some kind of good luck charm

an autofiction piece on old friends and the ache of nostalgia

artwork by Mags Munroe

If you resist change enough, you end up being left behind. There’s pride in being the one who stays, but not the kind that lasts forever. Or even for a very long time. It begins to rust and swell and turn into that ugly, exhausted shade of copper, the one that says you should’ve gone back inside a long time ago. The rain will just keep coming, whether anyone likes it or not.

I remember how it all used to be, maybe a little too clearly. Back when everyone still liked each other, rearranged schedules to find time because we cared that much. We all did. I find myself looking back on those days far too often lately, always with fondness, but also with a sort of relentless ache—it was the happiest I’d ever been, but I know we can never go back; not unless some sort of divine intervention takes place. We all started in similar places, sprouted from the same seed, but we’re growing in different directions now. It’s just the course of nature taking place.

Anna texted me at 1:17 a.m. on a Thursday, the blue light of my phone glowing in the dim light of my chilly apartment. Are you up? She didn’t need to ask. She knew the answer. I’m always awake at the hours when the world feels its thinnest, and when reminiscence has the most opportunity to strike.

Always, I replied. I watched the ellipsis bubble appear and disappear three times before the next message arrived.

You’re still in that apartment in midtown right?

I read her text and sighed. Three years had passed since I’d lived there—three years of birthdays left uncelebrated together, three years of life updates discovered through social media instead of whispered over takeout dinners whilst wearing pajamas. I wondered if she could feel the weight of that time through the digital space between us, if she also collected these little markers of the drift like I did.

No, I’m in the city now, I typed, leaving out the story of how I got here on purpose, all the small decisions that ultimately turned into distance. With my sister while she finishes undergrad. It’s fine. Cheaper.

We used to share everything: clothes worn until they smelled like both of us, secrets passed back and forth until they lost their sharp edges, beds where we’d lie awake talking about the people we might become. Now she didn’t even know where I slept.

Oh. Well, I'm back in town for the weekend. Thought maybe we could get coffee.

I stared at those words for a long time, thinking about what it means to be “back” somewhere. As if places can remain static and just await your return. Like you can just leave and then come back to find everything exactly the way you left it. Perfect, untouched, and without the blemish of time passing. If only that was how it worked.

Sure, I said. When?

There were five of us once. We’d assembled in that strange, instinctive way teenagers find each other: through proximity, necessity, and the desperate need to be understood. Before Anna, there was Theo, and before Theo there was Andrew, and before Andrew, there was Mila. We were only just parts of human beings then, testing our edges against each other, learning where we ended and others began.

Andrew had a car which made him important to us in that stage of life where mobility equals freedom. It was silver with a dent in the passenger door that had its own mythology. Apparently, his father had hit a lamppost the day Andrew was born while rushing to the hospital—whether this was true or not didn’t matter; we believed it because we wanted to. It gave the story more texture, and all the more interesting to tell at parties. We’d drive out to see the bridge light up at night—five bodies squished together—windows down, even in winter, because Mila claimed she needed to feel the wind on her face in order to feel alive.

Theo would ask Andrew to turn up the radio, always only pretending to like whatever was playing. I’ve always remembered how we revealed ourselves to each other in fragments like that, spending years collecting little pieces of each other until we think we have the whole picture. Anna would always call dibs on the passenger seat with the authority of someone who knew her own needs—What? I get carsick in the back, she’d say—while Mila would be sprawled across the three of us behind, her legs upon my lap and her head on Theo’s shoulder. It was crowded, and it was chaotic, but we were all exactly where we were meant to be in those moments. I knew it because I could feel it. We were constantly a tangle of limbs and unspoken feelings, boundaries blurred by belonging and the intensity of friendships made before you know who you are. We were inseparable until we weren’t.

Mila was the first to leave, but I suppose the cracks had started forming before any of us moved away. Dublin called to her with promises of importance and becoming someone significant in a city big enough to hold her ambitions. I remember helping her pack, and folding her clothes into neat rectangles while she talked about her internship, her new Irish boyfriend with family connections, a new flat that she described as “charmingly dilapidated”. Her voice had already started to sound different.

“You’ll visit, right?” she asked, but it wasn’t really a question. It was a performance of continuity, a pretense that distance wouldn’t change anything essential between us.

“Of course,” I said, matching her pretense with my own.

She’d call sometimes in those first few months, which was nice of her, but I could hear that her tone becoming more refined with each conversation, as she adopted new phrases, new rhythms.

