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They met at the junior high youth group. He was in 7th Grade, she in the 8th; it was that awkward, formative age when everything is uncertain and friendships evaporate if one is careless, like new snow on warm asphalt.
He had a crush on one of her friends and she agreed to act as their messenger. Alas, love was not meant to be, but the friendship that blossomed between spurned suitor and agreeable messenger more than made up for it.
The two of them were inseparable in spite of their different backgrounds. She was the adopted daughter of upper-middle-class parents, while he came from a single-parent family on a fixed income. All the places they went together, in and out of youth group, they talked about everything: What they wanted out of life, their plans for the future… Both desired to work with children—he as a bus driver, she as a social worker.
“Hey, you,” she would say, eliciting a grin from him. Wordless familiarity abridged many a conversation they had. He was the brother she never had, she his nonexistent sister.
Eventually he became bored with the group’s shallow behaviour. They attended different high schools but on the same street, and so spent time together on the city bus each day… but already the inexorable drift apart was beginning.
He always remembered the morning she dropped a bombshell on the bus: She was pregnant.
Romance had never evolved for the two of them, although opportunities had arisen. One night they went for a long walk. It was one of those perfect nights, when the tranquil meets the sublime somewhere between starry skies and soft grass.
She smiled up at him with the moon reflected in her raven hair, and they kissed.
“Let’s never do that again,” he whispered when their lips parted. She nodded, understanding that what they shared was too precious to endanger with passion. They parted with a hug and nothing came of it.
Now she carried another man’s child. He respected her for going through with the pregnancy and giving her child up for adoption, but there was a hollow inside that could never be replaced.
Life marched on. She graduated and moved out of her parents’ home; their contact grew more erratic. From time to time they would run into each other downtown, her tales of life on social assistance growing ever more woeful. He promised to call or email but then his job or his classes would get in the way.
Once in a while their paths would cross. Well on his way to graduation, he was sorry to hear of her unemployment woes and anxious to help. He sought to find her a home with his spinster aunt, but that space was occupied by another young woman following a remarkably similar path. “Let’s get married,” they kidded, speaking matter-of-factly about shopping and cohabitation.
When he saw her next, it was as she exited the welfare office. He took in the female “roommate,” the telltale sores characteristic of methamphetamine use. Deep within his heart he felt a stirring, an impulse not to let her out of his sight, but he had a job interview to get to—besides which, she sounded uninterested in anything he had to say. As had always been the case, they parted with a hug.
She settled at a seedy rooming house in a disreputable part of town. Contact with her became limited to sporadic encounters via instant messaging, when he would attempt to learn her latest phone number. The numbers changed with the wind and she was usually absent when he called.
Two weeks before he left for college, they arranged to meet at a downtown café for lunch. She never showed, and it broke his heart.
He covered the hurt with anger and purged her from his mind; the college environment, with its bouquet of new faces and endless work assignments was tailored to that end. Her only semi-reliable contact, an email address, languished forgotten at the bottom of his online address book.
Summer brought heat waves and him home to search for work. Optimism was shattered when fate placed her, distraught, on his bus.
“My girlfriend just broke up with me,” she sobbed.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
“Nowhere,” she said.
She abruptly departed the bus with her itinerant male friend.
After they hugged.
He did not see her again.
Years intervened, bringing career and matrimony. He invested in a silver Toyota Prius that faithfully ferried him from his loving wife to his spacious office and back again.
Deep in the innermost secret parts of him, he never forgot her.
One haunted night, the Prius carried him down empty streets over which streetlights’ orange glow solemnly reigned supreme. He could not pinpoint what guided his movements. Be it God, be it Fate, be it the vague sixth sense of the night-time wanderer… it led him to an alleyway where a figure in stained grey sweatpants huddled beside a dumpster.
“Hey, you,” it mumbled through cracked lips and matted hair, and the grin it brought forth had to wade through tears. Without a sound, he transferred her to the loyal Prius, which eagerly took them to the local hospital.
Swathed in blue and white, her dark eyes stood in stark contrast to the pristine sheets. Nurses searched long and hard for a vein through which intravenous fluids could prolong the inevitable.
At last he stood in the waiting room’s crowded isolation, watching the doctor’s head slowly shake, and that shake rocked his entire world off its axis.
Back in the claustrophobic room that was now a sterile death chamber, he wrapped his arms around her shrivelled body and embraced her one last time.
It was their second kiss and their final hug.
Like always… They parted with a hug.
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