Jorge was visiting his family for the holidays, it had been almost 4 years since the last time he had seen them and more than a decade since the last time he had been back to his hometown. Jorge shut the door quickly behind him when he entered, he scanned around the El Burro, his hands were clammy despite the chilling weather and he felt an anxious swirl in his stomach. He never thought he’d agree to this reunion ever in his life, but he desperately needed a reminder of simpler times. Sitting at the farthest booth from the bar door was the man who invited him out for drinks, his childhood friend Lupe. There was an empty beer bottle on the table and it made Jorge wonder how long he’d been waiting for him.
When the two made eye contact Lupe excitedly jumped out of his chair to meet him. The patchy scruff he had in high school had now grown into a beard proper which contrasted with his still boyish frame. It made Jorge aware of his own body, which was now easily a hundred pounds bigger than when they graduated. As Lupe approached the anxiety swelled in Jorge, in countless ways he reflected his younger self, but people become strangers when a decade passes. The anxiety melted when Lupe simply clapped his hand and pulled him in for a hug. It was a power of Lupe’s that Jorge admired even still, and made it hopeful that things hadn’t changed much after all.
The two sat down and Lupe immediately opened with questions. “It’s great to see you man, how’ve you been?”
“Good, you know.” Jorge shifted around to make himself more comfortable in the booth. “Same-old same-old I guess.”
“Can I get you two anything?” The bartender approached. He was a younger man, Jorge didn’t recognize him.
“Two shots, Patrón. For old-time sake.” Lupe ordered with a crooked smile.
“I’m good, sorry. I don’t drink.” Jorge corrects.
“Ah, one then. Thank you.” Lupe waited for the bartender to leave before saying, “You should have told me, we could have met up somewhere else.”
“It’s fine, I wanted to get a look at the place, see what’s changed.” Jorge looked around, the place still had the same colors, the same decorations, and the same smell. It was the people around him that were different now. He looked over at the pool table where a few younger men were laughing, taking turns hitting the cue ball as hard as they could between puffs of their vapes. Jorge remembered doing the same when he and Lupe were younger, 15 maybe. They wouldn’t even keep score, they’d just listen to the old men in the bar, then ask them to buy them beers. Sometimes they would.
“When I heard you were back in town I knew I had to reach out. This place must be so boring to you now, huh?” Lupe joked.
“Nah, not at all. The city is always busy and claustrophobic. It makes it hard to think, to breathe. It’s quieter here, I like that. I missed that.” Jorge had only been in town for a few days, but the change in environment was refreshing.
“You’re married now right?” Lupe continued his questions.
“Uh, yeah.” When he saw that Lupe clearly wanted to know more, he continued. “We met in my last semester of college. She’s great. We’re expecting, actually.” Jorge instinctively rubbed the base of his ring finger, which not too long ago wore the band of a metal ring but now was only imprinted with the memories of one.
“That’s awesome, congratulations. You’re gonna name them after me right?” Lupe laughed to himself.
A wave of sadness drowned out Lupe’s voice. “I saw there’s a Walmart now. That’s cool.” Jorge distracted himself. “Makes me wish we had one of those around as kids.”
“Oh, yeah. It opened up a few years ago now. It was a big thing, lots of people got mad about it, threatened to boycott and all that.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t work, huh?” Jorge asked sarcastically.
“It’s convenient, that’s for sure. All that self scanning shit makes it easier to steal.”
Jorge laughed. “Remember when we used to take snacks from the corner store down by Dixie. God we were dumb.”
“We!” Lupe shook his head. “I remember I used to do the stealing, you were always too scared to.”
“You were a better runner.”
“The best. But, you know what’s funny?”
“What?”
“When the store was shutting down I was talking to the owner and we had this long conversation and it turns out that he knew the whole time we were stealing shit.”
“Really?” Jorge asked with shock.
