A Friendship

In the summer of sophomore year, you perfected my doctor’s signature. Really it isn’t very difficult, it’s just a long letter M, a dash, and a dot, but still I’m grateful. I know you said you only did it to see if you could, but still I’m grateful. Tired and grateful. Not quite sick and grateful. Our friendship, if you can call it that, is strange at best. We never really say more than a handful of words to each other but we are almost always together. We know admittedly little about each other but we share almost everything: a locker, oranges, a favorite color, the same strange not quite sickness that neither of us have bothered to try to name, and a small life-vest in an ocean that we made for ourselves. There is nothing but water as far as either of us can see, but for now we are both content to tread water next to each other.

It’s the spring of senior year and you sign my doctor’s notes with the pen that you keep around your neck. We are made mostly of orange peels, forged signatures, and the occasional kiss, not because we love each other but because we both need to be near someone sometimes but that would otherwise involve meeting, and then talking to someone. We are still just treading water and I think I see the outline of what might be land but that would mean actually having to swim and my legs are already tired. I know. I know none of this is healthy but I’m not about to point that out, not when I’m not technically sick, not when your favorite pen is already running out of ink.