by Cody Ryder
Or was it that I was afraid of what would happen if I did…?
When I finally fell asleep, my dreams took me back to him—back to when we were together.
It was near the middle of senior year, when I was busy preparing my paperwork for college applications. It was UC Berkley or bust, an extremely reckless decision, but I had figured it would motivate me to work even harder to get in. For almost my entire high school career, I’d had my goal set firmly in my mind—the school, the eventual job, the wife, house, you know the story. I’d gone after it without any doubt until that night—the night before I was going to send in my application.
I lay in the back of Dakota’s Volvo with him snuggled up against my chest. We’d put the seats down so that we could stretch out, and parked the car down by the beach in our usual spot. Thoughts of all our memories together over the past four years were running through my mind, and for the first time I had doubt about what I was going to do.
“Dakota,” I said.
“Hm?”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
“Dakota.”
“What?”
“I need to tell you something.”
He sat himself up so that he could see me better, his arm propping him onto his side. “Okay?”
“I…think I might be making a mistake.”
He frowned. “Huh?”
I swallowed. “I could see myself spending the rest of my life with you and being happy. The truth is, I think you’re perfect for me, and I don’t think I’ll find another person who is more perfect for me.” I sighed. “Talk me out of UC Berkley, Dakota. Tell me I’m making a mistake leaving here.”
He was silent, his eyes searching mine. He squeezed my hand, and I waited for him to tell me he wanted me to stay.
“I’m not going to tell you that.”
“What?” I breathed. My heart surged with confliction. “Why not?”
He smiled his handsome lopsided smile and kissed me. “Because for the past four years, you haven’t shut up about this dream of yours, Roy. I know how much it means to you.”
“Don’t you know how much you mean to me?”
“Yes. And I hope you know how much you mean to me. Which is why I want you to get into that school and fulfill your dreams. Because if you don’t try, I know that you’ll regret it forever.”
We kissed again, neither wanting to stop.
“You’re right,” I said. “I need to do this. This is why I love you, Dakota. We’re both going to do awesome things in life.”
He smiled, and a few tears streaked down his cheek. “Yeah, we are.”
I cried too, something that hardly ever happened. “Okay,” I said, quickly wiping away my tears. “Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way. Let’s promise each other, on the last day we’re together, no crying. Just good times.”
“Alright. I promise.”
We kissed once more.
Then I woke up.
Sunlight streamed in through my bedroom window and I stared up at my ceiling, my heart beating fast. My dream had been of a memory that I’d completely forgotten about until now. Dakota had said that if I didn’t go for it, I’d regret for the rest of my life, and I’d agreed with him, but there was something else that had stuck in my mind which I’d kept to myself.
What if I regretted not staying with you?
In the end, Dakota was right. Going to UCB was the right decision. But I’d forgotten just how much I’d cared for him, I remembered the conflict that showed in his eyes and that I felt through his touch. He’d wanted to tell me to stay.
I went downstairs, where I was greeted with the usual scene. Mom was flipping through some book on her iPad, dad was glued to the morning news, and neither seemed to acknowledge each other’s existence. “Good morning,” I said.
Mom looked up from the iPad. “Morning, Roy. There’s leftover breakfast in the fridge.”
Dad was engrossed in the TV and didn’t hear me.
“Joe,” mom said, clipped. “Roy said good morning?”
“Huh? Oh, good morning, son. There’s breakfast in the fridge.”
“Mom told me, thanks,” I said, and opened up the fridge to pull out the leftovers.
Mom rolled her eyes and went back to her book. “You would know that if you didn’t have that noisy TV so loud,” she said, under her breath.
I ate quickly, wanting to avoid as much contact with the negative atmosphere as I could, and then went back upstairs to check my computer for any responses to my job applications.
I have a good feeling about today, I thought. Today, there will be something.
But the only something I had in my inbox was an e-mail for penis enlargement that had somehow penetrated my spam filter. I sighed and deleted it.
For the first time in a while, I actually felt like I wanted to get out and do something, but the only thing that kept coming to mind was the Heart Lifespring Gardens. That lush forest and its undeniably calming atmosphere sounded so good in comparison to the drab atmosphere here. And of course, Dakota was there.
I realized that I stupidly hadn’t gotten Dakota’s cell phone number, and so had no way to know if he was even at home, but I needed to go there. I needed to see him again.
I went back downstairs. Dad was still glued to the TV set in the kitchen, and mom was watering some potted plants by the front door. “I’m going out,” I told her, putting on my shoes.
“Oh? To see Dakota again?”
“How’d you know?”