“Yeah, he said that I looked so skinny that if I had just asked for some food they would’ve just given it to me out of pity. So, they would just let us take whatever, it’s not like we ever stole enough that it bothered them anyways.”
“That is funny.” Jorge chuckled.
“But seriously,” Lupe tried refocusing the conversation. “What has your life been like man? I want to know everything I’ve missed.”
Jorge sighed, since he’d been back he’d given the same spiel countless times to his extended family. Well, what could once more hurt? “It’s been fine, boring really. I did the college thing, and got a job where I was interning at and have just been doing the 9 to 5 since.”
“You still doing that ‘coding’ stuff?” Lupe asked.
“It’s more complicated than that, but yeah.” Jorge continued with a milquetoast recollection of the last decade of his life. He was showered by the countless memories he had made in that time, all of the firsts he experienced. Once beautiful and precious moments now stained by the knowledge of the present. He only wanted to recall the bare minimum.
“But yeah, life’s just been normal. I’d really rather hear about you. I’m sure you’ve got some crazy stories, huh?” Jorge was happy to move the conversation off himself. “Remember that time in highschool before classes started you convinced me to go on a bus with you to Arlington?”
“We went to that Ranger’s game right?” Lupe recounted.
“Yeah, and then you got us into that club afterwards. You always got us into some crazy shit.” Jorge reminisced. He remembered taking the bus back into town that next morning, hungover. At the time he was really mad at Lupe for convincing him to go along, but now it was a memory Jorge clung to. “I remember being so scared cause I had never been that far from home alone.”
“Yeah, but you got used to that didn’t you?” Lupe half-joked. “Life’s been up and down. A lot happens in ten years. After high school I sorta just kept doing what I had been and eventually my mama got fed up and kicked me out. Then I started getting into some dumb shit and spent a few years in prison.”
“Oh.” Jorge was surprised, though his next thought made him wonder if he shouldn’t have been.
“Yeah, but when I got out things started turning around. Found myself a job, gained a passion, met someone. Started being an adult, you know? It was hard, but I learned.” Lupe stopped talking when he saw Jorge had kept glancing at a woman sitting at the bar.
Jorge pointed at the woman. “She looks familiar right?”
Lupe looked at her, then called out. “Brenda.” The woman turned around and took a second to recognize the two of them.
Brenda’s eyes widened as she excitedly greeted them. “Oh my god! What are you guys doing here? It’s been so long!” She gave each of them a hug. “I didn’t know you were in town Jorge.”
“Yeah, visiting my family. And uh…” Jorge gave a little look to Lupe. “I go by George now.”
Brenda nodded her head, unsure if to comment. She looked down at Lupe, “It’s cool that you two are hanging out. The ‘Lupe Brothers’ back together, huh?” Jorge winced at her words. The kids started saying that back in middle school because he was so quiet no one ever knew his name, but they sure knew Lupe’s.
“Yeah, we’re actually catching up right now, it’s been a while for us too.” Lupe told her.
“Awww, we’re all so old now. Time’s arrow never stops.” She looked down at Lupe again. “Well I won’t interrupt, it was nice seeing you, George.”
“Nice seeing you Brenda.” Jorge watched her closely as she walked away. He remembered that she had gotten pregnant near the end of high school by someone much older than them. She was attractive then, and now even.
“You’re looking too much.” Lupe said. It was a habit Jorge had always had, even after marriage.
Seeing Brenda brought back a nudging question, one he wanted to ask for many years, and one he thought he no longer needed an answer for. “How’s Anisa?”
—
Jorge locked the door on the house he grew up in one final time. He said he wanted to make sure he wasn’t leaving anything important behind, but his real reason was more sentimental than he was willing to admit. The last time he was inside the house was almost a year ago after his dad’s funeral. As he expected there was nothing worth taking with him. He took another look inside the bed of his truck, it was perhaps the only positive thing that he had gotten from his dad who had bought it for himself a few months before he died. His tia had tried reassuring him that the truck was always intended to be his, but Jorge had known his father better. He gave one last wave to the landowners of the property the house was on and got inside the truck.
