you’re primed for detonation.

There’s only one problem

we’re not ready to go.

We don’t want to come with you.

If you ever cared about any of us

postpone

give us the time

to clear the blast zone.

If you ever cared about any of us at all

if you ever loved any one but yourself

give us time

to walk away safe.

Give us a sign

when you’re walk-away safe.

Do you know? I want to say it before your hand reaches for the door. You turn and glance at me, and I can’t stand that look on your face, empty, emotionless, indifferent. You’re miles away, maybe at your destination already, and I have no idea where that is, or I’d be there too. Not to follow you, you have your own life, your own friends, but if I could be where you are, in your head, I’d be there. I’d be there in a second.

Countless ways to say don’t leave, and none of them sound right in my mind, all of them seem like ticking time bombs. If there was any way to say it that would result in you staying, spending time with me, holding me, I promise I would say it. Do you know what this is doing to me? I wish you did. Worse to admit, I wish you cared. I know, deep down, it hasn’t occurred to you to care. That would mean you notice me at all any more.

Some day, maybe soon, maybe tonight, you’re going to forget all about me. What happens next, I can’t stand to think about, and I think about it every day.

Please, if you ever cared about me at all, just leave. Before I say something to make you cry, stop looking at me. Walk out the door, and do what you have to do, but please come home. Leave, but come home, don’t look at me, but come home.

I’m always the first to break eye contact. It’s because, and I would tell you this if I could, it’s because I see it there. Everything you ever disliked about me, every thing I’m going to do, it’s all reflected right there.

You tell me you’ll be home by ten, but we know you won’t pull back the covers until half past one. I’ll pretend to be asleep while I stare at the wall, hands clenched and fingernails digging trenches into my palms. You’ll look at me, eyes burning into the crown of my skull, and then you’ll roll over, pulling the covers away from me, and sigh. That sigh. One of these days it will kill me. For now, for this evening, it’s what I have to look forward to.

–and reached out–

–and he had put a hand on the side of their face, to turn their attention away from the man with the hook–

–and to make his point, his hand went to the side of my face, and it was an electric shock to the brain.

…

“What ever happens, you’ll be alright.”
…

I glanced away from my friend and mustered up the willpower not to turn around for the sound of a voice that wasn’t there.

…

But in my head, it was ‘94. Another hand was on the side of my face, forcing me to meet the eyes of my best friend. The back of my head was bleeding, and my friend was desperately checking my eyes for a reaction, holding my face steady as the room swam around us. I’d already thrown up on myself, and all I wanted to do was sleep. He wouldn’t let me sleep.

…

My friend looked at me, a tinge of suspicion or concern registering, and I quickly struggled to regain footing in the conversation. Something about kids are cute. Ha-ha.

…

Back in ‘94, I started to shake uncontrollably. The hand on my face clenched hard, a thumb wedging itself into the hinge of my jaw. He started reaching around him without looking at me, searching for something, coming back with a pen. I didn’t understand, until I remembered something I learned about first aid in school. I realised he thought I was having a seizure. I managed to say I was just cold, and he tossed the pen across the room and let go of my face. Without getting up from the floor he pulled the blanket down from the bed, wrapped it around my shoulders and bear-hugged me.
…

In the present I was supposed to be ordering food. I came back from my thoughts and ordered something I wasn’t hungry for, then retreated as my friend ordered his. I didn’t notice him paying for it. I was too busy thinking,

…

it was warm in there. It made me drowsy, and again, I wanted to sleep, wanted to stop the pounding in my head and escape the taste of bile on my tongue. Instead my friend shook my shoulders and asked me what song I wanted to sing. I told him I just wanted to sleep, but he wasn’t hearing any of it. He asked me if I knew Angie by the Rolling Stones. When I didn’t answer he shook me again and said Angie, Angie, when will those clouds all disappear.

…

We sat to wait for our food, and my friend was talking about books. Things he was reading. I have no idea how I held up my side of the conversation. I’m not sure that I did.

…

I didn’t know the words to Angie. We sang our way through You Can’t Always Get What You Want instead, my teeth chattering and his breath sour next to me. There was probably another song, and another,

…

and he remarked that I hadn’t heard a word he was saying. He didn’t say it unkindly, but it was clear he wanted to know what was on my mind. I shrugged and shook my head. Sorry, I told him, it’s nothing. I asked how his food was.

…

But I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t stand the idea of eating, the taste of vomit was on my lips, at the corners of my mouth, pasted on my teeth, the very idea made me think I’d be sick again. He broke the graham cracker in half, begged me to eat half, eat something

…

it was a question. Was I going to eat something. My friend had finished half of his food and was dusting crumbs off his fingers with a napkin. My food remained untouched, the cup of soda in my hands nearly drained. I put the cup down reluctantly and noticed for the first time the straw had been chewed– mauled, really– to a flat, misshapen strip of plastic.

…

I wasn’t sure how that night ended when I woke up the next morning. I was in my own bed, my face and hands scrubbed, a t-shirt too big to be mine hanging around my shoulders. There was a crushed graham cracker in my pocket.
…

I picked up the sandwich and ate it dispassionately, picking through the mental scraps of my memory for what could have happened, how I ended up at home, how I’d avoided my parents finding out. My friend glanced at me as he drank his soda and finished his sandwich. The conversation had drifted off, but he didn’t seem to mind. I sat there with my thoughts, and my friend wondered silently where, and when, I was.

