By Norah Rami
“Time, chain of days and nights, is nothing but
A name for breathing in and breathing out”
-Iqbal, Saqi Nama, Stanza No. 5
You will decide to be friends with him after a speech he makes in your high school debate class on the first day of freshman year. The room will be windowless with fluorescent lights reflecting off the white walls of your suburban Texas high school, which was rumored to have been modeled after a prison. Each day, after class, you will stuff your loose papers in your bag to make sure you can walk to biology class with him. It will take him half a year before he decides to wait for you.
He is the smartest person that you have ever encountered. When you read, you will start muttering aloud to yourself, trying to memorize passages so that you can quote esoteric philosophies and percentages back at him whenever you get into an argument. You will want to be just like him. He will tell you that you are the first person to tell him that.
When you are not at debate competitions together, you will meet midway between your houses—the corner of your old elementary school—to sit outside and read. He will have read more than anyone at your school, and you will find yourself repeating the ideas he told you on these walks in your college seminars years later. You will never return his copy of Notes of a Native Son, instead packing it in your suitcase when you move to Philadelphia for college, ignoring his illegible notes in the margins when you return to it again and again.
Senior year of high school, you will pick him up for school each morning along with three other friends. He will be silent amid the chaos of the packed car, stuck between two brothers who incessantly argue about the last film they’ve seen. But on the way back home, it will be just the two of you, and he will become a different person. You will casually say Love you when you drop him off at the end of the day, the same way you address your other close friends. At first, he will be shocked, scolding you for using the word too easily. But slowly, he will begin to return the endearment. Carefully, as though testing a hypothesis.
You will introduce him to the music that you and all your friends listen to. He will hate it at first. But eventually, you will both be screaming along to Haley Heynderickx’s “Oom Sha La La.” I need to start a garden. I need to start a garden. I need to start a garden. You will collapse into giggles, and Oom Sha La La will take on a meaning of its own. Part of a private language shared only between the two of you.
Some days after school, when you are avoiding going home, you will take him with you to the nearby forest to explore. The two of you will move and speak without direction, constantly trying to best the other with your wit. Ted Kaczynski. Logical Positivism. Aristotle. These are the topics you will discuss, though you knew nothing about them before you met him. Sometimes, the path will grow narrow. One of you will go up ahead, yelling back to the other. The Brazos River, full of mud and silt, snakes beneath you in a heavy malaise. You will point out it is the color of your shared skin and hear his laughter from among the trees.
He will be the second person on the invite list for your 18th birthday—right after the friend who insisted that you throw a party and two above your prom date. It will be a casual affair. He will show up early and nervous, toying with the top button of his button-down, paired with nice slacks. He will spend most of the party by himself in the corner, out of place among the shorts and high school gossip. This, he will admit, was the first party he had ever been invited to.
Before you leave for college, he will show up at your home. It will have been a while since you last met for a walk. He will admit that this is because his body has been in constant pain. The disease that had condemned his childhood to a wheelchair is now declaring total war in the months before he is supposed to spread his wings for college. He will claim that today is a good day, that he wants to go for a walk as the two of you always do.
Here is how many days we have spent together, he will say, calculating a number well into the thousands—virtually every single day since the first day of high school. Here is how many days we have in the future if we see each other five times a year for the rest of our lives, he will say. It will be a small number. No, you will say, though your negation is more of a prayer than a fact. Our partners will be best friends. Our children will be best friends. We will have dinner once a month on Thursday. He will let you enjoy these fictions, though in truth, he hadn’t expected to even make it to graduation. That night, he will tell you that every time he looks at the moon in New York, he will think of you.
Home from college for a week, it will take you a moment to recognize him on the side of the road, at the corner in front of your elementary school. He will be bigger than you now, with a beard and long, curly hair. He will no longer look like the timid boy whom you were always trying to protect; instead, as you will soon learn, he has become the type of boy who makes uncouth jokes at the expense of the girl he is seeing. But you will know it is him by the way he moves his hands while listening to music, even if no one is there. He will slowly turn around as you run toward him, calling his name, and before long, you will slip back into that familiar cadence. You will be surprised to hear that he reads poetry now, sending you some verses of Iqbal; after all, this is the boy who used to tease you as awfully romantic when you showed him your own poems. You will plan to meet up the next day. But when you get home, you will never follow up. You fear that you will never be able to understand him again. You fear that he no longer understands you. You wish you could turn back time.
You will see each other four times over the next year. Once, he will open his wallet and give you a Polaroid of the two of you from senior year. “I won’t need it anymore.” Another time, you will fight on a walk, and he will tell you that he doesn’t like the person he sees you growing into. You will bite your tongue instead of saying, Back at you. This will not be the first time that he attempts to call off your friendship, and you expect him to come back around, like he always does. But perhaps you don’t know him quite as well as you thought, because he never will apologize. You will not guess that both of your families will move out of this town in just a few years. You will not realize that this is the last time the two of you will walk this route together.
In February, you will visit New York and decide at the last minute to meet up with him at the art gallery where he works. You will wrap your arms around his shoulders as if holding him together. He will be solid and yours to protect again.
The walls will be a sterile white, harshly lit so as to feel otherworldly. Showing you around the exhibition, he will guide you to a pointillist painting littered with neon greens and pinks. The boy you knew would have scoffed at it. Instead, he will look down at his feet, his weight shifting like a pendulum. His hair will be longer now and much curlier than yours. He will tell you that he is sick again, his body pushing him to an edge that you will refuse to fathom, though he had long warned you of this moment.
We don’t talk anymore, he will say when you ask why he hadn’t reached out to you earlier. It will be neither a lamentation nor an accusation. It will simply be a fact. Two years before, he became the only friend to ever make you cry. Now you will simply nod and exhale.
Norah Rami is a College senior and the editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian’s 34th Street Magazine. This essay won first prize in the Gazette’s 2025 Undergraduate Essay Contest.
