brooke

I was sitting at one end of the bed, Faye at the other, her joint hanging loosely between her fingers. The air was thick with incense and the faint, sour tang of weed. She took a drag, exhaling smoke that curled toward the ceiling like a ghost unwilling to let go. “Every year, she’d text me right at midnight,” I murmured, my voice catching on the memory. “She was always the first to say happy birthday.”

Faye half-smiled, the kind of smile that held both humor and grief in a delicate balance. “No one does that anymore,” she said, her eyes drifting somewhere far beyond the room, maybe to the streetlights, or to the night itself. I stood and moved toward the window, desperate for the sting of cold air to clear my head. I hadn’t smoked in a while; it made me even more paranoid, turned my thoughts into wild animals I couldn’t tame.

“Do you know who remembered my birthday this year?” I asked, my breath fogging up the glass. “You girls, a couple of relatives, and… that’s it.” She let out a raspy laugh, coughing slightly as she joined in. “Same here. Just you guys… and a couple of random hook-ups,” She raised her joint in mock salute. “Not even A or F,” she added, her voice soft, almost bitter.

A and F. The friends she spent every waking hour with, the ones whose absence in her life felt as impossible as the sun refusing to rise. “You didn’t talk to them that day?” I asked.

“Of course we talked,” she said, her tone dry, her gaze still distant. “They wanted to know if I could get coke for G’s birthday party.”

I laughed, sharp and disbelieving. “Unbelievable.”

She smiled back, but it was a smile tinged with something unspoken. She got up to grab water, leaving me alone with the flickering incense and the weight of her words. I watched the smoke curl and straighten, curl and straighten, as if the room itself were breathing. My eyes wandered to her bookshelf, rows of titles on attachments and intimacy, just like my own collection back home.

The room was quieter now. Fewer cars passed outside. When she returned with a pitcher and two glasses, I decided to tell her about O. The friend who disappeared a year ago, stopped answering my messages, left behind only the ghost of what once was.

“I saw him this week,” I said, sitting back down.

She tilted her head, curious. “How did it go?”

I searched for the right words but found only confusion. “It was… like nothing had happened,” I said finally.

I told her how he hugged me, asked how I’d been, introduced me to his girlfriend—a sweet, warm girl I liked instantly. We had drinks, laughed, swapped stories like old times. But the whole time, all I could think about was the silence he’d left behind, the year I spent wondering what I’d done wrong. I smiled when he joked about how our next meeting wouldn’t take so long. But the joke felt like an aftertaste, bitter and impossible to swallow. I knew we wouldn’t meet again—not like that, not the way it used to be.

Faye lit another joint, her movements slow and deliberate. “It’s not about you,” she said after a moment. “They don’t need us anymore. That’s all it is.”

I stared at her, startled. “But we weren’t like that,” I protested. “There was no transaction, no ulterior motives. We were just… friends.”

“Even that can be a transaction,” she said quietly, blowing out a plume of smoke. “Think about it. He has a girlfriend now. A job. Work friends. A best friend. What can you give him that he doesn’t already have?”

I laughed bitterly. “So friendship is just… that?”

She shrugged, exhaling. “When you say he acted like nothing happened… maybe, for him, nothing did.”

I didn’t reply. Her words hung in the air like the incense smoke, twisting and shifting but refusing to dissipate. She was right, wasn’t she? While I drowned in questions and self-doubt, he had simply moved on.

Faye smoked in silence, her gaze fixed on something I couldn’t see. I lay back, staring at the ceiling, then at the incense stick, now burning erratically, as if it too had been shaken by the night.