We’re standing on some corner in downtown Richmond: me, my two friends, a pair of women, and their male friend we had met earlier that night. We’re deliberating over what to do next, caught up in each other for the night.
The guy is cute, with stubble like you used to keep, and I will myself to get lost in his aura, but he isn’t you. Here is a specimen with broad shoulders, a sharp jawline, and a narrow body, something I could comfortably fold myself into. I allow myself to follow him to the cigar bar he leads us to, then up to the members-only listening room, where we chain-smoke and the group chats away the hours. But I can’t find the fucks to give to listen to him at all.
The night is breathing all around me, but with every gasp, I turn to look for you.
Do you remember when we had the time, in the middle of the night, to drive down the winding roads out in the country? When the days seemed so plentiful that we could spend them together endlessly. When the night crept in and I crawled into the passenger seat of your sedan, and you drove us west, down 360, to Skinquarter, to a road devoid of lights, lines, or any markers of civilization at all, where the trees bent over the sides of the road, reaching down to us, leafless. It must have been winter, but I can’t be sure of that now.
You stopped the car in the middle of the road, turned the engine off, flipped the lights, and sat there in silence, in the creeping dark, staring straight ahead. I could never tell what you were thinking, and, in that moment, I asked if you were planning to kill me. I was so stoned, the question just slipped out of me. I laughed a little too late, as if it were a joke.
You assured me you weren’t, that you wouldn’t, but I was already red in the face. The truth was that I would have let you if you tried. Not because I was ready to die, but because I was ready to do anything you asked, to give up my body to you completely without hesitation.
After an immutable pause, the silence oppressive, you started the car again and drove off, continuing down the unmarked road, looking for a turnaround, like those you always stuck in your songs. A sign of the end of the evening.
Do you remember when we were supposed to record in your shitty little untreated attic room, back when you lived with your uncle? I texted you that morning as soon as I woke up, only to receive an apology in response. You had taken a tab of acid, forgetting our plans for the day. I should have been mad, but you offered me a tab from your stash and invited me over anyway, just to see if there wasn’t anything we could still get done.
I came over. I took the tab. We did our best to record throughout the trip, but none of it was usable.
Yet that isn’t all I remember.
I remember that, at some point past the peak, we were in that gravel drive, barefoot and eating fruit in the southern suburbs. I can still recall the piercing sensation between my teeth and into my gums as I bit into the apple. The feeling was ecstatic, reminding me that I was alive, sending shivers through my whole being, from each bite in my mouth down to the uneven rocks beneath my feet, tingling to the tune of the Earth.
I looked at you across the drive: your perfect teeth, your chiseled form, your radiating warmth that stretched and filled any space you were in.
But nothing amazing happened beyond the apple.
You weren’t even looking at me, but instead up at the sky. I was always too frightened to make a move, especially that day, lest it shatter the friendship. You were like something pinned to the wall of a museum, high above me, straining my neck to take you all in. I knew that, had I reached out a hand to touch you, some abject and angry docent would have appeared and warned me not to lay a hand on the art.
I think about that day often, and the day you showed me the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, an album you had on vinyl. We smoked weed in that attic room, not speaking as the music played, letting the album say everything.
Afterwards, you joined me for a cigarette in that same driveway, though you hardly ever smoked, and we talked and yapped and prattled on about music and life and love and the differences we found all above us, staring at the same sky, seeing different figures, making different assumptions, drawing our own constellations.
Do you remember when you told me you knew you’d fall in love with her?
Something in me triggered. Some kind of defense was built, like you were the lineman across from me as we waited for the center to launch the ball into action. You always played on the wings, attacking from the side, and it was all I could do to keep up with you as your affections danced around the grand field of the game, to decode your iron wall put up to keep people out.
From what, exactly?
If you loved her, why keep anything from her?
But maybe you preferred to be perpetually at the sides of the field, keeping those walls up, never making a move until it was obvious it would be reciprocated. Maybe I did the same.
