A Short Story by Brodie Fazio
The drive home from work every night had become therapeutic. An open highway, with nobody else on the road besides his music and his thoughts. He looked forward to this drive home every night. Somewhere he could escape and be completely alone for a while. The 2003 Toyota Camry, which was gifted to him by his mother, gave him the freedom to finally be alone. He finds comfort in loneliness. That paired with the sound of Frank Ocean’s album “Blonde,” an album which he listened to religiously while driving home, made him feel like the only man left in the world.
This lonely yet comfortable man goes by the name Kinsley, and this will be the fourth time in four nights that he is returning home late from work. Before reaching his home he decides to make a quick stop, just like the past three nights. He rolled past his driveway and parked his car at the apartment complex 4 spots down. Once parked, he turns off the radio and tries to make a phone call. Unsurprisingly to him, the call doesn’t go through. Nothing new. He hops out of the car and walks up to the back door, giving it a light knock once arriving. He checks his pockets to make sure he has his cigarettes while he waits. When the door finally opens, he’s at a loss for words. She looks even better than the night before. Megan was an old friend. To be more specific, an old girlfriend. They had maintained their relationship as friends after breaking up over two years ago, but some feelings had maintained as well. She was expecting Kinsley, as this was the fourth night in a row he had made his way over to her apartment. They sat and talked for a while about what used to be and what could have been. These types of conversations have been plaguing both of their minds for a while now. Attending weddings and baby showers was starting to get old, and the jealousy and angst about their futures was beginning to become a serious reality. The commonality that kept Kinsley and Megan connected in the first place was growing up in their hometown, but as everybody began to leave and move on, neither of them did the same. Megan returned home after college, finding a good job in the area and enjoying her young life as it came to her. Kinsley never left. He decided to leave school during his freshman year and return home. He started working for a small construction company to keep himself busy and earn some money, but he didn’t seem to have a plan in sight. It’s been 12 years since Kinsley’s freshman year of college, and that same construction company has been keeping him busy ever since. The other commonality that kept Megan and Kinsley connected was the fact that they both enjoyed smoking weed, something they would do while they were together. The stresses of growing into their futures could be temporarily forgotten about within a few minutes.
They walked out and sat on the porch together with the pungent smell of skunk violating the air. This is when the conversations would really get interesting. Megan was emotional, and she would remind Kinsley of her feelings during their time together. The true love that she felt and communicated to Kinsley wasn’t reciprocated until it was too late. He let her go. He thought that he could move on without a problem. Now it’s two and a half years later and he’s smoking weed with her on her porch, listening to her talk about the ways she got over him. That was what killed him. They had become such good friends again that she was comfortable enough to talk to him as a friend, not a significant other. He knew this before tonight. As they finished smoking their weed and the evening was coming to a close, Kinsley offered her a cigarette. She took the fourth cigarette out of the packaging and he lit it for her, continuing to talk until the cigarette had been finished and Megan had become tired. They walked to the front door together and held each other in a warm embrace for a moment, thanking each other for the conversation and time that they had given. He walked back to his car and threw the pack of cigarettes in the middle console as he opened the door. The second he arrived back at his apartment, he fell asleep, physically and mentally exhausted from the day.
By the time his alarm woke him up for work in the morning, he had shifted his mental focus from his emotional instability to his work assignments, and that was it. His job kept him extremely busy throughout the day, so much so that he barely even had time to think about Megan. Their company had suffered severely in production over the past few years, prompting the administration to cut down on simple work virtues like a 45 minute lunch break and smoke breaks. The 45 minutes had been depleted to 25 and smoking was effectively banned at the workplace, causing the majority of employees to fully quit smoking cigarettes, including Kinsley. It was physically taxing and mentally grueling, a long day for anybody involved. Kinsley waited all day to punch out and begin making the journey home, cigarettes in the middle console and Frank Ocean playing softly through the speakers.