“You seriously need to come visit. It’s so beautiful here,” she’d say, which gradually translated in my mind to: Come see how much better my life is now. How much more significant. I guess after a while, the calls became texts, the texts became likes on social media, and eventually, even those disappeared.

Theo went next. An unexpected scholarship for a grad program in San Diego. “It’s only for a year,” he’d said, packing his books into cardboard boxes. But a year turned into two, and then he met someone, and then he wasn’t really Theo anymore, but a stranger who occasionally appeared on my feed and annually reached out to say happy birthday.

Andrew stayed the longest. We shared a place for a while after college. Theo had lived with us too, but after he’d left, it was just the two of us. Andrew worked at a tech startup and would come home at late hours, his eyes red from staring at screens. I was making coffee by day, and by night, I was trying to write something meaningful. When he told me about the job in New York, standing in our kitchen with a strange formality, I knew before he finished speaking that he wouldn’t be coming back.

“I thought you might want to come,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “They need writers too, I think.”

“I can’t write in New York,” I said, which was ridiculous because I wasn’t really writing in Sacramento either. What I meant was: I can’t be your satellite anymore. He nodded like he understood. Two weeks later, he was gone. He left behind a bookshelf that was too expensive to ship, along with a silence that felt permanent.

There had always been a particular current running beneath Andrew and I’s friendship. I think about this now as I trace the edges of the shelf he left behind, my fingers following the grain of the wood; procrastinating writing once again. I remember a Tuesday in October during our second year in the house, in those first few months without Theo, when the heating in our apartment had gone out. The air was bitter with the first real cold of the season, and Andrew had come home with take-out and a bottle of wine.

“Heat won’t be fixed until tomorrow,” he said, setting the paper bag on our kitchen counter. “Might as well make the best of it.”

We ate straight from the containers, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our living room, a blanket over each of our shoulders. As the level in the bottle lowered, so did the space between us. His knee pressed against mine and neither of us moved away. That was the pattern with us—moments of almost that we folded away and pretended hadn’t happened. Like the time he stayed up all night helping me edit a story I was working on, and the morning found us sitting side by side at the kitchen table, with an arm draped over mine as he pointed out a line he loved. Like the way he’d introduce me to his coworkers as his “roommate” but would always add something that made it sound like more. She knows me better than anyone, he’d say. Maybe we both knew that we couldn’t go back once we stepped over. But I think we were just cowards.

That night before he left for New York, we ordered pizza and watched old movies and pretended it was just another night. The apartment was half-empty already, all of his things packed into boxes and suitcases that stood like a fortress around our living room. I wanted to ask him to stay. I wanted to give him a reason to turn down the job and to choose this, whatever this was, but deep down I knew that wasn’t fair. We had both become too comfortable in our almostness, to the safety of possibility over reality.

“I’m going to miss this,” he said during a lull in the movie, gesturing vaguely at the space between us on the couch. Just enough room for someone else to sit, if anyone ever joined us, which they rarely did in those last months.

“The apartment?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he smiled that smile again, the one that never reached his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. “The apartment.”

In the morning, I helped him load his car. His last box was a small one filled with books I’d given him over the years, each one inscribed with messages that said everything except what I really meant. As he closed the trunk, he turned to me, and for a second I thought he might kiss me, but instead he pulled me into a hug that lasted too long to be casual but not long enough to be everything.

“You could still come with me,” he mumbled into my hair.

“I wish,” I replied, and we both pretended not to hear the pain in my voice. Five minutes later, he was in the car driving away. I stood in the street watching until he disappeared around the corner.

Now, sitting in my sister and I’s shared apartment, waiting for Anna’s reply about coffee, I wonder where he is at this exact moment: if he’s happy in New York, if he knows that I’ve kept that bookshelf, moved it from apartment to apartment like some kind of good luck charm. It hurt so much when he went away, because I wasn’t just losing one of my best friends, I was losing all the versions of us that could have been. Anna’s invitation felt like opening the door to a room I’d sealed off forever ago. Seeing her would mean talking about all of them: Mila, Theo, and inevitably, Andrew. I’d have to pretend he was just another friend who drifted away, and that the ache I felt at the mention of his name was the same general nostalgia I felt for everyone else. I’d have to pretend I wasn’t still half-waiting for him to come back.