From what I last heard, you’re living in New York now. That’s where the work is, I suppose, in the dying industry we’ve both dedicated our lives to. It’s the industry I owe everything to you for getting me into, you being one of the first people to believe in me and trust me to mix.
As far as I can tell, you’re still dating the same woman. I hope you’re both happy. Truly.
This isn’t some hit piece. It’s a realization.
I remember you venting to me about your friend who had a crush on you, how you insisted you could see right through her and knew what she wanted, and how you would never give it to her. Still, you kept her around, drunk on her infatuation.
Is that what you did with me? Was I also so obvious?
Sometimes I think about when I ruined everything anyway, when you said you never wanted to see me again and made it clear we were no longer friends, when you claimed I was an evil person. Maybe I was. I didn’t try to defend myself. I told myself I was done with you, too, and it felt like wasted energy to try to keep someone around who I didn’t like and who didn’t like me, inconsequential in the grander scheme of my life.
But then I flash back to the day, a few months later, before you had moved, when I was performing with my acoustic guitar at one of the venues we both worked at. You came by to grab some gear for another show across town. You heard the terrible mix, my guitar having no pickup or input, the sound tech struggling with the dynamic microphone, the SM57 pointed at my bridge, the incessant feedback loops, and you grabbed the tablet to fix it without a word. Once it was dialed in, you offered only a nod. I nodded back, and then you were gone.
That was the last time I saw you.
In that cigar lounge, still talking to the thin stranger, noticing his thick eyebrows, I found myself still emulating you and how you never smiled without a soft laugh to accompany it. It was never natural, I could tell after a while, but every time anyone, even me, said something you knew was meant to be a joke, something searching for a positive response, you would force out a “Ha,” and flash your dazzling whites.
I forced it then, sitting across from that random guy as he announced he could sing and played shows like you did, laughing even though I hardly found any of it funny, wanting to uplift this man anyway. I wanted to make him feel the way you made me feel once, all those days long ago. I wanted him and his friends to feel the warmth of a nonjudgmental person because, always, no matter what, I felt I could be myself around you. To make a bad joke, say something awkward, commit a faux pas. None of it ever seemed to linger with you, and now I hoped to have that same effect on others. On someone. Anyone.
I was making out with a guy in my shower weeks after the man in the cigar lounge incident. A cute boy by all means, someone I frothed over at first, and he led my hand to his ass. That did nothing for me. But when I lifted that same hand back up to his face, cupping his cheek, feeling his stubble, I remembered your permanently shadowed chin and got excited immediately.
I fear his form did nothing for me except recall a memory of you, just like the stranger who led me to puff on cigars and drone away through the evening.
Everyone is a cursed mirror, a portal directly leading to you.
Do you remember any of this? Do you remember how everything we did was a bad idea? Is that how I should remember it? Did you ever think of how it might have tormented me to hear about all your girlfriends, your trysts, watching them hold you when I never could? Is this all too much for me to say?
Regardless, it will always linger in my mind: the night that you, I, and one of my close friends were standing on the pedestrian bridge over the river, looking at the lights of downtown sparkling before us, the wind cutting through my jacket, your guitar in your hands, playing absentmindedly.
You wandered off to play to yourself, not wanting an audience, going farther down the bridge, away from me. I looked down at your reflection in the water and strained my ears to hear your songs. I watched on, gazing at the distorted image. You were like a dream in the low light, and now it seems as though it was inevitable that you would leave me like one, like the images of the night fading away as I rise in the mornings, leaving nothing behind but a feeling I can do nothing but desperately hold on to.
I hope New York treats you well. I hope the winds blow you into a corner of fortune forever. I hope the sky isn’t too much for you to hold, all that way above me. I hope you remember me. I hope the twinkling lights of Manhattan speak to you as the lights of Richmond have always spoken to me.
I hope your life is full of beauty.
I hope you never speak to me again.
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