As you can probably tell, gender is a central material preoccupation of mine. It governs so much of my life, I was writing about its gravitational power long before admitting how it affected me.

The following story, titled “liminal summer” (lowercase intentional), was begun in 2022. I wanted to write about life in a between space, between childhood and the future, the past and future, an adolescent bardo of sorts—a place where we aren’t truly gone, but not yet arrived. The general story of the work had been figured out, but getting there made no sense, so I put it away.

Last year, over the course of a couple of days after finishing my first novel, the revelation about how to end the story came to me, and I set about writing it from the last bits of written material to the end. The first one thousand words were written over the course of a month in 2022, I think.

The last 5,500 or so were drafted in a day.

I’ve debated whether or not to revise this one down. At 6,500 words, it’s a bit too long for conventional magazines. But I find it charming, emotional, and a little silly in the way good stories about teenage life should be.

As always, enjoy.

---

liminal summer, by Charli Jae Brister

We sit at the edge of the city, four cylinder engine rumbling gently, three boys and one girl all freshly graduated from high school, and watch the sun trail down the sky to the horizon. Today is the Summer Solstice, which means we have the longest possible window to make it happen.

But that means we have to wait. And wait. And watch the horizon intently, while sweat dapples our foreheads in Matt’s shitty, old car with no air conditioning; while we sit in the still, windless Central Texas heat as we face west; while we hold our breaths and each of us wish we had something, anything to drink right now; while we nearly vibrate out our seats in anticipation of that single moment.

***

None of us knew exactly how we heard about it, all we could figure out was that we’d all learned about it. It seemed like it was pieced together through fuzzy memories, little recollections and dreamy waking moments that hadn’t fully faded out. Matt’s was at a move-in party for his co-op. He was stoned and drunk, surrounded by guests and new flatmates, in the middle of a prismatic sea of light and smoke. A free jazz band was whipping up a maelstrom of sound, flurries of cymbals, kicks, and snares, a saxophone and trumpet danced in contrapuntal circles through the furious storm, and a voice whispered to him, cutting clear through the noise: he doesn’t remember what it said, he just knew the next morning he needed to be here.

Catie’s happened on her morning jog. She was rounding the final corner of her daily two miles, when she kicked a rock that wasn’t there before the step. The moment before she hit the ground, a dog walked across her vision, its fur a perfect portrait of where we now sat in Matt’s car.

Alec’s moment came while he was on his own little trip to Mississippi. He stopped in the middle of the night on I-20 at a gas station near Shreveport, to grab a bottle of No-doz and and make sure he was headed east, and as he was checking out, he spied from the corner of his eye a brochure glowing in a tourist display, with blue text that said Go Home, Then West.

Mine felt a little less magical. I was laying in the bed of a man over twice my age, looking at the mixture of our seed glisten in my hand after I’d wiped it from my chest. It had a modest prismatic effect, dulled by its thick, pearly gleam. My hand turned over as it caught the setting rays of sunlight from his high-rise apartment, and in a small moment I imagined my hands as more slender, my fingers longer and narrow, tipped with nails long and claw-like, painted blood-red. I imagined his cum splashing on my sternum, a ring of lipstick staining the head of his cock.

That unreal person was me. I shook my head to banish the thought.

When he kissed me goodbye, I felt his tongue in my mouth, and it tasted of golden hour light and exhaust and the sweat of my friends. He tasted of the hands of the clock ticking to precisely this moment, in this car (it annoyed all of us—we could all sense heat and sweat in some way, so we deduced that it would need to be Matt’s car. We gave him gas money for his trouble).

***

Matt keeps the radio down, letting it play at a dull, fuzzy hum. We’re at the edge of the current station’s area, so swirls of static push up through the noise, otherworldly blares and hisses. We tune them out like every other unnecessary stimuli here: there’s nothing but us, Matt’s gas pedal, and the horizon. Nothing else exists, not even our bodies.

***

“So…” Catie said, nodding her head at me and moving her hands in a circle to get me to talk. We were having lunch, sitting by the window at a sub shop near my house. She’d finished her food and stared at me trying to pick over my own. I didn’t really feel hungry right now, even though I hadn’t eaten in a day.

