Finally Breaking Through

We sat in silence for a few minutes, just passing the bottle back and forth and taking swigs of it. In the distance the sounds of the party continued with no sign of abatement and I wondered how long it would all really go on for.

There were things to do tomorrow, hell there were things to do all week. All the boring activities of frosh week still laying out in front of us and we’d have to be bright eyed and bushytailed for each one of them. So what I was doing now, well it was probably the polar opposite of what the responsible choice was.

Getting drunk. Staying with Eddie. None of it should be happening.

“So what do we do now?” he asks me eventually, his eyes focused on the ground in front of him but a nervous kind of twitchy energy coming over him the longer we sat in silence.

“We could talk,” I sighed, “If you don’t want to be a dick about it.”

He ignored the jab, pressing for more information instead, “Talk about what?”

I had to laugh at that, “Eddie whatever you are, you’re not an idiot. I know that at least. You may be emotionally and psychologically stunted, but I’d wager real money that you know what I want to talk about.”

Eddie paused for a long time, seeming like he was thinking about the fullness of my statement. I didn’t know what was hard about this from his perspective, if anything it was far more difficult for me.

Because you see I knew Eddie. I’d spent years with him and knew about his past and his history and all the little quirks that made him the unique kind of asshole he was. If it was up to me I could skip to the end of this conversation and just be friends with him, be familiar with him, but that wasn’t an easy place to get to.

Because he didn’t, obviously, have any of that on his end. He hadn’t gone through those years with me, to him I was just a stranger. And for me that meant I had to play the game of getting to know him again, hopefully doing it a little faster than the last time so we could move beyond that to the place we should have been in the whole time. Taking him from who he was to the better version of himself, someone who didn’t make the same kind of mistakes.

That was my goal, the only one I could think of. Make Eddie a better man and then hopefully avoid all the troubles he’d get himself into. If I was going to be stuck in this timeline for a while, the least I could do was give Eddie a fighting chance at having a decent life when I was gone.

Once I was gone. Once I figured out how to get out of here and back to some semblance of normalcy, a goal that I still held onto as the only real option for me.

“Really?” Eddie asked me, and I shook my head.

“Eddie this isn’t really hard here,” I said, “We’re strangers, sure, but we don’t have to be. I mean hell that’s how all people start out, isn’t it. Strangers until they’re not.

“I don’t know about you but I don’t know anyone here. I came to this school without any connections, looking for a fresh start and looking for something different and I’m trying to be open to that. It’s my hope that if I am, if I put out into the world that I’m the kind of person who is open to doing things, then others will pick up on that.

“And that’s why I’m here. I want to connect with people, really connect with them. I want to build attachments without cynicism and find a way to let people in, you know? Really expand… really broaden my horizons.

“I hope you can say the same thing, and I hope that if I’m sincere and forthcoming about this, well that maybe you’ll be open to it as well. Because I want to get to know you, Eddie. Because I think you have the potential in you to be the kind of guy I want to know, even if you act like a complete and utter asshole sometimes.”

He furrowed his brow, “You want all that, for me? But why? Why me?”

“Eddie,” I smiled, “You undersell yourself.”

And I looked at him and I smiled and I tried to be sincere.

And that’s about the time he misinterpreted everything.

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