“Did you,” the counselor prompted.

She looked exasperated. “No, but I wanted to! That’s insane, right? They’re CHOCOLATE!”

“Yar, TASTY chocolate,” the man to her right interjected. He wore an eye patch and grinned at her with a row of glinting gold teeth.

“Shut the FUCK up, Doug.”

“Let’s pause for a cigarette break.”

I can tell you the script of the evening as I replay past experience in my mind’s eye. He’ll order the most expensive things on the menu, I’ll order the closest thing they have to chicken. His girlfriend will drink too much wine and fall down in the parking lot, or, as it happened on one memorable occasion, in the restaurant lobby, flashing her underwear at a crowd of waiting patrons as she struggled to stand up. It would be funny if it weren’t a skipping record I can’t seem to stop.

This guy was my brother. My best friend, a friend of ten years, and yet we’ve come to a place in our adult lives where there seems to be no room for words, no time for discussion, and at the heart of it, both of us wish things hadn’t come to this. We pretend not to care any more. There’s a polite indifference in what we say, where we go, what we do, the plans our girlfriends make. The arguments we’d have in high school that raised in decibels and were punctuated in spittle are now contests as to who can object the least. The brotherhood that made us the friends we were is as irrelevant now as what restaurant we eat in, and what bars we buy our drinks in.

My girl wants us to stay friends– she likes his girlfriend, and I do too. But I’m not friends with his girlfriend, with either of those people. The longer I drift away from where we were in high school, where our intentions and mutual respect were, the less I feel any thing at all. Our friendship is the grave of a distant relative that I visit because I’m in town, because I feel obligated. If it were any other set of circumstances we probably wouldn’t bother. He’s flown in on business and we’ve made half-hearted remarks about doing something, then don’t. I’ve flown into town to bury old classmates, and he’s stayed away, and I’ve resented him for it and kept silent.

That would never have been the case in high school. When his dog died we went out to the creek behind his house and dumped the ashes. When my father had surgery he came to the emergency room and held up both sides of the conversation while I tried not to cry or be sick on the waiting room floor. There were girlfriends, break-ups, miserable school dances we always skipped out on to go lean against a wall and smoke. We always said we’d be honest, that we could rely on each other for the truth no matter how complicated our lives became, or how unfaithful our new and different friends might be. That’s become the least important thing. The less we know about each other’s lives, the better. He doesn’t give a shit, and frankly, neither do I. It seemed so important back then. It’s hard to accept such a singular and important truth was nothing more than some mutual self-delusion. Now, it seems as if we need that miasma of white lies, brush-offs and and ingratitude to make both of us the sort of people who can breathe in any social environment, no matter how toxic.

I hated clubs in high school, and so did he. We’d laugh at the kids with the fake ID’s procured for admittance into a place that played music equivalent to a drum machine and a strangled cat. When there wasn’t a local garage band playing we went to the biker bar hidden in a local strip mall and pumped twenty dollars worth of coins into the juke box. Now he’s found small games of pettiness and superiority to make the club scene livable. A new mont blanc ever y six months, vintage cuff links and silk ties, an assortment of alligator and ostrich shoes. You can’t out-dress him, he knows every bar manager and hostess’ name, and it makes him the stand out where-ever we go. He sees my passive bitterness and reads it as discomfort, as an inability to participate. Fuck that guy. When did this all become such a sensitive game of feelings and unspoken words. There was a time I could have told him in the plainest language that it was a matter of unwillingness, I’m not playing the game, I don’t want to be here, let’s go shoot some goddamned whisky and you can impress your co-workers with these parlour tricks—come on man, who are you talking to? It can’t be me. So who is he talking to? His girlfriend? Mine?

There’s no need to even be jealous. It’s clear he doesn’t want her, doesn’t think of her the way a shithead client or a lesser friend might dare to. Why is that loyalty important when it’s applied to my girlfriend, and unimportant when a friendship we swore in high school was thicker than blood, stronger than steel, is on life support. It’s not a question. I don’t have to ask. I know. He knows. We’re not those kids any more. We’re not that honest, that solid, or that strong. We’re two pathetic adults drinking pansy drinks in a pretty restaurant, and we will never, ever, have that brotherhood again. And I just don’t care.

“What part of METER WILL SELF-DESTRUCT was unclear to you, son?”

“That’s– that’s just stupid! I mean, it’s a parking meter!”

“A meter that said, clearly, INSERT COINS. METER WILL SELF-DESTRUCT.”

“What is the POINT of that? I mean, sir, why didn’t someone remove it if something was wrong with it?”

“There was something wrong with it?”

“It exploded!”

“No, it self-destructed. That’s what the sign said.”

“But– ”

“But what, son? It said INSERT COINS. Did you insert coins?”

“Yeah, but–”

“And then it self-destructed?”

” ….”

“Then it sounds to me like it was in working order. You’re going to have to get this vehicle out of here, sir. The street sweepers will be out in a few hours, at which point it will have to be impounded.”

“There’s no way I can move my car, it’s totaled! What am I going to do?”

“I don’t know, but you’re going to have to figure it out. This is a no parking zone after midnight, and that was five minutes ago.”

“I’ll call triple-a right now.”

“Alright then. You have a good night, sir. And read the meter next time.”