It’s Nothing, Nomad

I came home last night after driving around the entire county. As I entered my room, I was trying to figure out why my bed looked like I hadn’t slept in it last night. After a few minutes, it comes to me. I fell asleep almost immediately after dinner at my soon to be in-laws. Exhaustion has moved in.

My eyes are getting heavy, but I check my phone to see if my fiancee made it back to her place safe. Grayson’s text message stares me in the face:

It’s published

Can you do the thing the email said?

As my brain parses the syntax of his request and begins to fetch what it is I could possibly do, my last conscience neuron fires, and I fall asleep.

Grayson is in Chicago, enroute to Paris for a post graduation trip. As I write this he hangs over the Atlantic in a glorified bus. Life is never boring with Grayson.

I met Grayson in an Apple Store during the holidays. He was a newly hired employee while I had be around for all of one year. We were both in school… if you could call it that. We were enrolled in community college. We partied like it was what we were made for. We didn’t know each other well. I moved the January following that year to Santa Barbara for a promotion with Apple and Grayson made a point to see me when he came to visit some friends of his. It was around this time that I began to know Grayson more. He was in a lot of ways like me: Dangerous. Willing to do almost anything and could be almost anywhere at a moments notices. Like me he was all in on life and cared more about spending time with people than working on a paper.

We stayed in touch and after three long years in Santa Barbara, I moved home to realize almost all of my friends were gone. I say almost because Grayson was still there. It was here, 3 years after meeting each other that we started to become close.

I am fortunate to say I have a lot of close friends. People who have been there for me when they had every right not to be. Men and women who stuck it out with me when it was hard, and made time to celebrate when the good times came. All these friends though, were older than me. The relationship I have with Grayson is unique to me because he is younger than me. He is one of my few friends that I didn’t always learn from, but also learned with. We made a lot of the same mistakes, had similar triumphs, and could laugh about the same stupid things.

Here we are now though. Grayson has finally graduated college and for me, I’m getting married. It’s fitting we would both be celebrating major life events so close together. It’s weird now not to be going to Europe with him. Not bad, I have a soon to be wife that I love and need to be with here, and so, here we are.

Welcome to our little call and response writing forum. For me, to read Grayson write something longer than a two sentence text message is new, and delightful. I don’t know what will come of this, but for us it will be an exercise in consistency and honesty.

Here we go.