“Can we talk?”

He sounds almost too forceful in his delivery, the tone of his voice transforming his question into an attack, so he selects his next set of words deliberately, knowing he’d only have one shot at his opening.

Modulating his volume, he continues, “I’d like to have a candid conversation, with you, about our... falling out.”

But with the last pair of words—falling out—he falters a bit, pausing for a second to mumble under his breath, imperceptibly testing out potential phrases in search of the perfect encapsulation of their current predicament. After all, what is the proper term for a breakup between friends?

Flustered, he meanders toward to his next point, as if he spent too much time preparing his opening statement and not enough on developing the succeeding sentences.

“I think, maybe, after all this time, you know, we should, maybe, reconcile?”

His intonation swings upward, converting his statement into an unnecessary question. Closing his eyes to visualize the outline of his planned argument, he remembers the elements of his case for forgiveness. It rests on the two key points: the passage of time and his own repentance. But he’s already stumbled over both his opening and his first point.

He’s nervous and thus proceeds to word vomit.

 “I’m tired. You’re tired. (I assume. I mean, we haven’t spoken in so long that I don’t know if you’re tired or not, or maybe you’re more tired now than when we used to speak. But you must be tired. Right?).

“And it’s time, right? Don’t you think it’s time? I want, more than anything else, for this to be over. I mean, actually, I want things to go back to the way they were, but I know that’s impossible. I know that now. I’m not asking for that.

“But what if we found some middle ground? What if there was a middle ground? Could we do that? Could we—”

His lungs convulse in two quick, successive breaths. He is clasping his hands, his right over his left, but it does nothing to mitigate the shaking. A single droplet of water pools at the corner of his right eye, threatening to precipitate, to follow the contour of his cheekbone, curving along his face as it slides toward the cliff of his jaw before diving into the abyss.

He avoids looking at his silent interlocutor, his stoney face and glazed pair of eyes. Instead, he utters a muted mantra in an attempt to calm himself.

Can we just be friends again? Can we just be friends again? Can we just be friends again?

Casting his incantation as both a reminder of his argument’s central thesis and a plea to the universe, he looks up, ready to make his ask, to beg for absolution while raising his white flag in the process. After all, he was the one who took on most of the fight, who embodied its anger and indignation.

It started, as most feuds do, with silence, which then morphed into a more permanent separation, which then became an imposed erasure, a purposeful removal of any link or connection between them. However, once hardened, the disintegration of their friendship became so unbearable that he sought reconciliation and forgiveness. But he had no way of reaching his former friend anymore. His texts went unanswered, a wall of blue bubbles in various sizes, displaying a purely one-sided conversation.

Hence this argument is so vital for the rejuvenation of their relationship—a bond born out of mutual friends, one that began as an acquaintanceship, the soft embers of which were fanned by years of running in the same circles until they finally caught fire and a true friendship ignited. It is to that light that he hopes to return, that light from which shadows of memories dance in the lonely cave of his mind’s eye, a poor substitution for the lived experiences themselves. A light beyond his cloistered existence. A light from the sun, wild in the outer world. A light of which he mourns the loss.

“I hate the silence,” he says, more to himself than to his former friend. “I hate your silence.”

He recognizes this flaw in his character—the need to express every thought, every emotion, to fill the gaps in conversations with ad libs about his immediate reactions to the sensory overload of everyday life. It was a trait they both shared, and therefore, the most valuable aspect of their friendship.

Thus, it is in the constant silence that he finds the most pain. And frustration. If only he could convince his friend to re-engage, their natural abilities would rekindle their bond through the friction of a seemingly endless conversation, one where many words are spoken, the amalgamation of which creates a mosaic that displays the current state of their friendship, fractured but still connected, with a certain beauty visible only in its entirety, a beauty inseparable from its cracks. But his friend never responds.

So, he pushes through, attempting to say everything he needs to say before his courage fails him.

“Can we just be friends again?”

He expels each word in a sharp staccato. His meaning can’t be clearer, so he lingers in the silence, waiting for an answer.

“Could we ever be friends again?”

He repeats his plea but with a subtle shift in the modal verb, raising a question about the very possibility of being friends again, as if their falling out is not so much a decision to reverse but rather an insurmountable obstacle to accept.

“We could. I know we could if we tried.”

He is now speaking again to himself, trying to convince his own convictions to believe in this outcome, to manifest it into existence, birthing from the words themselves a revived friendship.

“Could we?”

He hears the doubt in his own voice. He looks down and to the left, fixating on the sink, the white porcelain of its basin and its chrome faucet, stained with months of dried water and soap and toothpaste spit. The faucet drips, something he’s never noticed before. It must take a few minutes to build up, but he sees the droplet as it slowly condenses until its weight is too much to bear and it falls into the darkness of the drain.

He doesn’t move, watching six—now, seven—droplets curl into a ball and plunge down like tiny Olympic divers, barely making a sound and splash upon their impact. His hands still clasp each other, right over left. But the shaking has stopped. He is calm, calmer than the moment demands.

Because in the droplets, he recognizes the futility of his plea, the emptiness of his argument. He is no more likely to convince his friend than the droplets are to fill the sink. His drip-drip of unanswered messages, unreturned phone calls, unread emails, all go nowhere. Their intended receiver either intentionally ignores or deletes them. Or both.

In that way, reaching out has been like texting a ghost, a faded memory that is both present and visible, but unreachable.

Still looking away, he starts to tell a story. He doesn’t know why it comes to mind, but he needs to fill the silence.

“Remember that time I got drinks with Aubrey at The Brig. It was supposed to be just us and Maria and Lyndsey. Aubrey was in town for work, and she wanted to take her new co-workers around (to show them off, really). This wasn’t a social visit, and everyone she invited had a purpose. Except me. I was just a body to pad her numbers because she knew I’d say yes.

