Parallel Lives

We are forty now and live in different cities with different groceries. You buy oat milk. I buy the regular kind. This says everything about where we diverged and nothing about where we're the same. At seventeen we swore we'd live on the same street, raise our kids like siblings, grow old and terrible together on a porch we'd build ourselves (neither of us could build anything). Instead: you're in Portland. I'm wherever this is. Our kids have never met. Our phone calls start with sorry and end with soon. But last month you called at midnight— your voice in that specific register that means the thing you won't say yet— and I sat on the kitchen floor and listened for an hour while you circled it, and I didn't say fix it or leave him or have you tried— I just sat there, and you just talked, and it was exactly like being seventeen except we both knew that nothing would be fine, and that was fine.