In the passenger seat was his girlfriend, Anisa. She had been extra clingy since Graduation, which Jorge couldn’t blame her for. Despite his protests she was adamant that she help him move into his new dorm. Jorge didn’t really see the point to it, but he didn’t mind having someone to talk to for the 8 hour car-ride.
“Did you get everything you needed?” She asked as he got in and started his truck.
“Yeah, pretty sure.” Jorge looked around to reverse his truck out. “Are you sure you want to come along? I can’t drive you back, you know.”
“It’s fine!” She gently put her hand over his on the gear shift. “I already figured out which buses to take to get back.”
The word ‘bus’ made him feel uncomfortable, “Are you sure? Doesn’t that sound, I don’t know, sketchy?” He asked.
“I can take care of myself just fine.” She boasted. Jorge believed her, she was an incredibly self-assured girl. When she had taken a liking to Jorge she made it known and made it known quick. It was one of the things he loved about her. He kissed her as a sign of agreement. “Where are we going next?” She asked.
“Lupe’s, I promised to see him right before we leave.” A dawning sadness enveloped Jorge.
“You’re gonna miss him more than me, aren’t you?” Anisa asked jokingly.
“Bro’s before hoes.” Jorge joked back.
“Stupid.” Anisa laughed as she playfully hit his arm. She looked at him silently for a moment. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
—
“What?” Lupe looked confused. “Anisa? Like Anisa Nunez?”
“Who else would I mean?” Jorge said, a little annoyed.
“It’s just… I don’t know.” Lupe was dumbfounded. “I haven’t seen her for as long as I haven’t seen you. I think she moved to Colorado or something, but that was a long time ago.”
Lupe’s words raised a deep anger in Jorge. An anger that he gave up trying to hide even though it only ever caused harm. “That’s funny.” He said in a passive aggressive, but mostly aggressive, way.
“What do you mean?” Lupe’s words were strained.
“I don’t know, I just feel like the girl who got between us would’ve been more important.”
“Is that how you remember it?” Lupe challenged.
“I remember it how it was.” Jorge folded his arms. “My biggest regret in life was letting that girl anywhere near me. We wouldn’t be having to do this if it wasn’t for her.”
“She was hardly the reason why things are the way they are.”
“Of course, it was your fault too.” Jorge was quick to respond.
“I admit my fault, but…” Lupe chewed at his lips. “You were more at fault than she was.”
Jorge was taken aback. “How the fuck am I at fault? She cheated on me with you.”
Lupe winced, he had a look of open guilt. Guilt he was hoping was past them now. “Because she wasn’t the reason we haven’t talked, it’s you. You were the one who cut off all contact.”
“What else was I supposed to do? You fucked me over!” Jorge shouted. He looked over to Brenda who was too busy talking to the bartender to notice his shouting. In a quieter, but any less aggressive, voice he said, “You and her fucked me over.”
“You’re right, but you never even gave me a chance to talk about it.”
“What was there to talk about?”
“Everything, it was…” Lupe paused to find the proper word. “…complicated.”
“How was it complicated?”
“Remember, you two hadn’t talked for a month at that point.”
Lupe’s words brought back a long suppressed memory. One that Jorge suddenly remembered in perfect detail. It was during his first semester away from college and he had called her to tell her that he wouldn’t be back for the winter break like he had promised. He told her that his scholarship required him to stay on campus, and she knew he was lying. After the fight they moved on to the silent treatment and both were too stubborn to let up. The silence was finally broken when Lupe had told him what he did. It was the last time he talked to either of them. “And what? That gave you the right to fuck her?”
Lupe shook his head. “No of course not, it was a mistake man that’s what I’m trying to say. Look, this isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”
“Then what the fuck did you want to talk about? Bullshit about my life? Were you hoping to just ignore the shit you did like it was nothing. Like it meant nothing?” Jorge looked over to the bartender, desperately pleading with his eyes for something, anything.
