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“Whenever you’re ready to start with your I-told-you-so lecture, Josh,” I said, “let me know. I’ll just close my ears.”
He shook his head slowly. “No, you know what? I think I’m going to pass.”
I smiled, and watched as he gathered up his things, picked up the flashlight, and stood—stretching his arms out. Then, with his free hand, he reached down to pull me up to standing too. “I just don’t know how you walked around with that in your foot all day,” he said. “It seems like a fairly painful enterprise.”
“Well, I think both of us have been creating some pain for ourselves for a while now,” I said.
He rolled his eyes at me, which I guess I deserved. “Can we save the philosophizing, please?” he said.
“Sorry. It felt like the moment was calling for it.”
He turned the flashlight on, shining it at my face for a second, before motioning with it in the direction of the parking lot. We started heading that way, Josh staying about half a step behind me. In four weeks though, on my way to Los Angeles, I would come back here to take a photograph. I’d want to remember how I had felt sitting here—to take it with me, this sense of relief I knew we were both feeling, the quietly growing momentum that eventually I’d understand comes from letting go of the things you were holding on too tightly to in the first place. But it was daytime when I came back, and everything felt different. In our spot was an enormous rainbow umbrella, the edges of two red beach towels sticking out from beneath it. It seemed important to take the picture anyway. So I did. From the angle I shot it, you could only make out the top of the umbrella: a swirl of bright colors against the August sun, intense and glowing, but distant from me, benign. Which, really, turned out to be the most hopeful epilogue to the weekend, to the whole crazy time, that I could hope for.
“So did you ever figure out my toast, by the way?” Josh said now, falling in step beside me. “What you were going to say today, if you ended up having to stand up and say something?”
“I didn’t get that far.” I shrugged. “But I probably would have kept it pretty short.”
“How short?” he said, starting to smile. I could hear the amusement creeping up in his voice, the familiar sarcastic tone.
He was enjoying himself way too much. I smiled back anyway though, mostly because it didn’t matter anymore—what I would have said, or would have done. Other things mattered more now. There are words and there are feelings and somewhere between where the two meet is the truth. Here was my truth: I was ready to go home. We were both ready for that, I thought, and—finally, finally—for whatever was coming next.
I stopped walking, but only for a second. “Just, you know, the really important things,” I said. “Be well, be happy, be true. And, then, of course . . . cheers.”
This was when I raised an imaginary glass in my hand, gave it all one last moment, and kept going.
