“I got your watch,” I say, reaching to the bed and tossing it on his chest. The thud it makes on impact is heavy, as it should be. “Told you I would get it.”
He looks at it where it lies, his neck craned enough to view it, and his eyes don’t blink for the longest time. The watch rises up and down with his slow, methodical breathing; his expression looks pained. Finally, he reaches for it with his hand and flips the band inside out, looking at the inscription, running his thumb over the word just like I did.
Then his eyes snap to mine. He’s still holding the watch, his knuckles almost white, he’s clutching it so hard, but his eyes are on me, a soft contrast from his straining fingers—as if he’s trying to communicate a million things at once with that look. I see how sorry he is, but I also see so much more—something too overwhelming for him to translate.
“Kelly was my high school girlfriend,” he starts, and I take a deep breath, sitting back down on the bed, my hands gripping the edge, but my eyes on his—I won’t leave his eyes.
“Before we were boyfriend and girlfriend, we were best friends. I met her in kindergarten. I put glue in her hair in first grade, ate glue to impress her in third, beat up Michael Watson in fifth because he was her boyfriend, stepped on her toes in seventh at the junior high dance, and kissed her when we were freshmen.”
Kelly was his girlfriend—his best friend. Kelly is the Always. I know it in my heart, and I’m broken immediately just knowing it.
“After my accident, I had to relearn how to do a lot of things in my life. I wasn’t always the guy I am now—the guy who can figure out how to make the bench press work for him, and who can handcycle for ten miles. I didn’t know how to lift myself up from the bed. I didn’t know how I was going to get to the bathroom, or if I would ever be able to drive. I watched my mom pretend she wasn’t crying when I wasn’t looking. Watched my dad do the same. And Nate…he couldn’t hide it, so I just watched him cry. That was the hardest part, because I didn’t want to make it worse for anyone by crying for myself…for all I’d lost. I lost a lot of things, things like baseball, which, while I know that sounds so very unimportant and trivial, it’s still a thing. It was my thing. And I had to let it go; I had to watch my brother take it over, love it, become it. I needed a new thing. And as much as my brother, my father, and even on some level my mom thought that I found other things to replace it quickly…I didn’t. I found darkness. And Kelly’s the only one I really told.”
His story hits me with a weight of a thousand bricks. He’s still lying on the ground in front of me, his watch slowly twisting between his fingers. He touches it with a fondness that I’m beginning to understand, with a fondness that scares me, because I don’t know if I can compete with it.
“My physical rehab was brutal. I’m a lot like you, in that respect,” he flashes his eyes from his watch to me, a small curve denting the corner of his lip. “I push myself too hard sometimes. I don’t like hitting walls, don’t like there to be things I can’t find a way through or around. But I was finding those things everywhere I turned.”
I slide from the bed to the floor, my back against my mattress, and my feet pushed in so I can fold my arms over my knees and lay my head to the side, truly listening to him.
“When Nate would visit, we’d play catch. If I missed a ball, he’d run and get it. Because it was faster that way, and I couldn’t run and get it myself. He’d ask me to show him the weights in the therapy room, ask me to lift things, show him how strong I was getting. And I was getting stronger, but only on the outside. Inside…I was dying.”
“Kelly would come every morning and night, on her way to and from school. She stayed longer into the evening than she should, and she failed biology our sophomore year because of it. But I couldn’t get her to go; she wouldn’t leave. She promised me she’d never leave, and I knew she meant it—she would stand by her promise. Then one night, I took advantage of her loyalty. I was so fucking depressed that I asked her to help me stop hurting.”
The impact his words have on my chest is massive. They strike the air from my lungs with one pass and push the tears from my eyes the next. I let them fall in front of him. I let them slide down my cheeks, and chin, and neck, until they fall to the floor. I watch him struggle through this, swallowing hard, breathing deeply, closing his eyes until he opens them to rest on the watch again.
The watch. I get it. The watch.
“She refused, as I probably knew she would,” he says, a painful smile coming and going. “And the next day, she didn’t come. I thought that was it. I thought I had pushed her away because of how deep and dark and afraid and hurt I had become. And I was okay with that, because in a way, I liked the idea of not dragging her down with me—of her getting to go do all of those things that we had planned, just with someone else. I was even okay with the someone else.”