Friday is Johnny’s goodbye party, themed “Italian vs. American.” We face off — tiramisu versus ice cream nachos; Birra Moretti versus Sam Adams; Andrea Bocelli versus Dolly Parton — and vote on winners. The next day, he boards his flight to Rome with my gift in his bag.
On Saturday, for Ava’s farewell, we pile into a party bus and go to a day club where men with hulking shoulders and toothpick legs swarm around the pool. Things are a little quiet without Johnny terrorizing all the straight men, but Ava has a good time, and texts our group a line of blue emojis from the airport: crying face, cyclone, crying face, heart, butterfly, butterfly, jumping dolphin, evil eye. I heart her message and remind her to open her present when she gets to Cairo.
Sunday is Dani’s last night in town, and we celebrate with one of the group dinners we’ve shared since we all first met at a language exchange for expats. Ava and Manu usually make the main. But Ava is gone and Manu finished her own 6-month stay in this city of students and travelers and restless souls a few weeks ago, so my table is light. Those of us who are left pass around bags of double-fried potato chips and tubs of store-bought hummus. Afterwards, I slip a wrapped package into Dani’s backpack and go for a walk past my favorite bakery, shuttered for the night. The front window, usually cluttered with fat floury loaves and glistening pastry snails, is carapaced in thick metal slats.
It seems like I’m the only one who stays in one place anymore. I know my friends will get to their next cities — places in which they know no one, or know just their partner, or know many members of their extended family but are truly known by none of them — and, upon arriving at graduate student housing, or a strange apartment, or a guest bedroom, feel lonely.
The first thing they’ll do is sit down on their new beds, testing the tensility of the blankets and the softness of the sheets, and imagine they belong.
The second thing they’ll do, trying to feel at home, is unpack. Johnny will put up his black-and-white postcards. Ava will light her smudge stick of sage that’s seen the inside of no less than 26 airports. Dani will plug in their white noise machine and let the busy whirring of a thousand fans drown out the honks of Bucharest.
The third thing they’ll do, missing what they left behind, is open my present. Off will come the ribbon, rasped into frothy blooms. Then the paper, thick and crisp with tight corners. They’ll take out the leather-bound album I’ve prepared for them and open the first gilded page to see a photo of us.
When their real eyes make contact with their photo eyes, the two-dimensional ones that I’ve spelled into a portal, their bodies will be sucked through the page. They’ll ricochet like light refracted through a realm I’ve built out of layer after layer of memories, stories, late-night conversations, solemn pacts, and inside jokes. They’ll leave their apartments empty, their partners wondering where they’ve gone, and they’ll travel back across all the miles their misguided choices have put between us. They’ll come back to me.
I’ll know when it’s happened because my own album, sitting on my bookshelf next to the pottery I made with Johnny and the pressed flowers collected on a hike with Ava and the notebook Dani gave me, will start to glow. Light will drift around my living room like barbeque smoke. I’ll go to the book, open it up to a previously empty page, and see a new face added to my collection. It’ll be like they never left.
First will be Johnny, looking so handsome and so confused. The little line he shaves into his eyebrow will bounce around as he waves at me, eyes wide and worried. I’ll wave back and close the book, petting its cover before I put it back on the shelf.
Ava will show up the next day, with her hair curling over her collarbones and her gold necklaces glinting. Her lips will look pursed as ever but I won’t be able to hear anything she’s saying. “I love you, too!” I’ll mouth before shutting the album.
Dani’s usually late, so I might miss their arrival. I’m hiking part of the Camino de Santiago next week. I’m walking it a few days at a time. Every time I do a section, I make small talk with the pilgrims and hear about how most are compelled to do the grueling walk after losing someone important to them.
I’ll pat their backs and buy them beers but I won’t relate, not really.
All my people are at home, together again for any moment we may need each other, safe between the pages of my Friends Forever album, trapped under embossed leather on my shelf.
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Katherine Plumhoff writes short fiction. Find her stories in X-R-A-Y, The Forge, Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather Review, and Best Small Fictions 2024. She is a 2x Pushcart Prize nominee and 3x longlister for the SmokeLong Quarterly Workshop Prize. Say hi at @kplumhoff or katherineplumhoff.com.