“I just thought we could talk about more important things than what we did as kids.”
“This is important! That shit had me fucked up for a long time, I carried that pain with me for years.” He remembered the day it finally did go away, when he first went out with his wife. But now that memory was no longer there to hide the pain.
“How could I have known? It’s not like I was able to ask.” Lupe’s eyebrows furrowed.
“Fuck off.”
“You’re not innocent. You hurt me too, you fucked me over too.” Lupe pointed at Jorge aggressively.
“How?! I didn’t fuck your girlfriend did I?” Jorge mocked.
“I’m serious.”
“Then how, how did I possibly fuck you over?”
“Cause you left man.” Lupe admitted.
“Are you kidding?”
“We were a team, we were brothers who had each other’s back. And then you just left, like it was nothing, like I was nothing. You left like you couldn’t wait to go and never turn back. And you know what, you didn’t turn back. When you left it just…” He fought to find the words. “It felt like a part of my life was gone, a part of my soul missing. That’s it. That shit hurt.”
“Your pain is nothing like mine.” Jorge dismissed.
“I think it is.”
“So what? You wanted me to just stay here, sit around getting high and doing nothing? Wait around for you to get in trouble so I can bail you out? Oh yeah, I bet you missed that.”
“I’m not saying you should’ve paused your life, but when you left you acted like this part of your life didn’t matter anymore. Like you wanted nothing to do with it. When your body left you took our soul with it.
“Of course I did, this place is bullshit, it was always bullshit.” Jorge remembered his childhood here, growing up in a glorified shed in the back of someone else’s home. Just him and his dad who’d beat him until he physically couldn’t. Everyone in the family had known, but they felt more bad for his dad than him so they never intervened. “The only thing that mattered were you and Anisa, and it turns out that was bullshit too.”
“You were ready to give us up long before what happened, happened.” Lupe said. Jorge knew that it wasn’t entirely false. College meant a lot to him, it was a chance for him to be someone else, someone new. To be his own person.
“You just don’t get it.”
“Then tell me.”
“You don’t know what it was like to be me. To be more of an add-on than a person. Everything we’d do was ‘Lupe and his friend’. I could tell when people looked at me I was an accessory not a person.” Jorge had known Lupe since they were no older than 5 years old, always joined at the hip. Later in life, Jorge rationalized that as a kid he lived to do what he was told, it’s how he survived. That’s why it was so easy for Lupe to drag him around and get him into any sort of crazy mess he wanted.
“That’s ridiculous.”
“And sometimes I could see you saw me that way too.” Jorge finally admitted.
“That’s bullshit. If other people saw you that way then fuck them, but I never did. You were a quiet kid, people ignore those but I don’t, I never did. You were my best-friend, never anything less.” Lupe pleaded to be believed.
“You know what was the final straw, why I cut you off? When you fucked Anisa it confirmed that damned feeling I always had about you. That you wanted me to be your shadow, that you needed me to be less than you.”
“That’s not true.”
“You couldn’t stand Anisa, because she was finally something I had that you didn’t, and you just had to take that away from me.” It was a conclusion he himself had made many years ago, and no amount of pleading from Lupe would change that.
“You don’t give a shit about Anisa, you’re just using her again like you did then. To run away. Cause that’s what you fucking do. That’s what you always do.” Lupe’s frustration surfaced.
“Fuck this, I didn’t come here for this bullshit.” It figured, to Jorge, that this would happen. God started punishing him from birth and he wasn’t going to let up any time soon.
“Jorge, wait!” Lupe shouted from his seat.
“It’s George.”
—
The centerpiece of the playground at Murry Elementary was a playground set in the shape of a wooden boat. At the bottom of it was a small hole that led to a hollow opening below the ship. Jorge often spent his recess sitting in the dark space, waiting for the teachers to blow their whistle. The yelling and laughter of the other kids were muffled from inside and Jorge enjoyed the solitude.