“I dunno, it’s just like…I saw something, like I had girl hands, or something,” I stammer out, realizing how stupid it sounded once the words had left my mouth. “Felt like me, like I was looking at it. Not a dream.” That was the part I had the hardest time shaking off—that sensation that I was experiencing truth, a refraction of reality bent through a prism.

When it happened, first I was sure that it was a dream, an unreality, easily sloughed away like molting skin, and it would shrivel up and float away like every other dream. That mean denial, chalking it up to simple misfirings of neurons while I drifted in the no mans’ land of waking and sleep.

But it was sticky. When I tried to disregard it and toss it aside, the experience would leave a film, a residue of feeling and sensation, something that wasn’t easily filed away as passing fancy. My hand twisted, my fingers flexed and extended, my bones were my bones but not my bones, skin mine but not, delicate and feminine and real. And it was me and not me, all seen through the shafts of golden light in that bed, a dream but not a dream, of people dreaming of one another’s lives.

Which scared me. To speak it out loud meant admitting it was real. And I didn’t want that to be real.

I wanted to be me.

I didn’t want to be someone else.

Catie looked at my shaking hand, and put hers on mine. “Hey.”

The touch broke me out of my head. I didn’t realize that time had kept going while I stopped.

“Are you alright?” She asked.

“Yeah.”

We sat there, in silence, for a few seconds, just breathing. I could feel the tears in my eyes, gathering in my lashes, hot and stinging. The guy who took our order was nowhere to be found. Probably for the best.

“I think something like that happened to me, too.”

Not what I expected to hear. “What?”

She leaned back in her seat, and sighed deeply. “Yeah. When I hit the ground, it was like, you know, you said, when you’re dreaming and you see something that’s not a dream, like it’s real.”

Leaning over the table, my tears suddenly forgotten, I asked, “What do you mean?” I could tell that what I was doing looked creepy, but we’d been friends for a long time, and she was used to it.

Her face was working out how to say it. Eyes narrowing and widening, cheeks bouncing up and down as she pondered very obviously and openly, brows knitting and coming apart, the effort of thought plain on her face. I probably looked just as dumb.

“So, like, I was out cold, but then I woke up. But it wasn’t me? Does that make sense?” She had a pleading look in her face to match her voice.

I nodded.

“When I woke up, there’s this girl looking at me, and she’s crying when I wake up. She’s like, ‘omigod Catie, are you ok?!’, and I’m like, ‘yeah’, and then I look up at her and I know her name and I say it, but I can’t remember it,” Catie says, rubbing her temples like it will unscrew something, “and she’s there and she’s crying and I’m crying and my forehead is bleeding and she says, ‘another scar in the same spot’”—and points to the vivid pink scar above her left eye, right at the hairline near the side of her head—“and we laugh a little.”

We both sat there for a little while, silent and looking in each other’s eyes.

Catie broke the silence. “What did I see?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I dunno.”

“It didn’t feel like a dream,” she said, “it was like that was my actual life.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s how it was for me too.” It felt like I’d stepped into a different world.

“I keep trying to remember her name, but I can’t.” There are tears in her eyes.

My hand reaches over the table to take hers, unconsciously. “Hey.”

She blinks the tears away. “Hey.”

“Something up?”

“It’s just…it’s a girl…and I’m not…”

I squeezed. She squeezed back.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.”

***

“So do we know what’s on the other side?” Alec asks, bouncing in the front seat, watching as intently as the rest of us.

We all exchange glances and purse our lips. “Nope.” “Nuh-uh.” “Ionno.”

He nods and resumes staring. “Figured.”

Catie and I are in the back seat of Matt’s shitty old Ford Taurus, which should have been put out of its misery a long time ago, but his parents were holding off on replacing it, and the four of us were too sentimental to push the issue.

