Eight Count ✔️

FOUR

Metal pans the city bus, in strips, lining the sides and crushable stops and starts. The ceiling is the same light metal in curved panels. And the seats, blue, the same shaded metal beside the flat cushioned fixtures.

I release a sigh of something between frayed anxiety, frustration, and impatient calculation. Hugging my basket to my chest, Dax mimics me. His eyes still dart to the rungs above and the occasional opening of the glass door. And I follow suit, trailing his sightline and gauging his expression every few seconds. Perhaps I'm waiting for a breakdown, one similar to the emotional show he had hosted every month on the dot before. The fact, a science of the past, one I knew like the back of my hand.

Dax stands, hoisting his basket to his side. He gestures a stout woman to his former seat. In turn, again, I follow, positioning my basket to my left. Dropping the basket at his feet, I copy as if my brain is controlled by a string attached to Dax, a mirror effect.

A stray thought lingers, probing my more sensitive side with a kick.

I should have found him. I could have found him if I tried hard enough.

No, there is no one to blame, my high school trek of angst vouches that the experience isn't worth it. Forgive and forget. More like, forgive and get a different life. The only way to forget lies in the realm of removal. And I guess, I did that two weeks ago, but that wasn't the point of my move to Los Angeles. I didn't move for him. I moved for my career, to get away from my suffocating helicopter parent and that suffocating town.

No one to blame.

Factually, I could blame myself as I had the first three years in his absence, an idiotic thought process I'm more than elated to rid myself of. Or I could blame Dax wholely as I have for the past five years, a solid comfort that I could take as real. Except, this piece of information would now hold as much as a single wire paperclip on a three-inch stack of documents. An impossible feat.

No one to blame.

"Look at that!" Dax knocks my shoulder. His mouth draws tight as if he's having bowel disruptions, but the glow in his eyes tells me otherwise. "I can't believe how sharp the linework is."

Dax prizes his eyes on a concrete building flying past. Concrete chipped at odd angles and paint splayed on the surface, annoyance sprouts in my head, but I quickly push the messy thought away. Instead, I zero in on the fine details of the wall disbandment, attempting to claw a different meaning from the blue, pink, and black piece. The abstract graffiti looks something like a roller coaster or maybe an optical allusion, a mixture of colors there to fuzz my brain and mess with my sense of reality.

I nod. "Alright."

"Yeah, yeah." Dax mimics me, nodding vigorously. "I really like how the artist told a story with that piece. Really cool."

What story? A mess? A conglomeration of colors splattered on a public surface. A defacement, an abomination, certainly not "cool".

Yet, my lips tick into a smile, and my brain relays a single thought regarding his cuteness. Cute of all things.

"Have fun with that." I don't think I meant the phrase to echo with degrading dropback, but he doesn't seem to catch my sarcasm anyway.

"I will. I might sketch it from memory later. Always fun to see what obscurity my mind shifts up."

His look of shy enthusiasm sends my brain back to the past.

He used to sketch everything. Every building downtown had at least one sketch penciled in thumbnails within a sparse space in the specialty watercolor notebook he got on sale. He had at least seventy different pages of just trees drawn still from the hikes I used to enjoy. Then the animals we caught glimpses of, the moments of silence where he would disrupt the quiet with the almost silent draw of his number two pencil.