We fill the hole with ideas too important to splash on a page, and half an hour or so later, I am crying, a sort of slight thing that's interrupted by laughter. I have no idea where this laughter is coming from, only that it doesn't seem wrong, and it doesn't feel cynical. It makes the crying bearable.
“What?” he asks, the sound so different from the tears.
“I just... When I miss someone, I imagine them happy. That's what I'm doing to you already. I want you to go out to Boston and meet some spectacular artist and be happy—“
He shushes me. “I'm going out there for selfish reasons,” he says. “It's for me and for my music. I want you to know that. I'm not going there to meet someone.”
“I know.” But it's so quiet, even he can't hear me.
The conversation spins on, surreal, covering anything and everything. We are grasping at handholds that seem to be shrinking, and our words become melancholy, but not hopeless.
I just want you to be happy.
See other people.
You know it will happen. You know.
Can we talk, still? Please? I can't not talk to you.
We can stay friends. We can work that out.
This is going to hurt. Don't have any illusions about that.
And I don't. No illusions. A week from now, maybe a little more—but certainly not much more than two—I will be lying awake at night, listening for the heartbeat that is not there, waiting for the next visit that will not come, unable to touch the newest music on my computer.
“Don't forget me,” I tell him. “The important people in my life are like pins in a carpet. You can't find them, so they keep stabbing at you at odd moments, and the worst part is that I am not as important to any of them as they are to me. Don't forget me.”
“I won't forget you,” he promises. And I believe him, something I could never have done a month ago.
And there is more, but the details are not important. To confine them to words would be to ridicule something beautiful.
We both will remember. And that is enough.
