Someplace Humid Near Orlando, Florida
We had a tradition for birthdays: a call once it was midnight so that we’d be the first of everyone else to groggily whisper our well wishes for each other. It started as a promise from me that I’d do it every year for you, no matter what I was doing, who I was with, or how tired I was.
When I turned 20, some of my Denton friends whisked me away from my dorm to spoil me with jjajangmyeon, phở, rolled ice cream, and several new outfits from Plato’s Closet. The hours we spent together were supposed to be enough fun to distract me from your absence in my messages, to keep me from muting my notifications and clinging to the expectation that you’d just surprise me later if I stopped obsessively checking my phone. The distance between us surely hadn’t made you forget about our promise.
I never heard from you, though. I only got an “I’m sorry I missed your birthday!” text a few days later. You had been busy.
I believed in you for each second of those 24 hours.
*
The day we met junior year of high school, I had stayed after-hours to see what the Creative Writing Club was all about. While waiting for the meeting to start, a friend and I were obsessing over Sebastian and Ciel Phantomhive from Black Butler. You called out to me from the table behind us, gushing about how much you loved the series and those specific characters, too. I turned around to talk with you more, but my words caught in the back of my throat. You had fringed, dark-brown hair that fell in a jagged mess to your ears and wore black skinny jeans, high-top Converse, and a yellow-and-black flannel shirt. Whatever you tried telling me was probably something about Black Butler, and I convinced myself that the clamminess in my hands was just me being excited about befriending someone cool.
*
Autumn weather never really graced us down by the Texas coast, so we often hung out in the courtyard for lunch, sitting underneath the brick archway that connected to the front office. We had plenty of shade, but the moisture in the air still stuck to our skin, even under our hoodies. At this point in the year, our school had hired special vendors for Homecoming Spirit Week. You scarfed down brisket burgers and chili nachos while I munched on a funnel cake for the first time in my seventeen years as a born-and-raised Texan.
Something I said made you laugh and you doubled over with one hand on the concrete to steady yourself, the other over your mouth.
“You good there, Jay?” I asked, patting your back, the words mixing with my giggles.
You nodded; me patting your back somehow turned into you borrowing my lap as a pillow and me crossing my arms over your back. The softness of the black hoodie you wore made me feel weightless. I ran my fingers through your overgrown undercut, a privilege you gave only to me and one other person.
“You’re really comfy, Jay,” I smiled into your hoodie. You nestled your head into my hand, the friction from the shorter sections of your hair tickling my palm.
“You, too, Frence.”
*
At the end of our first week as high-school seniors, you walked me out to my bus for the first time in a while. Your friends came sprinting from the other side of the building, waving and screeching for your attention. I had to leave soon, so I trapped you in a hug for all of 15 seconds. Your tiny frame fit perfectly in my arms as you squeezed me tight. The curve of your waist against my fingertips made my skin hot, and maybe that was why I wanted to pull you back for a kiss when we parted. I tried to believe that the upcoming Labor Day weekend would give us enough physical distance apart for me to brand these new desires as teenage hormones, but the infatuation resurfaced seeing you again after break. These were feelings familiar to me from past crushes: picking your silhouette out among a 2000-student crowd, monopolizing as many hugs as possible before we each headed off to class, being annoyed with how effortlessly cute you looked all the time, wanting every touch we shared to mean something beyond platonic comfort.
It was then I knew I couldn’t hide my attraction to you behind thoughts of, “If only Jay were a guy,” any longer.
*
You came to me first after you found out your family could fit a sixth person in their car for Ren Fest. We were waiting for Calculus to start; you spun around to face me and smacked your hands against my desk when I told you I’d never been before.
“Oh my god, Frence. It’s decided—you’re going with me,” you declared. It’d be a tight fit, but you were willing to let your little brother squish you if it meant I could come along.
A few days later, you walked into class with bad news: I wouldn’t be able to go with you after all. You said it was because your family didn’t want to overcrowd the car when five people would take up all the space anyway.
“Sucks that you’ll be by yourself, save for family. Have fun, though!” I said. Your cheeks turned red.
“Oh, Nate’s going with me, actually, so I’ll be fine.” Nate was the person you loved at the time, someone you had invited along the moment your family made plans for the festival. I was just an afterthought.
*
How far is too far before we forget what we’re trying to hold on to?
*
Our first sleepover together happened sometime in September of senior year. I was too nervous to be alone with you that night, so I invited another friend along as my safety net. We started the night with long talks about life and relationships, which then turned into you both raiding my closet for mismatched outfits to make me try on. We laughed to the point of tears until my uncle came to warn us that we could wake up my sleeping cousins. After that, we moved to the living room where the full-sized air mattress had been set up for us. You and I slept on it together while my other friend crashed on one of the grey cloth couches.
I scared myself awake at one point during the night: I had rolled over toward you in my sleep, my left arm and leg frozen above you. I reeled my limbs back to me and muttered, “Sorry,” under my breath. You shifted under the blankets to get more comfortable. I felt your back against mine, and then my body stiffened. I waited for you to realize you had touched me.
You never moved, and I never went back to sleep.
The next morning, you and I decided to walk around the neighborhood. My other friend had already left, and your mom wouldn’t be by to pick us up for the Rick Riordan movie for another several hours.
As we rounded the corner by the duck pond and public gazebo, rain clouds began patching together in the sky. We risked another five minutes of walking before we were pelted by a sudden downpour. During our sprint back to my house, the clapping of my sandals and your Converse against the concrete somehow drowned out the rain.