It had served us well since Matt learned to drive. He was the first, and he was the one with the most latitude before Alec graduated high school. They were pretty liberal with their spending on him, and we got to be the beneficiaries of that doting. Most of the time it amounted to getting a free meal once every two weeks, some sodas and pizza and a sleepover (how they allowed it to happen with Catie was a mystery—we chalked it up to our parents assuming platonic affection over everything, which was mostly the case), but occasionally it was a day at the movies spent on one legitimate ticket and sneaking into one or two more afterwards, or a heavily supervised overnight trip where we got our own car. That was our little home together, a little bit of our own world that we could have just to ourselves.

We had gone to amusement parks, to public pools, downtown as teenagers (we peed on the Scientology building and didn’t get caught), north, south, east, and west, over hills and across vast flat lands (an easy thing when you live in central Texas, a locus point of geography that gives you weird weather and fun drives), onto back roads and highways, into dark back alleys and places we were too young to go but got in because we were in a car and some people assume that only adults drive cars.

We’d made out in there, pissed in it (getting the smell out was hell), vomited (ditto), shat (don’t ask), came close to losing our virginity, actually lost our virginity, accidentally did butt stuff, accidentally did butt stuff and liked it, and eaten meals, drank beer and wine and cheap liquor poured into soda cans, and smoked entirely too many cigarettes in there. We’d consecrated it, in a way. Made it ours. And we were going to use it for a time-honored tradition: doing stupid shit on impulse.

That was we told ourselves, at least. All of us know it’s not like that.

***

We’d gone to Taco Bell one muggy early June afternoon, before Matt headed to class. He wasn’t going to choose a major, at least not until he knew which one would have the most classes after 3pm—he had an aversion to waking up early, to a degree that the three of us found a little odd. There wasn’t anything weird or illegal happening, he just hated being awake before noon.

We were at the restaurant, sitting in the furthest corner from the counter, all in sunglasses, huddled together and doing our best to position ourselves to not face the sun—we were nursing hangovers brought on by an evil batch of trash-can punch the night before, one that almost killed Alec. We were all comforting him and trying to make sure he was okay, feeding him a pita because the only thing we could remember in our state was that carbs absorbed alcohol and that he turned away because he kept slurring that he couldn’t eat because his mouth was completely dry (that’s what he claims he said. When people are that drunk, the most coherent thing you can recall is usually little more than a vague recollection filled in with assumptions after the fact).

And then.

And then he leaned over, mouth past his knees, and let out a torrent of vivid green vomit onto the floor. Two of the residents of Matt’s co-op raced over with a garbage can, and Matt finished his retching fit in there.

To this day, I cannot recall why it was green. We had been together for the last 24 hours at that point, and none of us could name one thing we ate during that time that was even conceptually green, let alone something approaching a fresh vegetable.

But here we are, hunched over, staring at the sodium packed treats before us, willing ourselves to put some calories in our bodies.

“What the fuck are we doing?” Alec asks. “So we’re just going to try this? It makes no sense.”

“That’ why we gotta do it, Al,” Matt says. “We don’t got a choice. It’s like a…like a…prophecy or an epipipfany.” We can’t figure out if he’s still drunk or if he just talks like that now.

“Like, yeah, it makes no goddamned sense, but we have to fucking try, right?” I say, swearing like I’m in a Tarantino movie. My brother had taken me to a double feature of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction at the Paramount. The word “fuck” is the only thing on my mind.

“Right. And what’s the harm?” Catie asks. “We’re all here, we all saw it, right?” Four nods in unison. “So, it makes sense that we might just—“

“Well, yeah, but,” Alec cuts in, “like, just, we need to…”

“Are you just stalling?” I ask.

Catie crosses her arms. “Do you have anything to add? Or are you just bullshitting around?”

Alec rolls his eyes so hard we can see it through all of the sunglass we’re wearing. “Okay, I’m just saying, it’s just weird. I’m not sad or anything! It makes no sense!”

That makes everything freeze. None of us had thrown “sad” in before. The thought had been lurking at the back of our minds, but it wasn’t anything we’d voiced. All of us assumed it was, like, a future or an alternate timeline, nothing so goofy as a “happier world”. It was just a…preview…or a fragment of another life.

