Matt

A flash fiction story.

I stole this picture from someone’s eBay listing.

It had been ten years, easily, since I heard from him. A text rolled in randomly, asking if I remembered when we would drive in his shitty brown Volkswagen from the two bedroom apartment we shared with two, sometimes three other punks, how on our way to the tattoo shop where I worked—he reminded me now—that we would listen to the album, Feeling Strangely Fine, by Semisonic, every day as we drove, and that he was listening to it now—remembering those drives and that album, and the years we shared.

I had forgotten about that. Replaced that memory somewhere along the way with the multitudes of passwords one must remember now, or the middle names of girls I dated for two weeks, forever ago. And suddenly, as I stared at the words trapped in my phone from one of my oldest friends—a friend I thought for sure would have been dead by now—I wanted to cry.

He was alive. The heroin hadn’t killed him, proof in a picture he sent me a few seconds later. There he was, that boy I knew when we were fifteen playing guitars, in bedrooms, still in those eyes staring back at me again from thousands of miles, and a lifetime away.

I remembered how he would drive with one hand on the wheel and strum along his stomach with his other, like he was picking a guitar, and I would tap my fingers against the dashboard in time with the keyboard part of “Singing in my sleep.”

We hid that album from our other friends—had to pretend we were so punk all the time.

God, the posturing of young boys trying to find their way as men. How painful it is, but we had that album and those minutes every day, to and from the tattoo shop, and for the twenty minutes or so that it took to get there, or back home to the apartment, and our punk friends, we were free to be boys who liked what they liked just a little longer.