“Well, isn’t it obvious? He was your best friend.” She paused thoughtfully. “Do you still like him?”
“What? Mom, that’s long over.”
“Okay,” she said doubtfully.
I chuckled and shook my head. “Hey, mom,” I said, lowering my voice.
“What is it?”
“Is, uh, is everything okay? With you and dad?”
“Yes? What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know. Never mind. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay, have a nice time.”
I slipped out the front door and let out a long sigh. I knew what I wanted to ask, but didn’t know how to, and I guess I’d thought that my mom would’ve known what I was talking about. Had they always been like this, or was it that it’d just been long enough that my mom didn’t even realize how they were acting around each other?
When had they last been in love with each other?
I walked down to the driveway, and stopped hard in my tracks. Sitting out in the street in front of my house was a beat up old Volvo station wagon. The front door opened, and Dakota stepped out into the sunlight.
“Holy shit, Dakota! What are you doing here?”
He grinned. “Good morning to you too. I realized I didn’t have your phone number anymore, so I came by to see if you were home.”
I laughed as I walked down the driveway to him. “Well, I was actually just on my way to your house for the exact same reason.”
He opened the passenger door of the station wagon and swept his arm majestically like a chauffeur. “Need a ride?”
Getting into the car, I was overwhelmed with a wave of nostalgia. The car smelled the same as it did all those years ago, and the interior felt like it hadn’t changed a bit either. It still had the little plastic turtle toy in place of a temperature dial on the air conditioning, and the steering wheel still had the same black leather cover—only it looked quite a bit more worn down now.
“I can’t believe you still have this car,” I said, in complete awe. I looked over my shoulder at the back, taking everything in. “Wow, man.”
Dakota grinned and stuffed the key into the ignition and fired up the engine. “I couldn’t let it go. It’s never let me down. Well, until it broke down and I had to get the engine rebuilt. But other than, it’s never let me down.”
He pulled away from my house, sending another wave of nostalgia washing over me, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Oh man, Dakota. What
a trip. It feels like I’m going back in time. I could never have imagined us going on another ride together in this car.”
The car still had no air conditioning so we rolled the windows down and opened the sunroof just like we used to do, and the warm summer air rushed in around us. I was being carried on waves of nostalgia that were taking me back to the past, and everything that it had meant for us.
Six
Dakota had strung up a second hammock next to his, and we both laid out like the day before, listening to the sound of the wind and clucking of the chickens. Rosie lay on the ground between us, her chin resting over one paw as she looked up at us. We’d brought out a few of the milk crates that he used to carry his veggies and stacked them upside down on each other to make stands to hold our beer.
I looked over the side of the hammock at Dakota, who was laying out diagonally in the hammock, his legs crossed over the side and his hands wound behind his head. He was staring up at the trees with a handsome, almost dreamy look in his eyes. I felt a sudden jolt as my heart skipped a beat, and I looked away. It was impossible to ignore or deny—my feelings for him had come back, and they were simmering just below the surface on the verge of bubbling over.
Dakota broke the silence—we hadn’t said much since the ride over, having fallen back into that our comfort zone. “It’s interesting.”
“Hm?”
Rosie’s tail wagged a few times at the sound of our voices.
“How things turned out. In some ways, we achieved what we said we would do after high school, but mostly life just took us for a ride. I never expected to still be here at home. I’d always planned on the garden becoming something for my dad to enjoy, something that could add value to the house. I never thought it would become my own sanctuary.
“That’s true,” I said. “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately.”
“What sort of expectations?”
“Things we believe to be truths—things we expect will happen because that’s what we were taught when we were young or what we chose to believe was how the world worked. Like you said, Dakota, I don’t think either of us could’ve expected to be where we are today. I expected I’d be married right now, maybe getting a promotion, we’d be buying a house. The life that I was pretty damn sure I would have even all the way back then.”
“I remember.”
“Well now I’m thinking, I expected that I’d fall in love, and that someone would fall in love with me. That that was just what happened in the world—you look for the one, and you’ll find them, and everything will go wonderfully, happily ever after, you know?”
Dakota shifted up in his hammock and took a sip from his glass of beer. “Okay, sure.”
“But maybe that actually hardly ever happens. Maybe most of the time, people either never find their one, or they only think they have until it all comes crashing down.”
Dakota thought about this for a long moment. “Sure, I’m sure many people don’t find love. But I think maybe you’re a little biased right now. It’s certainly no evidence of being the truth, one way or the other. Some things happen, some things don’t.”
