Nostalgia for Zack

My heart aches for the mornings when I’d wake next to the window in my room with the old boarded-up fireplace, in my hundred-something year-old house, a yellowed tapestry billow-ly hung over my television, waiting in anticipation like a kid on Christmas morning for my best friend to come down stairs. We eat, I get dressed, do my make-up.

“How does this look?”

“Do these shoes match?”

We drive to campus together in the freezing cold, exhausted if we didn’t bump adderall, chain smoking if we did. We part ways, but meet up to go to the newspaper office, where I’m an assistant section editor—unimportant, yet qualified enough to sign out a key at the front desk. 

Me and the best friend talk about moving to London in the spring, and applying for jobs, and spending the summer in other countries, and applying to different schools. He’s done those things by now; I haven’t. We part for the moment, and meet at the days end, after a long shift, littered with questions:

“How do you say this name?”

“How much should I ask for? I know it says…”

“How are you doing in Public Affairs?”

“Do we get paid this week?”

I come home to my best friend studying on the couch, my brother cleaning up dinner he cooked for us, before we pack a bong, prepare for our nightly television repertoire. We won’t go to sleep when we get in bed, but we’ll tweet back and forth, he upstairs, I, down, joking about the ghost we’ve named Herb that never actually existed.

I didn't see it then, how good it was, how well we meshed, how much I actually loved my roommate, my best friend. I didn't realize he was even my best friend, though he could say exactly what I was feeling in a look, and I'd know he knew. Things are changing for the both of us now—me, a graduate without a full-time position, looking into grad school on the west coast. Him, a student at a privet university, pledging a fraternity. I was miserable then, unlike being miserable now though, because we were miserable together, and now my best friend is 300 miles away. I just want those 9-months, filled with all the purpose and hope and excitement in the world in that drafty old house back, where the person who got it most lived just up the stairs to the left.