Flight

Zach’s gone for Canada.

We’d met a few days ago, with him asking if I’d “care to join” him in a final gym session and of course, I had agreed fervently.

The gym was full of people, lanky, fat, midges and beefcakes, all sizes of them burning off the Christmas dinners and holiday waists they had accumulated.

My mind was buzzing through gym and the short walk to the food court, trying to come up with all the conversation I could muster while looking like I just came out of a shower.

Through the whole journey, I swallowed my uneasiness in short laughs and random questions to make use of the time we had left.

—

We sat silently, listening to the whirring and clicks of the restaurant’s cookers and pumps while I twirled my straw round and round the circumference of my cup.

Usually, I’d run out of things to say and panic internally, while he’d look at me like I was an interesting leaf in the forest and sometimes laugh, thoughtfully and hesitantly, at moments which made no sense.

This time, he seemed to talk more, and it felt like he ran out of words as well.

We were all too aware that this was the last of each other we would see for a long time; the cymbals were petering out and the atmosphere was static, the words we spoke were static, everything was static.

My phone quaked on the table like a punch in the gut and I hesitated before answering the call.

“Yeah. What, aren’t we eating outside? Okay, ten minutes… The stop before Kovan. BEFORE. The one slightly after Serangoon JC?”

I caught Zach looking at his feet.

“Al-alright. See you. ”

—

I can’t remember what it was that I was sad about.

The fella who brought me, against my fears and anxiety, to meet my block, to gym consistently and believed in me more than I did myself?

Or when he said “Take care too” with so much more emotion than I’d ever heard from him?