The Summer I Stopped Calling
There's a name I haven't said out loud in years. Not because anything dramatic happened between us — no blowout fight, no betrayal worth telling. We just drifted, the way people do when life gets louder than the friendships that used to hold it together. His name was Denny. We met in our twenties, back when Greenville felt like a small enough town that you could know everyone worth knowing. We'd spend Friday nights on his back porch, talking about nothing in particular — music, bad decisions, what we thought our lives were supposed to look like. He was the kind of friend who showed up with beer when you didn't ask and left before things got maudlin. I liked that about him. Then somewhere around my early thirties, I got busy. That's the honest word for it — not complicated, not tragic. Just busy. I stopped returning calls as fast. Rescheduled things twice, then three times, then eventually stopped trying to reschedule at all. He did the same, maybe mirroring me, ...