Our last night together, we went to Magoo’s and spent the rest of the money in the pouch on beer.
After that we walked down to the pond, recounting our favorite memories from the past 8 months. It was a dark night, and I mean dark. You couldn’t even see the moon.
We sat on the edge of the tower dock, feet dangling over the edge into nothing. There was an oppressive fog blanketing the world, obscuring us from everything, including, nearly, each other. The lights across the water—I only knew they were there because I knew—whispered to us in a dim glow and that was it.
“Do you guys remember that game, The Treehouse, that we played on computers in Elementary School? There was a story writing thing… man, I barely remember it, but you could pick from a few different settings for the scene to take place, right? And one of the options was ‘in the middle of nowhere’ and the computer voice said it in this really distinctive way, like ‘in the MIDdle of noo-where.’ Yeah? This feels like that. The middle of nowhere.”
We held each other. We cried. Not because we wanted to, even, but because we felt like we had to. We talked about whatifweneverseeeachotheragain, even though we knew we would. We talked about being scared for next steps, even though we were excited, even anxious to take them. We spun out every possible scenario where our lives were never this good again, even though we knew they would be.
In the end, though, I think we were crying for everybody else, for the people who had never known this kind of friendship, this kind of freedom, this kind of happiness, and maybe never would.
