Bridge

Longing

The buzzard rang and suddenly I was reminded where I was. Hundreds of screaming fans, the shoes squeaking in the court, the smell of fast food somewhere nearby. 

"Come on, baby, come on!" Going to games with Caleb was always fun. "That's it, baby, don't drop it, don't drop it. You got them 3 points." The player took his shot without thought as he caught the ball and scored. "That's what I'm talking about!" Caleb took a sip of his soda and leaned back, relaxed. "So, you saw Millie?" Always straight to the point.

"I wonder if I could change seats...I didn't know these courtside seats came with the third degree." I answered, looking around.

"You are not getting out of this conversation, Wolfhard."

Noah was leaning on his knees as if paying attention to the game, but I knew his mind was in bed with a certain blonde girl. Gaten who was sitting between me and Noah apparently overheard Caleb's question. "Leave him be, C, you know Finnie here loves to be miserable."

"Hey, Gaten, look, I think your wisdom teeth are finally coming out," I replied. We laughed and I relaxed. Leave it to these guys to take stuff out of me. I sighed, took a sip of my drink, and crossed my arms. "No, I didn't see Millie. I didn't try very hard either. It's easy when schedules are already working against you."

Caleb followed the ball with his eyes. "Not good, man, not good. You need some closure."

"Why does everybody keep saying that?"

"Because," Gaten interjected, "that shit that happened 5 years ago, between you and Millie, it's haunting you. Been haunting you ever since. Followed you into your relationship with Elsie, it's gonna follow you into your next. Unless you do something about it."

Although I couldn't recognize it at the time, I later learned I had the best of friends. 

"So what? What do you think I should say to her? Huh? 'Hey this shit that happened between us, whatever it was, 'cause really, I don't fucking know it was, has left me emotionally crippled, and unless you tell me what the fuck you felt for me and why you didn't wanna be with me, I'm gonna have a commitment phobia for the rest of my days and die sad and alone.' Is that what you want me to say?"

Gaten, Caleb, and Noah, who apparently had started listening somewhere in the middle, were left stunned. Caleb recovered faster than the other two, but before he could reply, the cameras were unto us. 

We smiled, waved, and behaved like the good boys we were always told to be. Then, Caleb looked at me with seriousness. "That shit you said, you really feel like that?"

I took out my cap, combed my hair back, and put it back on. "Yeah...I do."

Caleb shook his head. "Boy, Basketball was a bad idea, there's a bunch of other stuff we could have done."

I laughed. Thankfully he didn't say anything else about the subject and we enjoyed the game as usual. Later that night, after the game as I laid in bed and looked out my window I had a strange feeling. A need to see her. So I unlocked my phone and looked into that long-forgotten chat. The name "Mills Brown" looked foreign on my screen. After a while of deliberation, I opened it. Inside were a couple of birthday messages and stray how-you've-been's scattered through five years of texting history. I didn't want to look at all of it, so I scrolled to the top of the pictures and started there. 

Longing filled me. No rage, no resentment. Just an excruciating sense of being incomplete. Below me, eight million people were sleeping, eating, having sex, laughing, hugging, loving each other. They existed all around me. I was everything but alone. Why then did I feel such loneliness? 

I fell asleep soon after, thinking of the girl I longed for and with a resolve to love her, even if that meant from far away. Loneliness wasn't going to be in the autopsy when I died.