Our lives? We weren’t sure.

But lives, for sure. The sensations didn’t feel like dreams. They didn’t have that texture of unreality, nothing bent in the wrong direction, ontologically speaking. A truth. The indefinite article was key.

Not ‘the’ truth.

‘A’ truth.

“Maybe,” I begin, knowing no one else will dive into the silence, “maybe we can figure out what’s happening if we share.”

Our heads turn to one another, giant bulky frames hiding the terror plain on our faces, even Matt’s. Something about these visions tells us they aren’t just visions, not just hazy glimpses at a reality positioned obliquely to ours.

“Or,” I suggest, now that the fear has sufficiently gripped us, “we can talk about it with one person.

“We can just fucking, pair off or something. I don’t fucking care. We just need to fucking talk about it. Fucking, like, right?” I swear because my stomach is cramping at the thought of speaking what I saw into existence.

I realize I already did. Mostly. There was more, at different times, but it still didn’t feel correct, normal, like me, in the sense of seeing myself for what it was. I could talk about that.

I choose Catie. I always choose Catie. Matt and Alec were always going to pair off.

Catie and I were inseparable. I was the only boy who was gay enough to be a lesbian, she would say. Only dated girls until me.

I have no idea if it meant anything.

***

During our sophomore year Catie was alone at her house for the weekend. She was a self-starter, a girl that liked to be on top of things—boys, she told me, were not, so she never liked them. I, even though I did nothing to change her perception, was the exception. Her attention and affection were showered upon me almost from our first meeting in high school, an innocent flirtation that I felt comfortable returning because I knew the rumors, and well, if a gay girl liked you, then you were okay.

And, like a smash cut, I was being pinned against the wall at the age of 14 by another 14-year-old in a darkened practice room, kissed on the lips like she knew what she was doing (neither of us did—we cut our gums a few times because our teeth kept clicking together), and then she held my hand and asked, “was that cool?”

I nodded, because, despite the shock and fear of the moment, I never felt like she was hurting me. Something about her was…care. Protection. And she hugged me. I hugged back.

After that, we were inseparable, and the relative public-facing chasteness of our bond hid the fact that we were two pubescent perverts taking advantage of the damaging assumption that Catie’s sexuality was a fixed thing.

It was nothing major, or unsafe—our hands were our primary tools of exploration. Health class became something we looked forward to, finding out what new and exciting facet of our bodies had off-label uses. We poked, we pinched, we prodded, escalated to our mouths; but there was a lack of pretense to it. It was never lustful, though that crept in—we were just two confused kids that had a golden opportunity to see how the other worked, intimately.

And that spirit of experimentation had gotten us to a night alone, with Catie’s adult siblings doing adult sibling things, confident in the knowledge that their sister was hanging out with that weird, wiry, vaguely faggy boy she affectionately called her “girlfriend”.

We were lying on her bed, watching Chicago. I loved Chicago. The sense of a world apart, where you could perform, be yourself, and leave the coldness of reality behind—or maybe that was Cabaret, but the movie adaptation had an air of desperation to it that didn’t fit the moment.

What is memory.

Roxie or Sally was singing “Maybe This Time” or “Roxie”, and the feeling of Catie’s hand on my back was different. She had a look in her eye. Something that told me that she was…curious. Our mutual consent was unspoken. It was clumsy, fumbling, stressful, and ultimately unsuccessful according to what we knew about the process, but it was done. Neither of us felt like we had lost something.

It was more like we had given it away.

In the bug-zapper dull afterglow, we held each other, not speaking, breathing quiet, like the moment would disappear if we were too loud.

Privately, in the very back of my mind, I imagined that I could be this quiet forever, and Catie would always be here.

***

“Alec and Matt are gonna go finger their asses together, so it’s you and me,” Catie said, “again.”

“It’s not that bad, right?” I asked, shrugging. “Really?”

She smirked. “Could be worse. Could be better.” Her car finally turned over. “At least we’ve got time, right?”

