June

By Nico Carmen

Where to begin with June? Japanese-American, girl, like me; sad and lonely, to the point of self-destructive desperation, like me, or at least like I was at the time I knew her. We were both eighteen. Wait, no, I’d just turned nineteen and her birthday was in her namesake’s month, to come of age in her eyes finally. She longed—for so long!—to be in a relationship. I for my part kept to books and games, finding solace in a studious solitude, but looking back now I was probably just telling myself that. I was to see June in, well, June, for her birthday. I’d never been to Hawaii before. I’d never flown in an airplane by myself before. She, June, was the first friend I made that wasn’t from childhood or school convenience, the convenience was instead much more concrete: I ran into her, literally, turning the corner from a 7-Eleven, hurrying home, groceries flying and then spilled and scattered everywhere. Things, like a friendship, grew from there. We were kids then, even more so then, on that tiny island called Okinawa. Late summer nights, cicadas, fireworks, crushes and other boys. Of course afterward our lives diverged, as lives do, taking random and contingent paths, toward some things and away from others. I moved to California and then Texas and June moved to another island. We kept in touch. She was (and I suppose still is—no, of course she is) my best friend, a best friend of my choosing, which made her all the more special, and so loved. (If she only knew this, I mean, to know something so intimately you feel it, something like the disaster I’m about to share with you, Reader, might have been perhaps avoided. Or so I like to think.)

This was some months before I was to see her, June. She called me round midnight, if not later, making it about 8PM or 9PM her time. I had just gotten in bed, I had work the next morning (a summer job at a bookstore, my then bones achy and tired all the time, youthful though drained as I was, though mental health and swirling teenage anxieties more than likely had something to do with it). Absolutely I answered. Her face on the screen: pretty and lovely and a little teary and nervous. She told me she was about to see a boy, a boy she’d been talking to here and there, phone-wise. Let me tell you this about June: she was, as I said to another friend whom I first told this story to, as a sort of rehearsal for whatever this is, a “hopeless romantic.” She longed to be with someone: you know this now. She was prone to big gestures, in some vague hope that, if the boy saw the effort she was willing to go for him, she, June, would be seen as someone worth going the effort for herself. How many boys had she tried to affect in this way! How many tears shed! For all her prettiness and loveliness and kindness and grace she chased only those immature and pimply brats who would have been terrible containers of all that prettiness and loveliness and kindness and grace anyway; they would have failed her, and so she failed herself. If only she saw she was worth more than what she wanted! But I’m getting ahead of myself here, you will see in due time. So now, pattern established, here she was, calling again, gesturing bigly again, telling me she was off to see a boy she’d been talking to phone-wise, text-wise, at his workplace: he worked at a hotel in Honolulu, overlooking Waikiki Beach, and she wanted to surprise him with flowers and a cake. A boy she communicated with only on the phone. Who or how they met otherwise was unknown to me; it’d been some weeks since I’d spoken with June (I’m a low-maintenance friend, whereas I’m sure you can tell by now June is absolutely high-maintenance, though I never minded that high-maintenance work) so when she called all of this was sprung on me, as sudden as tragic news. I felt a click in my head, a switch that needed to be flipped: a friend was in crisis and I needed to be of help. I did what I could. There was no way to get her to turn back, go home, be safe from her own head and others, that I knew; all I could do was cushion things, the eventual, patterned blow, the Big Oof. What else could I do from where I was? In bed, thousands of miles away, weary from my own stresses, forcing myself, but not really, because I wanted to be there for her, if not physically yet, then at least here, right now, phone-wise. I stayed on the phone with her the whole time: the bus ride into the city, the bakery, I gave her directions, too confused to follow her own navigation system on her phone, too socially anxious to ask others—even with my own anxiety I demanded she just faced her screen to any kind-looking enough civilian so I could ask them which way this shy yet somehow insanely bold girl was to go, from the bakery to the flowershop and then the hotel. She did not do this. We caught up in between. I learned of other gestures, other boys, her schoolwork and her college aspirations (she wanted to be a vet), one breakdown I never learned of (here is one symptom: when she goes totally social media silent. No stories or likes or posts. Nothing. A total black void-quiet, black as a locked screen.); I shared what I could share: still single, still fine with that, I wanted to be a criminologist then, true crime-obsessed as I was. I told her it was good to see her, which was almost a lie, because it didn’t quite touch how Good it is to see June at all, a true blessing, something to be held delicately in your hands, the magnitude of my feelings hardly communicated in full. You would think the same thing if you saw her. She smiled, and I prayed she believed me.