When I let Anna know where we should meet, I suggested a café on the other side of town from where the old apartment was, as if physical distance from those memories might make it easier to discuss them without giving myself away. I wondered if she knew, if any of them had known—if we had been obvious to everyone but ourselves. How do you grieve something that never quite happened? How do you explain to a friend that the person you miss most isn’t the one who left, but the one who might have stayed if you’d only had the courage to ask?

Suddenly, meeting Anna for coffee felt like the most impossible thing in the world. She’d take one look at me and know.

I looked up and saw Anna through the window, fifteen minutes early herself. She’d cut her hair short since I last saw her, and was wearing the kind of expensive-looking coat that suggested Los Angeles had been good to her. For a second, I considered leaving through the back, but she spotted me and waved, her face brightening with familiarity.

“Row!” she squealed, tackling me with a hug before she sat down. Her usage of the nickname I’d had with our old group made me flush with a mix of embarrassment and homesickness for a place that no longer existed. “You look exactly the same,” she added, which wasn’t true but still nice of her to say.

“How’s LA?” I asked, and she launched into a story about her apartment and her job and the guy she’d been seeing for six months now.

“And you?” she eventually asked. “Still writing?”

I nodded, though that wasn’t entirely true either. I’d been starting and abandoning pieces for months. They all somehow morphed into thinly veiled accounts of Andrew and me, transparent enough that I couldn’t bear to finish them.

“Have you heard from him?” she asked after a pause, not needing to specify who she meant.

“Sometimes,” I said, rotating my mug in small circles on the table. “I mean, definitely not often.”

Anna studied me with a kindness that felt unbearable. “You know, the rest of us used to have this ongoing bet about which one of you would break first.”

“Break?”

“Like, admit whatever was happening between you two.”

I looked down at my coffee. “Nothing was happening.”

“Right,” she said. “Nothing at all for five years.”

The truth was both more complicated and painfully simple. All that had happened was that we’d created a language of meaningful looks, and built a relationship that had been defined entirely by what it wasn’t.

“He’s dating someone,” Anna said carefully, between sips. “I thought you should hear it from someone who cares about you both.”

I nodded, keeping my face neutral as something inside me collapsed. Not that it was a surprise, of course he would move on. Of course he would find someone brave enough to cross the line that we’d treated like a forcefield.

“Good for him,” I managed to say.

Anna reached across the table and put her hand over mine. “Can I ask you something? What were you so afraid of?”

The question hung between us. I could have given her the easy answers—that we didn’t want to risk the friendship, we were at different points in our lives, that neither of us was good at relationships. But the truth was simpler and more terrible.

“I think we were afraid it would be everything we wanted,” I admitted. “And then what excuse would we have had for being so unhappy?”

Anna squeezed my hand. “He’s coming back next month. Just for a weekend. Mila’s wedding.”

The thought of seeing him again both excited and terrified me. I imagined us at the wedding, maintaining a careful distance, exchanging pleasantries that meant nothing while our muscle memory held years of careful movements.

“Do you think he’ll bring her?” I asked, unable to stop myself.

“I don’t know,” Anna said. “But would it matter?”

It would matter tremendously. But I just shrugged in response, a gesture so reminiscent of Andrew that I felt embarrassed.

She laughed, and for a split second she was the old Anna, the one who would climb onto rooftops just to see what our town looked like from up so high.

“He asked about you,” she said. “When I saw him at Christmas.”

I felt something uncomfortable shift in my chest. “What did he say?”

“Nothing crazy, just if you ever finished writing your novel.”

I hadn’t thought about that story in years. I’d started it the summer before college, and he’d caught me working on it late one night after a board game night with everyone. I don’t even remember where I left off.

“My novel?” I said. “No, I never did.”

“Well, I think you should. I liked it. And so did he, it looks like.”

We left the café an hour later, standing awkwardly under my umbrella. She was flying back to LA the next morning.

“It was really, really nice to see you, Rowan,” she said, and I knew she meant it. “If you find yourself in LA, you know how to reach me.”

“You too,” I said wistfully, with a half-smile. “Let me know if you’re ever up here again.”

She nodded. “I will.”

I watched her walk away, her new haircut darkening in the rain, and I felt the familiar ache return. It wasn’t nostalgia exactly, but more so the knowledge that we were all still connected somehow.

That night, I dug around for my old USB drive, plugged it into my laptop, and found the old document. It hadn’t been opened in years. At that point, the words felt like they’d been written by someone else. Which I guess they had been, in a way.

I began to type.

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