distance
Dave met Mikey by the melting lake down the road from the comic book store where they spent half their childhood. It was strange seeing Mikey again. Mikey had grown lanky, though his shoulders still hadn’t filled out. He loomed thin as an afternoon shadow: paler, too, as if adulthood had already drained him. In the noontime spotlight he was nearly translucent. Dave didn’t recognize him when he appeared in the distance and stared hesitantly in his direction for a long minute before he was close enough to confirm Mikey’s identity. He waved.
“What a warm welcome,” Mikey shouted, a moment after Dave recognized him.
“I swore you were someone else,” Dave replied, laughing.
“Did I get that much handsomer?” Mikey asked.
“No, but your ego got bigger.”
The banter almost felt real, and they were nearly teenagers again: pimply and angular. They had found solidarity in humor then. Now it felt scripted, a force of habit, sliding off their tongues before they could think.
Dave did not understand why, but for the first time in his life he felt nervous about talking with Mikey. He sat down by the lakeshore and dug his heels into the pebbles so that Mikey would not notice that they were trembling.
“It’s been a while,” Mikey said to the silence before settling down beside him.
“Yes,” said Dave. Then again: “Yes.”
Conversation came quickly after that, and they talked about Mikey’s career plans and Dave’s new kitchen sink and Mikey’s ex’s wedding invitation and Dave’s dog. They talked about everything and nothing at all. It was a limp parody of the conversations they used to have, anyways, toes submerged in the water for hours until they had shriveled into numbness. Eyes lit like cigarettes.
Dave couldn’t shake the feeling that they were both talking to the versions of themselves they knew five years ago. He noticed this in the small moments of mental labor between sentences: blindly feeling for the blurriness of childhood, drudging memories into common ground, inspecting Mikey’s eyes for recognition — for approval — for the rawness that he had once found there. Mikey smiled a lot as Dave talked, but Dave wondered, too, how much of this was habitual. It was a ritual of ease that they practiced, but nothing about this was easy.
Perhaps they could grow familiar with these new versions of each other eventually, but they could not relearn each other in a single conversation. By the time Mikey got up to leave, they were both fidgeting and the sun had abandoned them. What to say or do around strangers with dear faces? Their limbs melted into darkness until all that was familiar were their voices, raspy now, dried out from the talking.
I’ll see you around, Dave pretended. We’ve got to do this another time, Mikey pretended back, walking away. Dave was still pretending when Mikey faded out of view, smiling into the darkness and attempting to replay the conversation in his mind. He realized he could barely recall any of it.
Just Mikey’s twisting hands — the empty space between their voices — the chill of the lake at their feet.
