What We Carry

"Sorry." The word tumbled out of Maya's mouth before she could stop it—three years too late—as she nearly collided with the girl who used to be her best friend at an airport gate. Mikey looked almost unrecognizable. If it weren’t for her distinct greenish eyes and a mole right on her eyelid, Maya would probably never have guessed it was her.

“Maya?” Mikey said in the most confusing voice ever—the one where you can’t figure out if they’re surprised, angry, upset, or happy to see you.

“Yeah… How are you?” Maya was barely looking at her. Every time she caught a glance of Mikey, it felt like her invisible stitches somewhere deep inside her were starting to slowly rip open.

“I’m doing great. What about you? You haven’t changed a bit.”

“I’m doing alright.” Maya paused for a quick second, contemplating every word racing through her mind at that moment. “Couldn’t say the same about you.” She lightly hinted at Mikey’s dyed black hair, which used to be burnt and blonde the last time they spoke, and her make-up, which used to be soft and almost invisible on her. Now she just looked… way older than she was.

“Yeah. College really changes you.” Mikey looked at the ground, as if she were trying to find the words on the floor of the airport.

“Yeah, I guess it does change some people.” The disappointment in Maya’s voice was unmistakable. Both of them were thinking the same thing, but neither of them dared to bring up the feud that led to their friendship breakup.

Getting into college seems like the most important thing in your senior year of high school. High school sweethearts try to go to the same university, athletes who dedicated their whole lives to their sport are anxiously waiting for scholarships to continue playing and doing what they enjoy and love. Mikey and Maya were no different at the time. Even though they were almost complete opposites, neither of them struggled with academics, and they never competed with each other over grades, projects, or anything of the sort. The biggest difference between the two of them was their social skills. Both of them were very extroverted and both of them were very liked, but Mikey was noticeably more popular than Maya. This never created serious fights or feuds between them, but they would occasionally bicker about problems arising from this distinction. One of the reasons why Mikey was more popular was that she was just naturally good at stuff outside of school. She could sing, she had an amazing imagination, she would build robots for fun, and would win almost every science or math competition she ever entered. Maya, on the other hand, struggled showing her skills to the world. She was one of the best writers you would come across, and she could paint and play any instrument beautifully. She just struggled to share this with the world because of some problems she was facing at home. Both of them were sure they would get into colleges—they just wanted to get into good ones. When decision days came, Mikey got into one-third of the Ivy League universities. Maya got into one.

“Can you believe we’re going to Cornell together?!” Maya exclaimed when she saw Mikey’s acceptance letter on the online portal.

“Yeah… About that…” Mikey’s voice was filled with worry and fear.

“What about it?”

“I’m not going to Cornell.” Maya’s smile dropped. She couldn’t comprehend what her friend was saying, nor could she understand.

“What do you mean you’re not going to Cornell?!” Mikey could not meet Maya’s eyes. She was looking into the air, as if the response to her friend’s question would suddenly appear out of nowhere.

“It means just that. I’m not going to Cornell. I’m going to a community college two hours away from home. It’s more convenient that way for now.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means just that, Maya! Am I not being clear enough for you?!” During seven years of their friendship, Mikey had never gotten this angry or screamed this loudly at Maya before.

“No, you’re being perfectly clear. I just don’t understand why you would give up Cornell for some stupid community college. You have the money for it—”

Mikey did not let her finish.

“It’s not about the money, Maya! I just need to be close to my family right now. My grandma’s time is limited as it is, and I don’t want to spend the last years of her life too far away from her.”

“But your grandma wants you to go to Cornell… I really don’t understand. I think you’re making a really big mistake.”

“Maya, I honestly don’t understand how you can be this dense!” Mikey looked at her as if she wanted her best friend gone in that second.

“I’m not dense, Mikey. You’re just being unreasonable and stupid.”

“Oh my God, Maya! You never understood it, and it’s not gonna change now. This is my decision, and it’s not gonna change.”

“You know what?! You always do this. You always make stupid choices and cover it up with some lame excuses.”

“Lame?! You’re calling my grandma’s dementia a lame excuse?!”

“Yeah, I am. You’re making the biggest mistake of your life right now.”

“You know what? I think the biggest mistake of my life was being friends with you. It’s so obvious that you don’t like me. You never understood why I didn’t hang out with our friend group when I wanted to stay with my grandma. You just never understood me.”

“I agree. I don’t like you, and maybe we both made the biggest mistakes of our lives when we started being friends.”

“Yeah, maybe we did…”

Maya left Mikey’s house in a haze. The last time they saw each other was during their graduation, and they never spoke a word to each other since then. Everything in high school is way more serious than it actually is, but you can never tell or convince a teenager of that.

Maya shifted slightly, still unsure if she should stay or walk away. The silence between the two of them was heavier than any suitcase around them.

“I thought about this moment more times than I want to admit,” Mikey said finally. “And now I don’t know what to say or feel.”

Maya nodded slowly. “Yeah. It’s like… I rehearsed it in my head a thousand times.”

They both laughed in a way people laugh when something is actually not funny at all.

“I used to check in on you. Through mutuals,” Mikey said. “I didn’t want to gossip or anything. I just wondered how you were doing.”

“I wondered too,” Maya said. “But I was stubborn. I told myself that if you cared, you’d reach out to me.”

Mikey looked down. “I was stubborn too. I thought if I left it alone, it would just go away, you know.”

The airport was filled with busy people, energetic families, friends going on vacations… but it seemed like there was just a static sound surrounding these two at this moment.

“We were so dramatic,” Maya said after a long pause. “I mean, I’m not saying that what happened didn’t matter, but looking back, it’s crazy how much weight we put on one fight.”

“I know.” Mikey scratched the back of her neck uncomfortably. “But it wasn’t just the fight. It was everything underneath it. All the stuff we never said to each other and just let build up inside us. It would overflow sooner or later anyway.”

“Yeah,” Maya agreed. “You were scared. I was angry. Neither of us knew—or maybe didn’t even want—to say what we actually meant.”

“I kept thinking you’d try to fix it,” Mikey said. “You always did before. I think I was waiting for that.”

“And I was hoping that maybe, for once, you’d be the one to fix everything. But neither of us made the first move.”

They stood still, but they were closer to each other than they’d been in years.

“We were kids,” Maya said, her voice soft and sentimental. “Trying to act like we had it all figured out.”

“And now we’re adults, realizing we had no idea what we were doing,” Mikey added with the same voice.

Maya gave a faint smile. “Maybe we needed to grow apart to grow up.”

After minutes of memorizing the whole section of the airport, Mikey finally met her eyes. “I think we did. Doesn’t mean it didn’t suck.”

“No one really got me the way you did,” Maya said.

Mikey’s voice got quiet, as though she didn’t want Maya to hear what she was saying. “I missed that. I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

They didn’t reach for a hug. Didn’t make empty promises about keeping in touch and checking in on one another. They just stood there, realizing what had been lost between them and what had, in a way, survived.

“I don’t think we can go back,” Maya said.

“No,” Mikey agreed, and gave her a half-smile. “Take care, Maya.”

“You too.”

Maya watched Mikey disappear into the crowd, and for the first time in three years, she felt some lightness in her chest—and now she wasn’t sorry.