Nodding, I go back to the novel I’m reading. I can feel the silence between us growing. It was already strained by graduation. Catie wasn’t doing so well with the realization that she was actually leaving for school.

The four of us, once an inseparable, conjoined mass, were splitting, flying off into parts unknown, unsure of the next time we’d meet up.

***

Alec was enlisting, a decision that all of us had tried to talk him down from. He was a sweet guy, never angry or mean or hateful. He leaned a bit into that “annoying atheist” guy thing, but we knew it was just a put-on—we all thought that maybe he wanted to die, but not necessarily by committing suicide.

We had watched him nurse a puppy through its first few weeks before finally turning it over to a shelter. How he performed last rites for a dying bird, then buried it afterward.

Alec’s acute awareness of the fragility of life and death made us alarmed by his decision. None of us could figure out why. He never volunteered that information.

***

Our drive to Catie’s house is cold for June. Neither of us are in a mood to speak—we’re still thinking about “sad”.

It’s asinine. I’m not sad. I’m happy. I’ve graduated high school. My entire life is ahead of me. My life will be spent doing stuff at college and then I’ll be a teacher. That’s how it’s going to be. No need to think about any deviation from the plan. It’s set up and I’ll be able to just show up, do the work, and be done when they hand me the diploma. Maybe I’ll even be able to go to grad school, get a Master’s, then a Ph. D., and everyone will be forced to take me seriously.

“You don’t want that.” Catie’s voice almost gave me a concussion.

I had been speaking aloud.

“Not many options right now,” I say.

“You could follow me,” she says, a lilting ascent in her voice, hopeful.

“And do what? Where are you going, anyways?”

“Out of state.”

“So you just drag me around, your little faggy mascot?” I’m feeling punchy, like every other 18-year-old terrified at staring down the rest of their life.

“No! That’s not what it is! My parents like you, we could be, like—a thing,” she says, nodding like there’s An Implication.

“Like they’ll pay for me? Or I can get a job while you go to school? Who the fuck wants that?” She doesn’t fucking get it. “It’s just…”

“What? What? That you’re gonna be without your fucking dyke girlfriend? You might have to talk to girls again?”

Her words hit me in the chest. “No. That’s not it. I’m just scared. I’m scared of being by myself. We could pretend before. I could say I was your girlfriend, and mean it.

“And now I can’t. You’re gonna get a new one. And I’ll be here, or wherever,” I say, my voice getting shaky. “Alone.”

Catie says nothing, stares straight ahead. I see the tears forming.

***

Everyone jokingly called me Catie’s girlfriend. I thought of it like a joke, too.

Then I didn’t.

***

“Are you okay?” Catie asks, holding my hand. She’s painting my nails—black, because we’re just like that.

“Yes. No. No…maybe.”

We’d been crying nonstop since we pulled into the driveway. Something about the gravity of the visions, how they altered us—we were fraying.

Was visions the right word? It didn’t feel like it. But it wasn’t fortune telling, or Deja vu, because those were about the future and the past, respectively. This was something different. Not dreams, not quite reality. But they weren’t OUR lives.

Right?

That was the part that was messing with us. Something about it felt authentic. That we were seeing unlived futures—not things that couldn’t happen, just hadn’t happened yet, or maybe events hadn’t been set in a specific sequence to make them happen.

Catie and I gamed it out, like teenagers would. An idea, an iteration, a counter. We looped around it countless times and got no closer to what the fuck we were after.

Finding that we were just making ourselves more nervous, she decided to give me this gift, which would be immediately removed once I got home.

“Did you see something else? Or something more?” Catie asks. You can tell me, it’s ok. I think that’s what you suggested.” She smiles.

“Right.” I take a deep breath, exhale the doubt.

***

He took me from behind. He pulled my hair.

I begged.

A few tugs and he made me blow. Pitifully simple.

But in that moment between the holding in the release, I looked at the mirror in front of me, and saw someone else. Two different people.

Women. The figure railing me—the person in the mirror—was obscured in shadow, but the figure and my own intuition told me it was a woman. The other person had the same chin, the same eyes, the same eyes.

Blonde hair.

Red lip.