“Guess our morning walk turned into a jog,” I commented between gasps for air.
“Yeah, no kidding,” you laughed. “Hey, Frenci?”
“Hm?”
“Who’s this person that you like?”
“Uh, why do you want to know?” I asked, looking up from wringing the water out of my shirt, brows furrowed and heartrate up again.
“I’m just curious,” you said.
“Not a chance.” I narrowed my eyes, skeptical of your motives.
“Oh, come on. Just tell me,” you urged again, this time nudging my arm. I couldn’t tell if your lips had curved into a teasing smile or a knowing smirk.
*
Throughout senior year of high school, we developed a routine of passing around a splotchy, red-and-white composition book I still had from a middle school science class. Whichever one of us was in possession of the composition book last gave it to the other person the next time we met, and throughout the day we scribbled, doodled, ranted, and vented to each other in it. I one-sidedly named it “The Mentality Journal.”
One night while I was up late finishing some homework, I wrote a two-page confession letter to you in the journal. I gave it to you the morning after but with those pages stapled shut. You noticed the change, stuck your finger through one of the gaps in the staples, and asked me what it was, if you could read it.
“It’s...personal. Sorry, Jay,” I said.
A pause.
“Okay, Frenci,” you said and flipped to another page. Part of me wanted you to rip the staples out and read the confession, to force me into confronting my feelings for you face-to-face. That way you could reject me, tell me you loved me only as a friend—as family—and I could finally give up on you.
But I knew you wouldn’t turn back to those pages. I trusted that even when you had the journal with you later in another class, you wouldn’t try to read from between the gaps.
*
“Wow, that person’s a bitch. They don’t know what they’re missing out on, Frenci,” you comforted, unaware the person I lamented about having unrequited feelings for was none other than you. The final bell just rang; you had decided to put your JROTC obligations on hold until you saw me off to my bus.
“That’s ironic,” I muttered, thinking the bang-pang-clang and clatter-chatter of other students crowding the stairs was enough to drown out my voice.
You stopped a few steps above me and said, “Oh, shit.”
I turned to face you and repeated, “Oh, sh—.”
Then I ran away.
*
We graduated high school in early June of 2014, and the day you left followed a few weeks later. With the help of a few of our mutual friends, I threw you a going-away party at one of their houses. My parting gift to you was homemade chicken parmesan with extra cheese—your favorite meal. We ate and talked and laughed for the remaining few hours you had in Texas before you hit the road for Florida.
At the end of those few hours, our friends suffocated you with farewell words and group hugs. I stood off to the side with my hands behind my back, waiting my turn. I held onto you longer than everyone else had, but the only words that came out of my mouth were, “Have a safe trip, Jay.” You replied back with “Yeah,” and just like that, you were elsewhere. Whichever three words I wanted to tell you never made their way out the door.
You let go; I let you.
*
For two years after you left, I believed in the texts I knew would eventually make their way to me. I believed in the late-night phone calls and Skype sessions we had where we’d vent about being in college away from everyone and everything we knew. I believed in the Ravenclaw-themed lanyard and prefect pin you bought for me during your trip to Universal Orlando—in the envelope you packaged them in addressed to me like a Hogwarts acceptance letter. Hope is easy when there’s routine.
But somewhere along the line, I stopped wanting to try all the time. I became closer with friends I had known longer whose messages flooded my phone more than yours. We each met new people who made our classes more bearable and social lives more fun. Soon, neither of us could continue carrying the conversation anymore as the promises we had made to travel to each other morphed into nothing more than just the shriveled remains of a barren commitment.
*
Dealing with a lost relationship is easy when there’s someone to blame for breaking the bond. One person crosses the line, tries too little, betrays the other’s trust, cares enough in words but not in actions, and then the one who’s hurt decides whether to sever the bond or save it. I don’t have anywhere to place the blame for what happened to us, though—not on me, not on you, nor on the thousands of miles and numerous states that have kept us apart.
*
While cleaning out my dorm closet one day, I found the Mentality Journal buried underneath a handful of other old notebooks. I read through it one last time for the sake of nostalgia, my hands eventually flipping to those two stapled pages. I slipped my finger through one of the gaps. The words “I like you, Jay” came into focus; I was reminded of when I believed our relationship would always stay the same. All along, I just didn’t want to accept that we both had changed from who we used to be.
That whoever you had become was someone I didn’t know.
That my heart was still stuck with high-school you.
That I could wish, dream, hope for it, even, but simply thinking about you would never close the distance between us.
So I tossed the journal in the recycle bin down the street.
*
Whenever December 26 rolls around, I catch myself awake just before your birthday, my thumb hovering over the call button beneath your name. Maybe you’ll pick up, voice low, a bit groggy, and I’ll apologize for calling out of the blue, and you’ll say it’s fine because you haven’t slept yet, and we’ll talk for hours just to catch up on escaped time. Maybe that one call is all we need for a new normal to find its way to us. But instead, I lock my phone and close my eyes.
The message can wait until sunrise.
-Frenci Nguyen
Frenci Nguyen is a PhD student in Creative Writing at Ohio University who holds an M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction degree from Miami University (Oxford, OH). They were runner-up for the 2021 Betty Jane Abrahams Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020 Jordan-Goodman Graduate Writing Award in Creative Nonfiction. Frenci’s work has appeared in Harpur Palate, GASHER, The Citron Review, Bat City Review, Hippocampus, peculiar, and elsewhere.