Talk Shit

by Toni Kochensparger

I have this thing where I believe in fate because mistakes are guaranteed. By definition, they’re totally unavoidable. By definition, they’re impossible to predict, but they will happen. And so, there’s this little unreadable map of all your mistakes laid out on the table in front of you, just out of sight, demanding various responses and reactions from you as you age—steering you, truly. Leading you on a path until the end.

That’s a long way of saying two of my best friends fucked each other and now none of us hang out anymore.

There’s a little-known myth about the dawn of existence where the two halves of the split atom at its center were sent in opposite directions to observe the circular universe. They wouldn’t reunite until they had both arrived at the site of their separation again, when they will be charged with witnessing the end of all things, a quiet moment where they will sit, side by side, in IKEA chairs and fill each other in on what they missed as they followed the curve on opposite sides.

It is said that during their initial, tearful goodbye, they both promised to tell each other what happened during all the episodes the other one missed. A tender moment in the center of an explosion.

Anyway, so the guy—the one friend who fucked the other friend (it was an affair)—got in touch with me after two years and we got coffee in the Village.

I was nervous all day. And in the days leading up to this. I filled myself to the brim with beta blockers and got on a train and then I was there, sitting across the table from him, and his hair looked exactly the same.

We’ve known each other since I was nineteen. I’m thirty-three, now. We’ve known each other for almost half of my lifetime, and we had been best friends before the whole thing went down in flames.

(When your friends fuck each other, it’s technically arson.)

Anyway, when I asked him about the woman he’s dating, now, he said, “let’s not do that.” We weren’t there for pleasantries. We were way beyond triage or restructuring. And still, we weren’t strangers.

At best, this was a kind of chemotherapy. Metaphors.

So, we ordered coffee, and we talked through the whole thing.

This took two hours. We sorted through the ashes. We tried to find the parts that were worth saving. We discarded the objects that weren’t. We found the point of ignition.

He looked me in the eyes and said, “So, tell me, I guess—at this point, what do you need from me?”

You know? We boxed it out. Chemotherapy.

And then, we talked about the good things.

Before the fire, we had been inseparable, as a group. There were five of us in the neighborhood, so that became our pod during the pandemic. These were the people I was with when Trump won. These were the people I was with when Trump lost. These were the people I was with during the back nine of my twenties, the people who really shaped it, and I remember having a distinct sense, during all of it, that this was only a moment in time.

They would talk about buying property together in upstate New York when we were older and I’d think: no, someday this will end.

Something will happen. And this will all become what it once was like.

So, at the café, after we went over all of this, he asked me whether it was just fiction.

And I knew what he meant.

We all went our separate ways, when it burned down. And, over time, it all kind of started to seem like a memory you experience alone—the kind that feels like an hallucination.

Anyway.

The halfway point—the point in the universe’s circular curve where the two halves of the atom pass each other as they make their way back to the beginning, to watch the end—took place on a lake.

The girls were all hanging out, getting drunk on the dock, and so he and I decided to take one of the canoes and explore the side of the lake that no one had rowed to yet, the whole weekend. There was a little peninsula with trees that obstructed our view of that part of the water. The whole time we rowed, we sang Just Around the Riverbend.

And when we passed it, when we rounded the apex of jutting dirt, that’s when we saw them.

There, perched in the tree and the land on the ground and on the cliff, there were three turkey vultures—the ones we’d seen circling above us, in the sky, the whole weekend—standing perfectly still, staring at us.

We stopped singing. And our oars stopped.

It was the first time in our whole friendship that we stopped talking.

And we all just watched each other exist.

It went on for minutes. It went on with a kind of silent understanding shared by everyone in that part of the lake whose heart beat. That this was a moment that was frozen in time and charged with kinetic energy, like the top of a rollercoaster. Like: I knew that the birds felt it, too. The birds were so tall.

And then, one by one, they flew away. First the one on the ground, then the one on the cliff, then the one in the tree.

And then there was a moment of nothing.

And then we turned around and we rowed back to the girls on the dock. You know? We rowed without speaking.

Back at the café, I told him that was my favorite part. The halfway point when the atoms passed each other on the road. And he told me that he loved it, too.

I told him that, even if the rest of it was fiction, that part—the most unbelievable part—had to be real.

And then we got up and, without talking all that much, we walked to the train.

We had reached the part where the universe dies. We went our separate ways.

And that was it.

***

A little coda here is that, a few weeks later, I wrote a letter to the other friend—the one he’d had the affair with—because I wanted a bunch of my stuff back.

I didn’t want it to come across as super selfish, so I pretended I was just reaching out. Like, right? So, I divided the letter into feelings and logistics.

The entire time that’s passed since the arson, it’s her actions that have confounded all of us the most, especially considering she was the one who abandoned us when she fucked up. Where he owned up to stuff, she ran away.

Presumably, to hide in a world where mistakes don’t exist. 

Anyway, I wrote down some feelings and some logistics and I put it in an envelope and I mailed it, stuck in between two pages of an Edward Albee play, where I highlighted the line, “sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.”

And I mailed it.

Just one atom, waving to another.

The curve of the universe as it slowly closes in.

Toni Kochensparger was born in Kettering, Ohio and now lives in Ridgewood, New York, where they write jokes on trash their neighbors leave out on the street. Their short stories can be found in Kelp Journal, Bulb Culture Collective, and The Writing Disorder. They run Kissing While the Radio, a monthly reading series at KGB Bar in the East Village. They were recently awarded a residency by the Edward F. Albee Foundation. They once fully wet themselves in sixth grade. To learn more, please check out https://linktr.ee/gothphiliproth.