“What are you doing in here?” A kid hunched in front of the opening asked. Jorge remained quiet, praying he would walk away. “I always see you in here, what are you doing?” The kid crawled into the space and sat next to Jorge, who pretended not to notice him. The two sat there in silence until the whistle had finally been called.
For the next week the kid kept coming back, silently sitting in the darkness next to Jorge. Eventually, Jorge broke, “Aren’t you bored? Why do you keep coming here?”
“Because you’re here.” The kids answered with a smile.
“You’re weird.”
“No, I’m Lupe.” Lupe was quick to answer back. It made Jorge laugh.
Jorge has heard the kids name before, “The teachers yell at you a lot.”
“My mom says it’s cause I have ADD”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know.” Lupe shrugged. The two sat silently again for a while, until Lupe broke the silence, “You’re weird.”
“No, I’m Jorge.”
The two boys laughed.
—
“George. Wait.” Lupe asked again. His immediate acceptance of the name kept George’s attention. Lupe picked up a manila envelope from the bed of the booth seat next to him. Written in black sharpie, it read, “To Jorge Camacho – My Best Friend.” He explained, “Look, the reason I invited you out here was to give you this. It’s a manuscript, I guess. I wrote it.”
“What, you want me to edit your book?” George asked sarcastically.
“No, in fact I don’t even care if you read it, but I wanted to give you the first copy of it.”
“I’m not interested.”
“I’m dying, George.” Lupe waited for him to say something, but George was silent. “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. I’m not expected to make it past 35.”
George did the math quickly in his head, no more than 5 years. George, still silent, grabbed the envelope from Lupe. It weighed heavy in his hand, heavier than he wanted it to be.
“Burn it, forget about it, or read it. Whatever. I wanted to leave a piece of myself before I’m gone. I figured you deserve part of it, at least.” Lupe said. To George he seemed fine, nothing seemed out of the ordinary, though it’s not like he understood what he said he had.
George turned the envelope over and read the black ink again. He looked around the bar, he could feel the gaze of the other patrons silently watching them. He said simply, “Nice seeing you, Lupe.” and left.
Outside George’s head swelled, he was burning to the point he could hardly acknowledge the cold wind battering against his body. After slamming the door to his car he felt the full toll of his frustration. He was at Lupe, upset at himself, and upset at the world. Why couldn’t he have just let go of the past? Why did he feel so cursed to make himself so miserable? He thought about what Lupe had said, about running away, and about Anisa. He rubbed his empty ring finger again, trying to find an answer in something he had fucked up entirely on his own. He threw the envelope onto the passenger seat and took off.
He wasn’t sure where he was driving to, he was too heated to go back to his tia’s house. His family has already been asking a lot of questions, how could they not when their nephew randomly dropped by needing a place to stay? Christmas was a good excuse, but what then after? Where would he even go?
George pulled over to collect himself. He needed to breathe and think things over. Rash decisions hadn’t resulted in anything good so far. Across the road from where he parked was a familiar place, Sherwood Park. It was empty, probably because of the weather. He looked at the envelope, and after a moment of hesitation grabbed it as he exited his car.
On a closer look, the park’s emptiness was obvious. The seat on one half of the seesaw had been broken, the left chain of the swing set snapped in two, the plastic of the tube slide was dented and warped from years of neglect. George sat down at the sturdiest looking bench, it still had all the same etchings it did when he was a kid, some of them his own. He studied the writing on the envelope, ‘My Best Friend’. George had many friends over the years that filled that spot for him, bonds that all eventually puttered out by the cruelty of adulthood. Out of those people Lupe always stuck out, the connection they had that transcended words or titles. George told himself that his name only stuck in his head because of the trauma he caused, and maybe that was the case still, but it wasn’t the whole truth. They were brothers, two halves of one whole. George wondered now why he was so desperate to change that, to complicate it.