The tits didn’t look as bolted on as the first time.

That wasn’t me.

I wasn’t that.

***

“You’re fucking with me,” Catie says.

I shake my head.

“So do you…are you…have you…”

“No. I don’t want to do that.”

“But…”

“Stop,” I say, and wrench my hand back. A glob of polish falls on Catie’s sock.

We look at it soak into the fabric, a perfect circle becoming a tangled thatch, crawling outward, until it stops, now a gray gradient with a moderately black center. Both of us stare at it, but Catie takes a huge inhale, like she was drowning.

She looks back up at me. Tears are streaming. Again. Rivers of them. “When I saw more stuff,” she says, softly, almost inaudible, “I remember a memory, like I was talking about having a memory of a thing that happened, and it was this. I was arguing with somebody and then some nail polish fell on my sock, and then you—“

I’m kissing her, one more time. I don’t want to let her go. I can’t let her go. It’s not in me to be alone.

We’re more sure of ourselves this go round. We know how our bodies work.

***

“Applied sex ed,” Catie declares, and I giggle.

***

As I put on my pants, I look at Catie, hunched over the computer next to her bed. She’s checking her university email.

“I gotta go.”

She looks at me. “Cool. Later.”

“Later.”

***

Is it easier to drift apart, or cut things off? Easier to make it messy, or be clean about it? Something memorable? Maybe just a tossed off comment. Or a cutting remark. A slur without irony.

Or you stop calling. Stop coming over. Always be busy. Start working when they want to see you.

Avoid unintentionally. Avoid intentionally but lie and say it’s unintentional. Tell them it’s gay to have friends.

Whatever you do, just make sure they know it’s not a thing anymore.

That’s all I can think about as I walk home in the rain that freezing June evening, my thoughts bending toward that golden void of future memory like a black hole.

Nothing will escape.

***

“Yeah, dude, I’m standing in a field, the grass is up to my chest. It’s super green, soft.” Alec has a sheet of paper, with each thing he’s noticed. “Rolling hills. The sky is kinda cloudy but really blue. There’s a sweet smell in the air, like apple pie.”

“That’s cool,” I say.

Alec scoffs. “Yeah. You three are being fucking drama queens about it, and look! I’m good! Perfect!”

Matt, Catie, and I exchange a look. Something’s fucked.

We can’t articulate what.

***

“Are we really doing this?” Matt asks. “I just saw, like, some dogs and a few kids. It was just that. I bet y’all saw some,” he puts his hands up with a  flourish, “some suprexplicantable shit.”

Catie and I squint, parsing the syllables for meaning. We wave goodbye to him—he’s off to go wail on his guitar for the evening, in front of people who will pay him for his trouble.

Matt’s been evasive, which we expected. Maybe he saw something boring.

“He could be lying,” Catie tells me, “or he’s just not ready to admit that it’s cool.”

“Ehh, I’m not sure. Like, you and I, we see something—“

“We see us, [————].”

***

My name doesn’t exist in this story.

I don’t really want to tell it, but I’m here anyways.

***

“That’s not what’s going on! I’m not that person! I’m seeing something else. Something different. Alec is in a field! Matt’s settling down! You’re dating somebody and you’re happy, and I’m…I’m…” nothing comes.

The future is pressing down on our shoulders, making our minds buckle. We can feel it—the stress, the cracks forming when you know the future, when you try to deny it, when you try to run, and it judders and shifts into something unrecognizable. We either want to run to it or run from it, but none of that matters. The knowing is the problem. You can’t live your life knowing how it will end. That would ruin the point of the story.

So the current will pull you back. Time will find a way to right itself.

How could it not?

***

“Fuck you! All you ever wanted to do is just keep me around!” I scream at Catie from across the hood of Matt’s car. “I’m not a fucking teddy bear!”

“Shut the fuck up! All you do is whine about being alone! You never do anything else! What the fuck am I supposed to do????”

