The Strand She Left

The single gray hair caught in the bathroom light seemed obscene somehow—a flagrant announcement of time's petty vandalism. Sarah plucked it, wincing, and wondered when exactly she'd started caring about such things. Perhaps it was the same morning she'd opened Facebook to find that Jason—the one person she'd promised to never lose touch with—had gotten married. To someone she'd never heard of.

She'd been running from that conversation for three years now. The last time they'd spoken, standing in the rain outside his apartment building, he'd said something about how some friendships aren't meant to last forever. She'd pretended she didn't hear him, hailed a cab, and spent subsequent months drowning herself in work promotions and city-moving and carefully curated absence.

Now here she was, staring at this traitorous hair, suddenly desperate to know if he'd let himself go soft or if he was still running those predawn marathons they'd joked about—ironically, neither of them actually runners, just two people perpetually running toward or away from something.

She found herself at his door before she'd fully decided to go. His wife answered—lovely in that unthreatening way that makes you feel monstrous for resenting her existence.

"Sarah!" Jason appeared behind her, looking older. Better, somehow. The lines around his eyes were more pronounced. A single strand of hair fell across his forehead, and she had the inexplicable urge to reach out and tuck it back—the same instinct she'd suppressed a thousand times before.

"I found something of yours," she lied, suddenly unable to articulate why she'd come.

He smiled, tired and knowing. "You didn't."

"No."

"Come in anyway."

They sat on his balcony, drinking wine that was too expensive, and didn't say anything about the unspoken things that lived between them like ghosts. His wife's laughter drifted from inside, warm and genuine.

"You look good," he said. "Tired around the edges, but good."

"You too."

"I'm happy, Sarah."

"I know. That's the worst part."

He laughed, startled, and she realized she'd meant it as a joke but it came out as something else entirely.

"Stay for dinner," he said. "As friends. The word exists, you know. We can learn it again."

She watched his hair catch the sunset, gold and brown and maybe one gray hair of his own, and thought about how people become memories, then strangers, then something else entirely. How the things we run from eventually catch us, and maybe that's not always a tragedy.

"Okay," she said. "As friends."

She stayed. They ate. They lied about being okay. They started, however haltingly, to tell the truth.