The Big Boom [re-writing]

10:00 am [updated]

When the truck driver was beginning to narrow off a road aside from my university, he dropped us off at the turning point (after we'd cleaned his back trunk in a childish rush). He would've missed his appointment through the traffic on this side of town, and all we had to do was walk the rest of the mile anyway, so he bid us his adieu there.

This walk was nothing compared to the other miles we walked through in the town and city though. It was so similar in a sense of the first time, hours and hours ago, when I'd followed Christopher to the airport and, by doing that, plunged myself into a remarkably extraordinary day.

You've told me once, one of your always admirable discoveries and quotes, of that one theorem about the thousand typing monkeys and how in the infinite amount of time we can give them to hit the keys randomly, their jargon of text would soon surely type out a distinguishable sequence. And I bet now that never would I have thought that those once indistinguishable sequences could formulate into a day as this one was, or even the feeling of it.

It felt similar as before because I felt this chain around myself pulling me forward again, reassuring this was the right way. Different now, because it hurt.

I could see the many roofs of my campus already, shrouded by trees, and I could almost hear me and Christopher's laughter from last night when we pulled those series of pranks on Mr. Gunther, who probably didn't deserve it as badly as we'd given him. I could see us both hauling old textbooks across the Sahara that is our campus in order to return them to the administration office at the end of the semester.

Okay, you'd said, so uh, I'm gonna log that workout into my fitness plan for the week, yeah?

There were faint outlines of when we walked ourselves back from the city late at night with rainbow-fluorescent pocket knives in our bags, bought because it simply looked cute. The skies here sometimes looked like a brick was crushed and then absorbed by the clouds. This place was a lot of things.

I continued dragging my legs on the sidewalk and tried enjoying the last few minutes here with Chubby and Christopher.

There were still so many things I didn't know about him though. So, so many things, trivial things, like what his favorite place was or his favorite books, favorite movies, favorite time of the day; what were his most embarrassing moments, his darkest ones, the ones that made him him; what hooked his mindful head and made time seem less like time to him, and what sunk his feet into the soil and made a single day everlasting? There were still many things about him that I'd merely touched the surface of, but never really dived head first into; like the story of a Christopher before, the harrowing anecdotes about his mother and his family's network of mistakes. There was more to learn on grief's grim encounters with Christopher along the high road and how little things like the will to move on anyway had become his best friend.

But none of those memories were ones I would ever have the pleasure to touch.

We came upon a stop at the entrance of my university, a couple summer students meandering around us already.

This goodbye, I had the pleasure to touch. I stood in front of him, my head down so I could see only Chubby by our legs, staring up at me.

"You say what you're thinking of first," said Christopher, "and then I'll go."

I frowned deeply at the ground. "I don't want to say goodbye to you."

He said, "I can't believe it's been twenty-four hours, and I didn't grow sick of you once."

I cracked a smile at that. Chubby barked at us happily as if he didn't grasp what was going on, his tail wagging back and forth. The frown returned to me as I refused to look directly at Christopher again. "I don't want to say goodbye to Chubby. I don't want to leave anything or miss anything again, and most definitely not with you."