George bent back the metal clasps and slid the manuscript out of the envelope. It wasn’t as many pages as he had expected, there were less than a hundred. At the center of the first page read the title, ‘Until Next Time’. With a deep breath George turned the page and began reading.
It was a children’s story about a crocodile. The crocodile lived in a small pond by himself and he had a problem. Inside of him was an emptiness, one that he couldn’t cure. Desperately he would search around eating and eating trying to fill the hole inside of him but nothing would work. Then, one day a plover bird came to visit him and told the crocodile that he knew how to solve his emptiness. He asked the crocodile to open his mouth, and that no matter what he couldn’t bite. The crocodile promised and opened his mouth as instructed, desperate for help. The plover bird hopped inside of the crocodile’s mouth and began to peck away at his teeth, carefully cleaning out the parasites and scraps from his gums. When the bird finished it flew back up above the crocodile and asked him how he felt. The crocodile admitted that he felt better than ever, that the empty feeling inside of him had finally been relieved. He thanked the bird for his help, promising to repay him one day. The bird simply shook his head and told him, “Until next time!” and flew away.
Soon after a while that feeling would come back to the crocodile, and soon after the plover bird would come back and help the crocodile once more. The routine made the crocodile happy, at the end of every visit they both would say, “Until next time!”. For the first time in his life the crocodile had made a friend. Then suddenly, the bird stopped visiting as much. The time between visits grew larger and larger. When the crocodile asked why, the bird admitted that he had recently moved to another tree, one much farther away and that it was harder for him to visit. The bird, noticing how upset the crocodile was, told him “There’s a beautiful pond near my new tree, maybe if you move there we could see each other more!” The crocodile shook his head, he had lived in this pond all his life, he couldn’t just leave. The bird understood and apologized that the next time he visits might be a while. “Until next time!” they said once more.
It had been a long time since the bird had last visited, and the empty feeling inside the crocodile was worse than ever before. The bird apologized once again for being away for so long, but the crocodile ignored him and yelled at the bird to clean his teeth. As always the bird hopped into his mouth and began to slowly clean. The crocodile had grown impatient, the emptiness was unbearable. Without thinking he shut his teeth and attempted to eat the bird, letting go as soon as he realized his mistake. The bird cried in pain and flew out high above the crocodile. The crocodile begged for forgiveness, saying it was a mistake and that he never meant to harm the bird, however he had broken the one rule he was given. “Until next time?” the crocodile asked, but the bird didn’t respond as it flew away. Years went by and the crocodile never saw the bird again, the emptiness in him rumbled louder than ever and no amount of cleaning his own teeth satiated it. It was then when he realized that the bird cleaning his teeth wasn’t what made him whole, it was the friendship they had made that did. The end.
The story’s ending was far too bleak to be a children’s tale, and the manuscript had its fair amount of typos and clunky sentences. But George figured that it didn’t matter. This wasn’t the kind of story you share to the world, it was one that you wrote to try to understand it.
George pulled his phone out and called his wife for the first time since he had come back into town. Unsurprisingly, it went straight to voicemail. “Lisa, I’m sorry.” He prayed his words would be heard. “And I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to say it. I’ve been an idiot and an asshole and I know this isn’t enough, but I want to make things right. I’m sorry. I love you.” He tapped the endcall button wishing he had said a million other things, but it was all he could do for now. ‘I’m sorry’, it was such a hard phrase to come to terms with before. It’s a lot easier to justify yourself than admit fault, at least for George it was, and maybe Lupe was like that too. George was stubborn, his own warped sense of justice wanted him to be, but what was the point of that stubbornness if all it ever did was make himself miserable? What was the point in feeling ‘right’ when all it ever did was make him feel empty?
George carefully put the manuscript back into the envelope and set it down in the passenger seat in his car. He didn’t know where Lupe lived, but he still remembered where his mom’s house was, and that was a good place to start.