Somewhere in northern Colorado there’s a dingy gray duplex sitting on a cul-de-sac near the railroad tracks. Behind it is a dry, yellow field where grasshoppers and mice keep busy.
One half of the duplex is occupied by my mother and a version of me at 16 years old. The other half is occupied by another single mother and her 16-year-old son, Shawn.
My friend Shawn.
We call one another “Neighbor Boy” and “Neighbor Girl.”
We call the duplex “Our House.”
There are shenanigans. There’s trouble and fun. But life is always fucking with things, flipping them upside down, changing them into something new and almost unrecognizable.
People drift apart. They move away, have adventures and things happen to them.
By the time we turn 19, Shawn is a quadriplegic due to a car accident and I’m in Florida, acquainting myself with the redneck bar scene.
I soon flee back to Colorado, and from time to time, I run into my old friend at a party, a mutual friend’s house, and once, strangely enough, in South Dakota.
We still call one another “Neighbor Boy” and “Neighbor Girl.” But the conversations are more subdued. No more roasting and shit giving. Just low-key, polite chit-chat.
I feel sad. I feel as though my Neighbor Boy had been replaced with this melancholy, broken stranger.
Then I’m suddenly a version of myself at 46 and none of that seems real anymore. And I see now that my Neighbor Boy wasn’t replaced, he was just changed, and I was being selfish about it.
Several months ago, something began to happen within the cells of my Neighbor Boy’s paralyzed body. Once it began, there was no stopping it, which is often the way with these things.
The dingy gray duplex is gone, replaced with fresh white paint and bright blue trim. The dry yellow field is now a little road lined with houses.
And gone, too, is my Neighbor Boy. Forever changed. I’m more accepting of these things now because I can resurrect pieces of him in stories, that place where I go to conjure ghosts of my old friends, visit with them for a while, heal them, and give them happy endings.
I mean… that’s as good a reason to write as any.