“Maybe do something that’s not just fucking me for fun!” That sentence hangs in the air. The group of people gathered in front of the 7/11 in the middle of a hot June night at 2am are enraptured by the spectacle of teenage yearning self-destructing. “You think I just did it for laughs? Like I didn’t care? You just get on top and—“

Catie guffaws. “And you beg me to do it! You beg me not to leave, to make it last,” she goes on, her voice shaking, “and that’s all I want to do! But I can’t! Because I know if I do I have to—“

“Have to what, Catie? What? Give up your future for your high school sweetheart? Afraid that I’m the best you’ll get?” In the back of my head, I’m admitting it.

I know that woman I see is me.

And I know the other person I see is Catie.

But saying it out loud hurts. It makes me want to—no.

Do I only feel this way because I know?

***

The four of us hold each other while we listen to My Chemical Romance in the parking lot of Nelson Field.

"So what’s going on?" We don’t really know who’s talking now.

"Cracking, maybe?"

"Sucks, dude"

"Look, man, I have no idea what to do"

"Maybe we should just get some fucking sleep."

***

Shower. Time to think. It’s been days since it happened. The water runs over my face, down my neck. It’s hot, and I’ll use all the hot water. Middle of the night, no one really cares. If my parents make a stink about it I’ll just tell them to take it out of my allowance.

All four of us know that we’re fucked. The cracks are widening, in a really short time. Every conversation is charged with speculation, words are being too carefully placed, actions choreographed. Everything is now predetermined, and we know it. We skipped ahead to the end, and now every day is seeing how the plot gets to it.

“Sleep, we need sleep. Just, like, go to bed, try to forget or at least, like, not go fucking insane,” I said, in the back corner of a 24-hour diner, to my three friends who were as drawn, pale, and sallow as me.

Catie nodded frantically. “He’s right, we have to rest. I think we’ll do something dumb if we don’t.”

“And look,” Matt said, pulling out a pocket calendar. It was covered in a cipher of ink marks I could only guess was his performance schedule. “Today is Tuesday. Right?” It was 3am. “Yeah. So tomorrow is the solstice. Longest day.

“And all of that other shit, who cares? That came with an invitation, remember?”

Alec scoffed, trying to be skeptical. “So we’re going to just, like, drive? Into the sun? Like that fucking Nickelback cover?”

Matt smirked. “Exactly.”

Water trailing down my body, taking huge, deep belly breaths, letting the steam fill me. I exhale, let the tears come.

We have no idea what we’re doing. It could the end of the world. We could just be having a collective delusion. We might already be dead. It could just be a dream.

There’s a million what ifs.

We have an invitation to the one truth.

***

Matt was already marinating his brain in whatever drugs he could find around the co-ops populated by university students, couch surfing, drinking, managing to piece enough income together to make us all look like poor idiots.

He had nothing we could call direction, and it seemed like he liked it that way. Structure had never been his thing, and he was the worst student of the four of us. Lots of teachers thought he was a bit slow, but we knew better. You just needed to ask him the right questions, or get him to make noise about it with his guitar.

He was a wizard with it. He took lessons as a kid, doing the usual blues thing, but he discovered effects pedals, weed, and Jimi Hendrix at the same time and didn’t look back. He heard Loveless for the first time and begged his parents for a Telecaster. He made worlds that bent in on themselves, oceans of noise populated with small schools of noise flourishes; big, mean, powerful shark riffs; and massive whale like blasts of static that seemed to rise and fall from the horizon, leaving gigantic waves in their wake

He didn’t seem to care about money, or shelter, or a job, or the future. Matt cared about his music—just his music, in a way that pushed everything else out, even making money or recording it or whatever else you could do with it.

And he seemed to be fine with it.

***

Matt picks us up, one by one. We dutifully get in, take our place, and say nothing. Conversation makes the stream deviate, deviation makes us insane, and we need to be the least insane we’ve ever been for what we’re about to do.

Deep down, we are dead certain it’s going to work, but saying it aloud makes us doubt.

So we don’t. We accept it.

It makes it easier to give in.

***

They all told us to be here, in this moment, in this car, driving towards this specific point of light.