“So, I went, ready to catch up with a friend I hadn’t seen in months. And, man, I’ve never felt more like an outsider. I didn’t know most of the people there, and everyone I knew was busy mingling. (More like aggressive networking, but you know how that is.) Plus, I didn’t have an important enough job to be worth knowing to the out-of-towners. So, I kind of just sat in a corner with my cider.

“And then Aubrey came up to me and said that some senior staffer on the campaign was hosting a fundraiser that night, and she asked Maria and Lyndsey if they wanted to go. (Aubrey said something like, ‘It’d be nice if our bosses could connect,’ to them.) But she didn’t ask me. Plus, I’d already ordered another drink and I didn’t want to chug it. She just turned to me and said, ‘You’re good here, right?’

“And I should’ve said no. I should’ve been honest and said, ‘You don’t invite your friends out and then leave them behind. You just don’t do that.’

“But instead, I said, ‘Oh of course. Totally! Hopefully I’ll see you again while you’re in town.’ (I didn’t.) And I gave her a hug and then she left with everyone I knew. And The Brig was starting to really fill up and I looked so sad sitting alone with my drink.”

He pauses for dramatic effect, hoping that the third act of his story will carry its intended emotional impact.

“So, I called you. Because I knew you’d come and sit with me. And it didn’t take much convincing. In under ten minutes, you left your house, biked to the bar, and sat with me.

“Just me.”

He looks into the opposing pair of eyes, practically begging for some—any—breakthrough to make it through the thick fog of their feud.

“We didn’t have plans. You might’ve had your own plans already. But here you were. And I’ve never been more grateful to be your friend. In that moment, I knew you were my best friend.

“So, I took a picture of you that night. For Snapchat, with some comment about how you’re a ‘real one.’ But it’s the look on your face that really got me, how it’s like your expression is saying, ‘What? This is what you do for a friend,’ as if joining me was so obvious that you were embarrassed that I was memorializing it. (And the filter I used was kind of ridiculous—a shower of blue hearts. But one of them falls on your eye right, squarely in the center. A perfectly matched blue heart.)

“Sometimes that picture pops up in my photo library as a memory. These days, every time it does, I realize that I never told you how much that night meant to me. I’ve kept so many of those kinds of memories—in my saved photos and videos, in our texts, and in all the other messaging apps we used—sometimes we had simultaneous (and different!) conversations running at the same time. But we were like that, able to juggle multiple thoughts, multiple stories. When did that stop?... No, I know. I just, sometimes, I try to forget.

“Anyway, you really were a true friend. And I’m not suggesting we could go back to that night at The Brig. But could we, maybe, start with just being plain old friends again?”

As he finishes, he’s breathing heavily having just unburdened himself of the weight that memory carries. He’s also scared to look at the other pair of eyes, afraid of what he’ll see, afraid that it won’t be the same look that’s saved in his phone.

But his story is met with silence, and he knows the answer to his question almost intuitively, as if it has been obvious this entire time, its signs etched into the very absence of spoken words surrounding him now.

“We couldn’t. We… we can’t. I know. I promise I know.”

His defeat is imminent, so he continues to stare at the sink. The counteroffensive came like an invisible assassin, striking down his strongest points without notice, until suddenly he looked around the room at his slain argument and all he was left with was the rout.

“I won’t reach out again. I promise.”

But his words are empty. He will reach out again. If not this month, then in the fall. Or next year.

“I am sorry. For, you know, everything. For how things turned out. I really am sorry.”

 He knows his apology won’t make a difference, but it feels cathartic to say the words and mean them, even if he regrets not saying them sooner. Even as he bears the wounds of his regret that they fell out of their friendship in the first place.

Except, to him, the regret itself is both a penance and a burden. There is guilt too, for his outsized role in the feud, for playing both the villain and the victim in an attempt to elicit sympathy from their mutual friends. And, of course, there is pain, the persistence of which reminds him that their friendship was profound for as long as it lasted—and possibly more profound in the constant reexamination of its demise. And there is fear, that he might do this again with someone else, that he is unworthy of friendship, that he is prone both to feuds and to defeat.

But outshining all the other feelings is the regret laced with genuine sorrow. In that way, he isn’t so much presenting an argument as he is giving a eulogy. His sentences mourn the recently departed past.

Having gamed out this scenario to its inevitable conclusion, he looks up at the mirror in front of him and the pair of eyes staring back. My eyes. We enter the windows of each other’s soul, as if having just met for the first time, uncertain of what to do next. I’ve stood in front of him all night, in my cramped, windowless bathroom, listening to his argument.

I pull out my phone, unlocking it to reveal an unsent text.

Can we talk?

I can almost see the plea in my reflection’s eyes, as if he’s trying to deter me. Without words, he begs me, “Don’t do it. Don’t send it. We said we wouldn’t. And we know how it ends.”

But I’m not persuaded by his failure. I know my argument will fail as easily as his did. Because I don’t know why I should be forgiven. Beyond the passage of time and the separation and my own repentance, what has changed? Should I really expect something just because I want it? Just because I asked?

Still, there’s a comfort in futility, in knowing a choice’s inevitable conclusion. It’s like talking to yourself: no matter where the conversation goes, you know with absolute certainty where it’ll end.

And having just spent hours with my reflection, we both know how this ends. I give the mirror a weak smile before turning to exit my bathroom. Defeated, my reflection smiles back before following me to the edge of his glass prison and disappearing. Once he’s gone, I unlock my phone and text my ghost.

Surprisingly, I get a quick reply.

No, Trelaine, I don’t want to talk to you.