Connection

Written by: Elliot (25-U1)

Designed by: Giselle (25-E3)

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I should be sleeping soon; work in the morning, and all. Fast food needs faster workers. Never sleep late if you can help it, especially on Fridays. The phone battery is full, though, and I don’t feel the fatigue coming on just yet. Every movement of the second hand has given me something new: a cooking vlog, a fat cat hugging a sausage, another college satire video. For some reason, I’m tempted to send the cat video to someone.

Or not. Generally, everyone’s asleep by this time. Even the thunder’s retired for the night, let the rain hum it to sleep as it taps on my window. Its fingers scroll on my glass, waiting for the image to change. Doesn’t bother me, though. This inflatable futon, the one I got off that dropshipper guy, means rain can’t stain your duvet. There aren’t any bookshelves or desks to run its shadow-fingers over, if you don’t count the clothes-rack in the corner. It’s a nice bedroom, I guess, considering my wage. Worth showing off in a story. Maybe even let people visit, once the professor isn’t breaking my back with notifications.

I just got a notification.

I’d mutter something inappropriate, but for once, it isn’t the professor giving us another paper. It’s from some guy – Alex. I think I know an Alex from somewhere. He told me he was going to college with me, we were gonna work toward that, we could get out this town together. Yeah.

yo

wna meet

im in allison for like 3-4 days

Traitor. I can still see his house right now: there, that’s the Yues’, down there, and a little further along the road there’s the mall and school. You remember how school was like with me, Alex. I think. Sometimes I wonder how you would’ve survived if I weren’t there with you. That window there – it still hasn’t been repaired. The wind’s dust still traces out where you hit that baseball through to escape Pre-Algebra, that spot in the track where you planted your face in the tarmac and left your mark on Allison High.

Sometimes I miss being on the same track as you, before high school. Not after we passed a baton over Skype, doing Pre-Calc AB while you went off to Fargo. Telling me all sorts of nonsense. “We’ll go to that one swing like before,” you said. That’s what I say to the mirror in the bathroom, of course. I like imagining that’s you. I’d never say that to the phone screen. The microphones in it might hear me and tell you. Still, though, the walk through the house in the mornings, on nights like this one, this one I’m having now; it’s like walking beside you, in a way. Kind of. Almost. Allison doesn’t change much. It’s almost, in a way. In a way I almost move my finger. I think it’s a specific kind of way. I’m definitely pacing in some kind of way.

Maybe it is a specific way. I know there was a specific way when we said it; “Stay here,” we said, “we’ll go for drinks after we get our master’s,” we said, and one of us did it and stayed. I did. The room’s moving with the rain-shadows; you can see it every which way, the navyblue hues on the wall, the bathroom light — did I turn that on? — yes, the bathroom light redder than my eyes somehow. I should change that light-bulb. The town has that new Home Depot at the outskirts, beside your Grandma’s old home. I still remember it now, look: turn right at Colford Street, walk for twelve minutes (we took twelve at the time), then left down 16^th and on for six minutes. Four minutes after that, there’s a set of cul-de-sacs lying down to rest from the summer heat, so you should rush through the corpses and reach the last one. I should try that sometime. I rush to the last one; I click the post.

It’s impressive, I guess. I didn’t get a certificate this cool. Maybe it’s the ’Community’ on mine that does it. There you go, though, like I said. It opened all those doors like we said it would — I’m opening doors, like I said, moving outside — to outside. Wonderful. Yale. The vector is down there, Connecticut, Connecticut Avenue. Let’s go. Down Connecticut Avenue, November 26^th. Remember November, yeah, that’s what we said. Same bus stop as the one just ahead. “Lemme know how the maths goes,” you said. “Drink some at the Cracked Glass when I’m back,” you said. Somehow the navyblue hasn’t gone away, just followed me from my bedroom staircase foyer front lawn sidewalk bus stop. We should stop.

Your house. And it looks like a master’s. I thought you were coming back after the master’s. At least you know Picasso, or whoever, now that you’ve worked this hard. Look at it. I can see this story. Your friends can, too. Drinks at the Guggenheim, or whatever hippie place that is. (That’s not the beer we agreed we’d drink once we turned twenty-seven.) What’s that? And then you’re in the Bahamas, then Milan, Mexico. Or Greece. I think those buildings’re Greek, actually. Yeah. You’re in Greece. Your house is opposite mine.

lmk if ur down by tmr

idk if ur asleep so

Yes, after nineteen years we’re doing that. Sure. Never looked back when you left with Mommy and Daddy, that’s for sure. Never properly locked your door, either. I got in – still can – just fine. Your spare key is still under that flower-pot beside the door.

Look at that. Furniture just like how we left it after the playdates. The carpet’s still stained with you; you must’ve forgot about rolling around the carpet, pretending to be hay bales in a field, pinging between the couch and the TV. I feel the pinging in my pocket. Should answer it.

its ok if u dw to ikwym

js thought itd be fun bc we havent met in a while

?

I’d want out if I could, but I don’t. Maybe I do want to exit this place, find myself in something more. I hope I will. Allison has decent jobs for a math graduate, right? If my degree comes soon, that is. I’ll calculate the hyperbolic cosine of potato strips, then find the volume of my hamburgers to write it on the customers’ receipts. I’ll be fine. I am fine, I think, out here. Your house is behind me.

There’s no buses at the bus stop at this hour, so it should be fine to just sit and think: Traitor. And after eight years. The same time we took to crawl from the cot to this bus stop, wait for the bus to take us to somewhere only children could hate properly. You liked math more than I did. You had it all, too, the magnets and stuff: there was a fraction, a half, a 0.5, and we called it a “divided number”, I think. There was a weird line there, I think I said, it’s not a number, I said, it’s meant to be 12. But it isn’t, you said, it’s something else. It’s different now. It’s all different now. The rain’s still falling around me now. I think I forgot to take an umbrella. That explains the wet hair, I guess.

It might not be different now. I don’t know. There’s always the easy way out of all this: just don’t respond. Ghost your new number, the one I don’t know. The Alex I know looked different and had a number, not a non-number. You’re lying. I’m lying, but your lie is bigger. You should stop lying, liar, is what I would say if the rain wasn’t muffling my words. I won’t, then. I’ll leave it be.

Or I can, will, might. It’s probably for the best that I get rained on. Maybe wet skin makes bedbugs less likely to bite.

Focus. I have to go to bed now. It’s late and I have work in the morning. I’ll sleep and I’ll forget this and delete the conversation in the morning and go to work. And then I’ll flip burgers and finish my lecture videos. And then I’ll remember I could’ve been catching up with you after I clock out. Somewhat. Sometime.

The rain is a wall. From the outside it's a little house, maybe. The bus stop’s to my back and rain on left, right, front; up. Kind of.

Kind of.

whos this idh ur number