Measuring Stick
Letting go of childhood friendship is hard.
I know we shared a story once, but these days I find that hard to believe.
These days, when you call me at two in the morning, your voice dipped in tequila and anxiety, you tell me you’re dying, you’re drowning, you’re burning alive and they’re taking you whole. I listen. I comfort you. I try not to cry. But in the morning, I delete your call from my phone and pretend as if it were nothing at all.
In another age, when I was seven and you were eight, we walked by a homeless man on our way home from school. I didn’t think much of it until you asked me for your wallet in my bag and took out a bill. You smiled at the man and gave him the bill.
Your family taught you well. Compassionate and kind.
Those days, we were inseparable—invincible children in perpetual motion, ideas leaping off of us like sparks from a fire. Or make-believe detectives, coloring in the gaps with our imaginations. We’d meet at the last house on Gilmour Street, give ourselves fake names and funny hats, and pretend to be Holmes and Watson, asking strangers on sidewalks for clues. We’d sneak out of our homes once the sun had just set to lay on the wet grass in Parliament Hill, look across the river to Gatineau, and tell stories of the grown-ups we wanted to be.
We were our own Gods.
Summer was our sanctuary because you liked the taste of freedom and sunlight made us both beam brighter. For me, summer meant laying in a hammock by the water and planning our next adventure to somewhere exciting and new, or bonfires by the woods near your parents’ Quebec cottage, where the flames would get dangerously close to the trees but we’d put them out just in time. We watched the sunset as you drank down your thoughts and I drank in the moment because, for one second, with the glimmer of fleeting dusk on the horizon, you were magic to me. You were magic.
Somewhere between the Ottawa River and the railroad tracks, we promised to be friends forever. But we were silly, forgetting so quickly that not all roads lead to home.
It was with this innocence that I often wrote you poems while you weren’t looking:
The letter “Y” is your road and mine.
As the fork in the path reaches a close, our sidewalks collide—
I stopped before you could peek over my shoulder. But now I wish I kept going.
Kept going, like the way you ran, past the railroad tracks and out of sight. We used to be terrified of crossing them, but one day, you flew over those tracks without looking back. Years after I moved away, I heard you hadn’t come home in weeks. And when you finally came back, you smelled of cigarettes and perfume and alcohol.
One night over the fourth cup of tea, I realized I’d been thinking of it backwards:
The letter “Y” begins together and ends apart.
Like the base of a tree, growing and reaching, until the branches break away.
Fast forward too many years:
There is something foreign in the way you sit quietly alone now, the way I reach for you and you turn away. There are moments when I speak and realize I lost you long ago. We parted ways too early in life to say we grew up together, but I grew with you more than I have with anyone else.
The late nights and early mornings we breathed together, those are the moments I’ll hold onto long after you’re gone. So now when you go, I know I’ll never have to be alone. I know because we used to unravel the world’s great mysteries together, laying out the reasons behind every question, algorithms to nursery rhymes. In a voice fit for gods you’d tell me not to worry; things will be okay. Now I know better.
Late at night when darkness clouds my judgment, you become the measuring stick for every friendship and every friend who’s followed.
But they are not you, and thank God, they will never be you.