It all started as a Joke

Except Him

It all Started off as a Joke

-A concerned friend

It all started off as a of a joke. We all thought it was just a bit of playing around. The girl who has a hair tie around her wrist hoards them, The nerdy smart kid has to be plotting to blow up the country. There's a kid who has an apple for lunch every day? Well he must be obsessed with apples of course!

A joke, that was all it was.

And it stayed like that for years. Every day he would bring a shiny red apple for lunch, eat that and then ask around to see if anyone had an apple they didn't want to eat. We grew up together, every one of us in our little group learning and loving along the way.

He was one of our best friends.

The time came, as it does for everyone for us to go our own way. The hair tie girl became a doctor, the nerd works for nasa. I became a therapist, Working with people with addictions. We still kept in contact, holding informal dinner parties every few weekend and chatting whenever we found the time.

All of us but him.

He didn't tell us what he chose to do until three years after we graduated. We didn't hear a thing from him in those three years, try as we might all attempts to contact him failed. And we did try, many times. We only stopped trying and started forgetting about our childhood best friend a few months before the letter arrived in the mail.

A letter made with no paper.

I should have seen it then. A slip of something not quite parchment and smelling strongly of apples. An invitation to the edges of town, out by the farms and forests. Looking back it was painfully obvious. She should have thrown the letters out. We should have forgotten about the boy we grew up with. It would have been better for everyone.

It would have hurt less.

But no, we were excited to see him again. Excited to catch up again. none of us looked too deeply into the strange material the letters were made of. None of us looked into why the letters were made of apple. Instead we all piled into a car and headed off to the address.

We found out what he'd been doing all the years.

It started as a joke, a harmless playground jest. None of us were able to predict this would happen. Oh how I long for the days back when an apple was just a snack for lunch. We all long for those days.

Except Him.