“I can’t help but feel a little pessimistic. I’ve been seeing things differently ever since Alicia left me.”
“Well, that’s normal, right?”
“Yeah, it’s just…I feel like so much I believed in means nothing now.”
“What? That you’ll never meet your goals? Never settle down? Come on, Roy. You’re not that old. Remember what we talked about? It’s a new beginning.”
“I know, I’m irrational. But it’s not just that—I always used to think that my parents were happily married, that they were the example of a successful marriage. But now I look at them and I don’t see happiness at all and I wonder, had it always been this way? They were the example of a perfect marriage and maybe they’d actually never been happy in the first place?”
Dakota raised a concerned eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Well, since I moved back I’ve been noticing how distant they are from each other. Disagreeing and arguing about pointless things. You know, Dakota, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my parents kiss? Or hold hands? Even as a kid. So I don’t know, maybe they were never in love in the first place.”
With his glass of beer held on his stomach, Dakota rocked slowly in the hammock, his eyes turned up to the sky. Dappled drops of sunlight danced across his face as they slanted through the leaves above, like glimmers on the surface of water.
“You must think I’m being really naïve, huh?”
He turned his gaze over to me. “Relationships change, that’s just a fact of life. We also tend forget about what it was that made us perfect, and the things that we used to share.”
He paused, and my heart did a little flip. Was talking about us?
“Sometimes,” he continued, looking back up at the sky, “we get used to the way things are and need a change of pace to remind us of how they used to be. Maybe your parents need that. Also, people show love in different ways. Just because you can’t remember seeing intimacy as a kid, doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.” He gulped down the rest of his beer. “Everyone’s situation is different,” he smiled. “Try not to let it get you down.”
“Yeah.”
He slid out from the hammock and Rosie got up to sit at his feet, her tail wagging eagerly. “Hey, Rosie. Hey,” he cooed as he rubbed her head. He stood up, his empty beer glass in hand. “I’m going to go refill. You want another?”
I sat up and gulped down the remainder of my beer, and then climbed out from the hammock. “I’ll go with you.”
We walked side by side down the dirt path to the house, my left hand hanging loosely at my side, the glass in my right. Dakota was on my left, and his hand also swung at his side just a few inches away from mine. It felt like our fingertips were magnetic opposites, they wanted to be together so badly.
Leave the past alone. You’re caught up in nostalgia for something that’s been over for over a decade. You’re just doing this because you want something to replace what you lost.
Was I? Was that really it?
“What’s next for you, Roy?” Dakota asked. He pulled one of the tall beer bottles from the fridge and refilled our glasses, and then brought out a block of aged white cheddar cheese and cut off a few slices onto a plate. He picked a few golden tomatoes out from a basket on the counter, washed them, cut them into quarters, and then put the slices onto the plate next to the cheese.
“Well. Getting my career back on track,” I said. “Getting a new job, moving back up to the bay, picking up where I left off. Yeah.”
He must’ve heard the nag of doubt hanging in my voice. I was surprised to hear it. My plan had become so engrained in my mind that it was almost second nature to say it, but right now, for the first time probably since that night in high school when I asked Dakota to convince me I was making a mistake, I felt doubt.
I realized I hadn’t given why I wanted to pick up where I left off much thought. The image that had motivated my life goals back when I was young flashed through my mind—me, a snappily dressed professional driving to work in my new car, my modern office on the cutting edge of the industry, my house in the suburbs with my perfect family. My clean, ordinary life. I had it all planned out, but I realized that in all these years of chasing I’d never stopped to ask myself if it was still what I wanted. Did I still want it? And why?
“You don’t sound too sure,” he said. He pushed the plate over to me, and ate a piece of tomato with the cheese.
“I don’t, do I?” I popped one of the savory sweet slices into my mouth, and then followed it with a chunk of the rich, aged cheese. It was such a simple snack, but so incredibly delicious. “I don’t know, suddenly I’m confused about it all. I’m not sure what I want.”
I felt a cool, wet touch on my hand, and looked down to see Rosie nudging me with her nose. She cocked her head at me in a look that seemed to say, “Are you okay?” I
laughed and stroked her head, and she licked my hand reassuringly, her tail wagging slowly. “Hey, Rosie,” I said, and I crouched down to give her more pets. “You worried about me?” She licked my face, her mouth hanging open in a happy dog grin.
“That dog,” Dakota said as he leaned back against the counter and tossed a chunk of cheese into his mouth. “I swear she has more empathy than most people do.”
“Thanks for looking out for me, Rosie,” I said, and as I scratched under her chin she started to kick her back leg. “Good girl.”