We reach the moment. Matt guns it, tearing ass down a lonely two-lane road just outside of town—don’t remember which one, but there are a lot around Austin.

The light gets brighter, brighter, and goes white as we drive INTO the horizon, past the world—we can see existence get smaller in the rear view.

Outside, the air cools, the humidity gets a little drier, and it feels like the atmosphere isn’t pressing in on us. The light is bright, but not blinding. We’re in a photo shoot—not the set, but the photo afterwards, too perfect and manicured, made to feel ideal but untouchable.

We drive for what feels like an eternity—literally—until we reach a diner. Nothing special, four walls and a couple of neon signs. Very retro, lots of rounded edges, chrome piping, checked floors. Trying hard. Who cares.

We walk in and are suddenly blinked to tables. We can’t hear the others. There’s just me.

No.

Me and Catie.

Across from us is Catie, older, wiser, graying just a bit. Her formerly perfectly straight brown hair is now a curly bob she wears with ease. The lines on her face are there, but not obvious—she’s probably ten years older?

Future Catie smiles. “I’m 38. It’s twenty years.”

My hands clench. “Are you telepathic.”

She shakes her head. “No. I just know what’s going to happen.”

I look at present Catie. “You’re doing pretty well,” I say.

“Yeah.”

A hand touches mine. Slender fingers, red nails. I look up.

It’s me. Not me. Still me. Never me.

Always me.

Gorgeous. Not a line out of place. Her jaw, her chin, her makeup, like they were meant to be there. Her lips have a little pout to them, and her hair is…well, she’s balding, but what’s there still looks good, and she’s working around it.

“Yeah, I thought this would be a surprise,” she says, her voice pitched up to be a bit delicate and feminine. “But you’ve still got the voice.” She dips into her original register. “You can still sing, don’t worry.”

That makes me giggle.

“And you’re going to figure it out. Don’t worry,” she says, “and it gets better. Life isn’t going to suck.

“You wanna know the best part?” Future Catie asks.

Future Me and Future Catie hold up their left hands. Matching gold bands. In unison, they say, “May 27, 2016.”

Oh my god. It’s perfect. Catie and I share a hug, and I take her hand.

It’s going to be okay. We’re not going to have to be alone. Life won’t suck.

We don’t have to worry.

Driven by our excitement, we get up from the table and prepare to run to Matt and Alec. Future Catie stops us. “Hey.”

“Wha’ts up?” My Catie asks.

Future Me chimes in. “You can’t know. That was part of the deal.”

“What?” Catie asks.

“We didn’t know, and you can’t either.” My future voice is thick with sorrow. “You can’t leave remembering.” She’s crying now, black streams falling down her cheeks. “We got the chance to meet you, at least.” Both Caties give me a weak smile.

I shake my head. “NO!” I scream. “You’re…you’re…perfect. I can’t forget.”

Future Catie is just as broken. “I know. It’s going to be hard. For both of you. But you’ll find your way back. You always do. It’s not farewell.”

I try to take Catie’s hand. She pulls away. I try again. She shakes her head. One more time. She takes it.

“What?” I ask.

Future Me sighs.

Future Catie is choked up. “It’s til next we meet.”

***

Catie and I ended it a couple of weeks ago. We were all just goofing off, and Matt veered into a ditch trying to avoid a deer. We were okay, but Catie was done dealing with us, it felt like.

“You and Matt and Alec are just fucking losers! Wasting time and jacking off! You never tried to make any friends, and now you’re crying because I’m leaving! Right?”

For some reason, I didn’t have it in me to argue. “Yeah, you’re right. You don’t need me anymore.”

She was going to scream again, but the fight drained from her. “Wait. I do. I do. Always. But.”

“No. You don’t. Never did. I was just nice to have around.” I just wanted to push her away. “You never liked me. I’m not your girlfriend. I’m not a lesbian. That’s what that means, right?”

“No, no, hey, you’re…I love you.”

She said it. Finally. All I had to do was say—

“Go love someone else.”

---

And there you have it. Thank you for reading. Not sure when the next thing will be out.

You’ll hear from me soon.

Love you, take care, stay safe