still waters

prologue

When I first proposed the notion of a furthered step, one that would turn my fantasies into a reality (or was it the opposite way around?), I had asked in a desire to deepen our friendship, for it had felt as if it were lacking something.

It was never doubt. That concept never seemed to surface for longer than a few seconds amongst my mind. If an ounce of it did happen to rise up, there was this unshakable trust I had for the boy that always beat it down. In retrospect, perhaps there was a bit of credulity present as well.

After four years of seemingly-close friendship, it was only human nature that my view from that Sony webcam, and the lamp illuminating the corner end of his bedroom wall, couldn't quite satiate me as it once had. With each day of the passing four years, the gnawing feeling that I was missing out on some aspect of my friend's life ate away at my conscious.

Whenever I happened to voice my dissatisfaction with the distance between us, I didn't much question his evasion of the topic. He had given valid reasons as to why we couldn't meet in person, such as family hindrance and the inundation of school.

Little had I known, his tremendous efforts had succeeded all of those years—for it wasn't until I set foot in his world that the fog veiling my small-town eyes abated.

"Dayton," I said one night, when I was feeling extra gutsy. The boy smoothed the arches of his eyebrows with the raise of them, his eyes wide and open to question. His lips parted, impending response. "Figure I could come to visit someday?"

That was the first time I had asked; two years ago. With it, the natural arch of his eyebrows returned as the muscles of his forehead relaxed—or paralyzed, I wasn't sure—and his right cheek began to lift as his mouth opened in contemplation—or disgust, I wasn't sure.

His laptop camera was tilted so that his entire upper body was in view. As always, the boy had on his deep purple jacket; the hood flipped to cover half of his head. He thumbed the bright, cyan blue strings that contrasted the plum as he contemplated my rather abrupt question.

I hugged the pillow that was sitting in my lap to my face, hiding whatever type of contortion my expression would take on. It all depended on his response. It seemed many of my decisions depended on that, even back then.

My teeth sunk into the pillow and my nose rubbed on the cotton as I stared at the boy through the screen. The light reflected off of him in a strange, refined manner; the curb of the shadows contrasted to his pale skin, framing his jaw line into an intensified V-shape. The small section of light that danced upon his coffee-stained hair rendered the remainder of it a coal-like black, as if the illuminated portion were ensuring nothing stood in the way of its performance.

"Uh," was his simple response, something to close the silence. His head tottered to the left, the movement pouring his lamp's dim light onto the right side of his face. It fell on the ripples of his skin-laid features, undulating on his pronounced cheekbones and bringing to light the concavity of his dark eyebrows; thick and arched due to the slimness of his features. As he spoke, his cheekbones looked to me like tiny boats on his ocean of skin; at some words drowning, others resisting the submerge. With age I had presumed, his cheeks began to sink into that dimple he used to have.

By the lamp behind him, his pupil grew harmonious with the soft-brown iris that mimicked his hair. That night it stood alive on his head in a jumble, as a result of his constant urge to run his fingers through it.

"I don't know, Jamie. I'm sorry," he finally said.

It wasn't until two years later, when I had warmed the boy up to the idea enough, that I grew a bone of confidence. After consistently mentioning the ordeal, I began to grow confident in my own idea of purchasing a ticket without his consent and appearing on his doorstep. I knew the boy, and I knew that he wouldn't allow our friendship to take a hit over a thing we both seemed to want.

So I did just that, hoping just that, oblivious to just that. It seemed the only way of filling that feeling that our friendship lacked closeness.

I had no knowledge of the area in which he resided, I had no knowledge of what I'd find when I got there. I only knew that he hated where he lived; that world he lived in. Due to my immersion in our friendship, I prepared to hate it just as he did. But beneath the pettiness, beneath my premature aversion, my sole motive for purchasing the ticket was my certainty that if the place was the boy's world, the negative aspects of it were insignificant to me.

Months after that night, he told me that if I came for a visit, I'd be futilely clawing my way out. He said that whichever new place I move, whatever new sites I see, that I'll never be able to scrape the visuals from the depths of my memory, nor erase the crashing new viewpoint that place in which he resides will open my eyes up to.

I told him to quit panicking.

It was then that I began to realize how oblivious I had been the entire four years of our friendship.