LIVED THROUGH THIS
Unflinching Friendship
Car crashes, quarry jumps, and the friends we love despite everything
I put my feet on your dashboard, sand and beach tar between my toes; we are old friends.
You pull out a Marlboro and fumble in your pocket for your lighter, holding the steering wheel with your knees. “Don’t,” I say, reaching out for the wheel, nodding toward my child in the backseat. You nod and drop the cigarette out of your lips to your lap and grin at me. “Fine, but only for you.”
“Not for me,” I say.
“For him, because he is yours,” you say.
“Yes, but also for you.”
I’ve been trying to save you for 20 years since we were teenagers, since you’d drive recklessly on country roads, turning your truck into ditches, throwing beer cans into the bed, rolling it in a tobacco field. We all thought you were dead. I remember running through the fireflies, your overturned headlights lighting up the thick green tobacco rows, the red dust settling in their beams. I ran fast and silently, but by the time I was there, you were standing under stars lighting up a cigarette, staring at the wreckage, shaking your head. “Well, fuck,” you said.
