We lived in one of those pit-stop, small towns. The ones that just exist on the edge of a two-lane highway where tall yellow grass grows and abandoned rusted trailers accumulate in the fields. The ones that travelers only come to on their way to somewhere else.

It was beautiful in its own way, but the boredom was so heavy, so vast, that you could feel it rising from the heat on asphalt, you could hear it in the drone of the AM radio coming from the gas station, you could taste it in the lukewarm coffee at Gidget’s.

But I had Eli, and for a while, that was enough. Every Saturday, we would go to the EZ Laundromat, which probably hadn’t been renovated since 1967 with its white linoleum floors and sea-foam green washers and dryers.

Everything in there was stale, as if too many people had sucked too much air out of the place over the years. But we would go, and he would wash the few clothes he had; sometimes, he would even take off his shoes and toss the socks he’d been wearing into the wash along with the rest.

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I never told him, but every time we’d walk through those doors, I’d pretend we’d found a secret portal into the past. Every trip was a new decade. I’d get us two cokes from the vending machine— they were still in retro glass bottles— and he’d buy us peppermint patties. We’d sit on the ledge of the window and look out at that dirty field with an abandoned shopping cart in front of Peabody’s Liquor Store.

I think, in those moments, we were both dreaming about where we’d rather be. But in saving ourselves from being a cliché— which is the worst thing you can be at seventeen— neither of us ever said anything about it.

Instead, we would listen to music on his beat-up blue CD player, our heads so close together, they were almost conjoined.

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Sometimes, Eli didn’t have enough coins to dry his clothes, so on summer days when it was disgustingly hot out, he would tie the few clothes he had washed to the back of his truck, and we’d just drive south down the empty highway.

“It’s air drying,” he explained to me with a chuckle the first time he ever did it. And we would just drive with all of the windows down, and most of the time we’d be listening to his dad’s tape of Bob Dylan and The Band, which had been stuck in the tape player for three years.

I would look over at Eli, and he’d be smiling with that small gap between his two front teeth showing. His black curls would rattle and bounce in the wind, and behind him, the paint-stroked blades of grass would bend in the fields, and I would stick my head out the window and look up.

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The sky had never been bluer, and with all that open space, who couldn’t fly?

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Saturdays were a break from the restlessness, and they were often the only days I saw Eli happy. But eventually, our trips became routine, and Eli started bringing the extra 50 cents to dry his clothes. I think we discovered somewhere along the way that even the things that make you feel most free turn into a trap when you do them too often.

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Around four months after we stopped going to EZ’s on Saturday, they found Eli’s truck sinking slowly by the nose into Beaker Lake. When the police found it, the truck bed was suspended in mid air like the childless end of a seesaw. Sometimes I imagine an air-dried flannel attached to the back, sinking into the dirty brown water.

They never found his body, but they assumed he was dead.

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I went to his closed-casket (empty-casket) funeral, but I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry at the massive, wreathed picture that stared at those of us in the pews. And I didn’t cry when his aunt Silvia sang a heavy song made up of minor chords, and I didn’t cry when his mom’s legs gave out as the pallbearers lifted the casket out of the church.

Instead, whenever it started to feel real, I gripped a crumpled note in my pocket, the one that had been taped to my window the morning Eli’s truck was found. The one that said, “I’ll come back for you, I promise.”

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I often pictured the reunion. Months after the funeral, it was young…it was romantic— like a scene in an old movie where the long-awaited embrace is almost abusive, and the kiss so passionate, you’re not sure where one pair of lips begins and the other ends.

As the years went by, though, my daydreams were wiser. I imagined that we’d bump into each other on a chilly day in some café in the city. And I would ask if he ever loved me, really. If he ever really planned to come back for me.

And his story would be long and sad, about how he’d gotten lost on his journey and, by the time he’d made it back, he didn’t know how to find me. He’d tell me that it was never the same with anyone else; he’d always ached for me.

I’d wonder if he ever dreamed about our reunion, too, and if he had, what he thought it’d be like. But I wouldn’t ask, because it wouldn’t matter. Looking into each other’s eyes, we would understand that everything leading up to that point would have just been fate preparing us to become us.

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I don’t really imagine it anymore; although, I do wonder if I should’ve cried—if I should’ve grieved when I had the chance. Maybe he really did die that day after he’d left the note, after the promise. Or maybe it was sometime even after that, once he’d gotten out. Maybe he’d just forgotten.

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Still, even after all this time, I wait for an unexpected knock at the door…

END