Greece

There has always been something magnetic about our nature - pulled to and from each other each year. We could be six or sixteen and I'd find you; sometimes negatively charged, but positive I'd raise your spirits.

We played kickball every lunch - the red rubber ball crashing into the wire fence; shaking the players that waited anxiously on the other side, fingers intertwined with the chicken wire. I’d quietly shift from my place at the front of the line, summoning the confidence to try once again at a game I didn’t know how to win, but could never stop trying. You saw me attempting - a nod of reassurance or grimace when I missed. When crowds would arrive, staring down from behind the fence, retrieving the ball as it rolls to the other side of the court - sneering you failed or some puncturing insult thrown at me like the ball I couldn’t seem to reach - you saw. When I had enough, exhausted by expectations of progress, it was you who trailed after me. After I turned my back on the kickball court, high tops dragging on the pavement in shame, I didn’t expect anyone to follow. You made sure I wasn’t lonely. After all, you were familiar with how that felt.

Five years passed and you were always one of my favorite people, someone I was still trying to get to know after all this time. I’d hesitate to say it, trade I love you for love ya little bro in hastily scribbled birthday cards, tease you about a multiplication problem you solved wildly wrong. But sometimes I wonder if I should’ve told you at the time - you were a friend I valued almost as much as I’d come to miss you.

In the cool of a canyon we hiked down, we had balanced on the bars of a fence and waited for the rest of the class. It was a quiet moment reserved for our melancholy as we whisper our fears of the future and sink in our pools of reminiscence. There is nothing riding on an effortless conversation with a good friend. And I thought this is normally where you pull away. But we kept talking. And I knew in that moment, this is what I had always wanted. 

That summer you got on an airplane and headed to Greece - a photo of you: beach wave curls, canvas shirts, vivid and warm architecture framed on the mountains behind your family. It’s like the trip we had planned in fourth grade - visiting our relatives around the world until our definitions of culture and origins looked the same. We said we would fill our absences of cousins with each other, and our futures with the promise of potluck picnics reuniting familial friends. 

My window to your light and vanilla world was shut at a different high school. Your skyline filled with plastic red cups and textbooks heavy enough to squash you like the bugs we had rescued in the summer warmth - but somehow you had grown even taller the next time I saw you. There was distance between us - not just in our heights as you’d tower over me, but with new cities and delayed responses to exchanged messages. I put in even more of an attempt in your birthday card that year, but you hadn’t even wished me a happy birthday the next month. Two months go by, and suddenly, two words become unnatural for you?

You and I are an unpredictable flight - turbulence interrupting the smooth, silky sights in between. Maybe no one’s even at the controls - but still, we keep flying. There are other places we’ll travel, other people you’ll visit. They won’t know about how you used to be blonde, eyes framed with strawberry freckles, how you take after your father, how you are missing your sister. Sometimes we forget that we know each other and it makes me all the more sorry. More so, than kickball. Because this time, you’re not walking away with me. It's you, walking away from me. 

The last time I had seen you - before you left that summer - was our last days as eighth-graders. I turned around as you were leaving, an empty dance floor - purple lights changing the hues of your expression, maybe it was sorrow, maybe it was pain - and we locked eyes. You raised your arm to wave, and I, preoccupied with the last song, casually shouted, “Goodbye Noah!”, because I was confident I would see you again soon. I blamed our diverged paths on that summer - that you halfway across the globe was an excuse for losing the reconciliation we had curated. I would tell myself a carefully composed goodbye could preserve what we had lost. Now I think about that moment a lot. Because I’m pretty sure you’ve never even been to Greece.

I’m holding on to that picture for a cloudy day - we can go together and turn our backs on the chicken wire holding everyone else caged in. The flight may be long but we’ve both traveled places that have taken much longer to arrive. Finding the euphoria we’ve captured in split conversations and unspoken understandings, this, this is how I’ll remember you.

 I try not to weigh your presence in my life - it would mean reflecting on something that’s gone. The shy fourth grader has long culminated, but so has mine. Wounds have healed, skin thicker, and stronger legs for field games. You are still here. I’ve never been able to tell if I found you or you found me. Whatever caused these paths to intertwine, is not forgotten further down the roads. Do you remember the last time we called? In broken words between the game we had played, I reminded you, “It feels like you hate me.” It wasn’t posed as a question, and was suggested half jokingly, but I begged for an answer - to confirm a fear lurking in the shadows of the past year, crawling into conversations and pockets of plane tickets and empty promises. When the hurt returns to your voice, softer now, I regret pushing the subject. 

“of course not.” 

Seven years passed and you are one of my favorite people, someone I’ve learned from. One year we had carved printing blocks and sold prints to earn enough money for our class’ trip. I still have the bookmark you had given me - a tree wrapped in satin stars - with a word printed above it. Wander. To leisurely seek the ins and outs of this rich earth and who we are when we are not with those that taught us to live. I have framed photos of them all, the families I’ve never wanted to wander from, across my walls. You are there too, beaming shyly from behind me. A recurring character in my poetry. The next time I see you, we’ll remind each other that wanders can return home. We’ll be in Greece in ten years or maybe just at a friend’s picnic next week, camera hung loosely from my neck, and I can capture us again.