Odds & Ends

I keep your picture in the odds-and-ends drawer. It’s on the bottom, at the back, from the Christmas card you sent me when you first moved in with your then-boyfriend, now-husband. I should have thrown it away after that Christmas, but I just put it in the drawer when the season wrapped up. And it never left. 

I think that was the last year we had a phone call. I still miss the way your voice sounds. 

Back in high school, I used to lie on your bed while we watched movies I didn’t care about. I just liked to hear you laugh at the wrong parts, finding humor in the schmaltzy romance or the overdone action. You never thought you were very feminine, and your snorting laugh wouldn’t have appeared in perfume commercials or romance novels, but in that moment it felt like you were the only girl I had ever known. 

A woman now, 32 just like me, and it’s been seven years since I heard your voice. Four since I saw you had a son on Instagram. One since I last got a text from you, saying maybe we should catch up soon. You never responded to the texts I sent after. But I know how it is. 

I don’t look at your picture. In the drawer. Not intentionally, at least. But sometimes when I pick up the can opener, a flash of your face peeks out from underneath it, and I feel my heart skip a beat. It’s like I’m 15 again, and you’re sitting next to me in the cafeteria and you lean in close to whisper about a guy across the room and I pretend I’m listening, but all I can do is smell the body spray you used after gym mixing with the sweat that collected on your neck when we were running. And a part of me wonders if you know I’m not listening when I mumble something back. 

And when you punch me in the arm later for teasing you, I rub the skin there and wonder if things could ever be different. 

We are different now. Older. No longer close, proximity-wise or friendship-wise or… any definition of close. When you come across my mind it’s like a warm hug tinged by a cold breeze. I want to snuggle into the sensation but my skin is prickling.

You used to linger on my skin like that. 

When we met I was different–still a girl yet to grow into a man. And I think you saw that, somehow. You used to make excuses to touch me, to hold me, in ways I didn't let myself be held. I would lay in bed at night and imagine a world in which it would be okay to imagine kissing you. Where best wasn't the label before friend, where us felt permanent. 

Part of my love for you has always felt permanent. A fixture in the back of my mind. Your photo with him and a scrawled ‘Merry Christmas, [redacted]’ in the back of my drawer. But at this point, you are a token of the girlhood I craved but never retained. And yet my mind carries me back there. To you. To us. 

Do you think about me? Do you ever sit down to write me and then stop? I do. From time to time. I type out a message and go to hit send and then don’t. Sometimes silence is its own message. But I don’t think it carries the meaning I want. 

I waited for your Christmas card this year and it never came. I never saved any of the others, not after the first. I also never sent one back. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But I think there will always be a hole the size of a card in my life now, a space I thought you would always fill that now feels like a missing tooth. I run my tongue over the space and I wonder if anything will grow to fill it. But I’m not a child anymore, and sometimes things don’t regrow. They just stay empty. 

But the odds-and-ends drawer stays full. And with time, I won’t even see the bottom. And maybe it will feel different than not seeing you.