The Hardest Goodbye
By: Ruth Boskovic
You can love someone so much…but you can never love people as much as you can miss them. – John Green
It was the summer of the drought, when the days were long and hot, the corn growing short and spiked and dirt roads so dusty that you could barely breathe. It was that summer that I saw you again, Justin.
It’s funny how life gives you people and friends that come and go, but always part of them stays. And you, back in those days of playing hide and seek in backyards and fighting over chairs and running through the fields under a wide blue summer sky, had given that part of yourself. I had cried when my mother came and told me you were gone, that cold, rainy day in March, because I felt like I had lost a best friend. When I’d go into the city I’d search the busy streets for your face with blue eyes and freckled nose, desperately hoping to see you and somehow knowing I wouldn’t. The older I got, the more afraid I was afraid to see you. Afraid I’d look in your face and not know who you were anymore.
I guess time took you away just like your parents did, because that summer I wasn’t thinking about you at all, at least not the way I had when you first left. When you are seven, your whole world revolves around yourself and your family and friends. But when you’re twenty-two and finishing university, friends you had fifteen years before don’t have first place in your mind.
It was July, hot and humid and tiring. That Sunday afternoon I put on a summer dress and a pair of flip-flops and headed to the mall. When you’re a country girl used to the dust and the wind and the wide-open spaces, going to the city is a holiday. The colors flashing, the noise and strange faces are like part of a different world. And that was the world you lived in, Justin.
I was walking across the parking lot toward the glass sliding doors, feeling like freedom, when I caught his eye. For a second I saw a tall guy sitting on a bench, smoking, dressed in tattered jeans, green running shoes, and a red t-shirt that said, if my music’s too loud, then you’re too old. Then he looked up at me as I passed by and from beneath a fringe of too long black hair a pair of blue eyes stared back into mine.
In a rush I was back in my garden with you picking peas in the warm, sweet-smelling afternoon air. We were eating more peas then went in our baskets. We were laughing, your eyes full of mischief and fun. You pulled my braid, I grabbed your hat and threw it in the horse pen and then your dad had to go get it since the two of us weren’t allowed in there.
“Hey!” the guy said. “Quit staring at me like that, chick. It’s creepy.”
I don’t know how I knew it was you. What made me stop as I walked by? It was your eyes, I think.
They were empty.
“My name is Shasta.” I said, holding your gaze. “Call me that.”
You froze and sucked your breath in, then choked on the smoke and coughed a little.
“Shasta?” you repeated, frowning a little. “Do I know you?”
“Once, you did. I don’t know about now.” I offered
We stood staring at each other and I realized that once you know someone you always have that connection there. But as I looked at you, I found myself searching for the little eight-year-old boy with a crooked smile and a knack for annoying me.
You coughed again. “Weren’t we like – friends – once?”
“Once.” I said softly
You knocked the ash off the end of your cigarette. “Wow. Guess we haven’t seen each other in a while.”
“Seven years old.” I laughed sadly, fighting back the ache creeping into my heart. I had lost something and never even known it. And the man sitting in front of me I didn’t know. I knew you once upon a time, Justin, but I don’t know you now. “Haven’t built any hay forts lately, have you, Justin?”
You laughed sarcastically. “Not a chance. Stacking soup cans at Zehrs is more like it.” Then you asked me. “How about you? What’s up with you?”
I didn’t want to tell you the truth. That I had one year left and then I would be graduating from Western, one of the biggest universities in Canada with a degree in English Literature. But I did, just the way I had once told you everything.
“I guess life gave you a better turn then it gave me.” You said bitterly.
I didn’t say all things I’d heard about you from your cousin. How you’d gotten into fights at school, and then finally dropped out before they kicked you out. Then how you’d partied around, gotten into drugs and now at twenty-three could barely hold a job.
“Maybe you took all the wrong turns.” I said
You didn’t argue like you used to. “Yeah.” You muttered.
I couldn’t help but compare you to the kid I used to know. And it hurt, I guess, seeing a stranger with your eyes, that last time I had looked in them, had been bright. Now they looked lost.
A girl came walking up, her orange shirt hanging off a too skinny frame. She was young, but her skin too rough, eyes too hard. “Aren’t you comin’?” she asked you hoarsely.
You stood up and there was an awkward silence and she stared at us. “Goodbye.” You said finally.
“Goodbye Justin.” I said back.
It was the summer of the drought, Justin, that I saw you again. Alone, with haunting eyes filled with doubt and anger and hidden pain. The fields around my home were parched and pleading, the grass so brown it crumbled beneath my feet.