And then we made it; June reached the hotel. Even from my small rectangular window-screen I could tell the place was a nice one: fancy-looking and brightly lit. I felt for June, and I was sure she felt it for herself, that we were undertaking an impossible task; we weren’t even guests here, everything the hotel held, gold paint and restaurants whose quality were measured in stars, economic promise so well kept we were at the point of prosperity, all the opulence, loomed far and bright, unattainable. On the way June told me more about this boy. He was eighteen. He wanted to be a pilot, or already knew how to fly, and wanted to fly for the Air Force, or something like that—I’ve forgotten now (I don’t want to remember). My face twisted up when she sent me a picture of his: hardly a face worthy of June’s, even just at that aesthetic level. (I think, recalling this story to that same other friend after this event had just happened, I made up the phrase “goblin-ass ugly fucks” when describing the boys June went after. I got a laugh.) I wanted to tell her this but didn’t. She was so on edge already. The boy—whose name I’m pretty sure I remember, starts with a “B,” but was so awful I don’t even want to memorialize his name here—worked at the hotel’s spa and pool, fetching and folding towels; she couldn’t get to him as a non-guest. June went to the front desk to ask for him. I swallowed, the ambient cringe salty-sweet. She dropped off the flowers and cake and then just ran the fuck away. With hardly a message to contextualize her gift. I yelled as a spectator would yell at their prized champion in the ring, taking an unnecessary blow. Why did she run? The whole point was to Be There. She hurried outside, retreating to the nearby café, not even the coffeeshop the hotel had inside. She ignored my chastising; she texted him about what she did and that she would be waiting for him after work. She would wait those hours! “can we meet?” was her text, and I could so easily see how sentimental and melancholic that lone message must have sounded and looked, sitting in its own text bubble on that boy’s (that goblin-fuck’s) screen. She—we—sat and waited, dusk turning to dark, and the dark turning into more dangerous hours, dangerous for anyone, but especially for a girl of seventeen with no driver’s license (June had told her folks she was staying at a friend’s place that weekend, that was her excuse). Too late now to catch the last bus. And then she got her text. “Thanks!” was all it was. And then he texted that he had to go meet a buddy of his, after work. How her heart did drop! Meteoric in its impact, you could have felt its shockwaves even if you weren’t, like me, watching distantly and yet still totally present through a screen. Measured in magnitudes. Such a brushing off, a blatant lack of any kind of sense of how Big this Gesture was, constituted in my eyes then, and still to this day, nothing less than a betrayal.

June and I talked. I can’t recall what we talked about. June got up and left. She walked along the beach, ignoring my urging to get out the water and the sand and into something that could take her home. A beach at night—I didn’t want her running into someone scary. She was crying, I almost hated her for it. To cry over who, exactly? Him? This fucker? Eventually she listened; I paid for her rideshare and got her home; expensive for anyone, rich or not, but that’s the kind of friend I am, Reader, the kind of friend I wanted to be for June. June always said she wished she could find a boy who treated her like how I treated her; for her sake and worth, how I wished the same! She made it home, telling her folks that her friend got sick and she, June, just decided to head back instead; her folks accepted it, or at least just let the whole thing go. Certainly they didn’t know what exactly June got up to, but they knew her moods, her tendencies, as well as I did. We all worked to look after her. She needed it, she deserved it. Love: to know it in your heart, to feel it in your head. I gave her the business the whole drive back; I told her how stupid this was, the danger of the stunt; a piece of my mind, a sisterly rant. Then, when I knew she was home and in bed and her face washed and moisturized, I told her “Love you.” She smiled and said the same. She hung up. I slept. I never saw her again.

Some months afterward: the symptom reared its head: skeletal silence on all platforms. I clocked it basically immediately. I DM’d her through all those platforms and her siblings too. I waited for updates, I got none. I kept trying. I called and texted directly and got nothing. I kept trying. I wrote a letter and lost weight. I kept trying. Then, something. I sleuthed around and got her mother’s info (how’d I never have it before?). She, June’s mother, finally replied. It was all in text. June moved to another island (started with a “K,” I loathe how memory fades like that); she suffered another breakdown. A relapse of those bad tendencies. She needed a rest cure. But she was excited to see me, her mother said, all over text, that I would be a big help. I said that was all I wanted to be. Big Gesture, Big Help, and no Big Oof. But then the month of June arrived, I heard nothing, got nothing from her mother this time, and then I went to Hawaii, and nothing, nothing, nothing, ない。The trip was a waste. I was supposed to stay with June and her parents, but neither were physically and emotionally available, and even a cheap hotel on a teenager’s bookstore wages was not at all cheap. I went to their house: it stood silent, hot and humid, some monument to some cataclysmic event. I visited that hotel, just to look at June’s supposed boy. I inquired about him at the front, I was told he wasn’t in, and then, feeling a deep dark pit where all my life’s Time seemed to sink, I booked a flight early and left Hawaii. I was no detective. No clues would find me. I went home with a super-awareness of a gap between me and June and the world.

O my friend, O my love! Do I have your permission to betray you? Must I tell the world your story, so as to keep you alive in my head and my heart? You will forever remain to me an enigma. To be so Down on yourself that Up was never to be found in your emotional dictionary. To seek from what can never give you what it doesn’t even have, to fill in that lack. Because that lack stays with us forever: it is what constitutes our very selves. It’s why we act and seek. It’s what makes us drive. But you didn’t know that then, and I claim no wisdom now. Maybe that is why I’m writing this, perhaps for you to find. Your best friend must by necessity be your most necessary traitor, your Judas, betrayal as my Big Gesture of my love. (Or is this simple revenge for leaving me so coldly?) If you do find this, I do hope you forgive me, as I wish I could forgive you your self-hatred and misery and psychic and physical pain. But don’t let those be your fault. Words are failing me at this crucial juncture, when all I have are these words here. What can I tell you? And if not to you, then about you, to everyone? To tell them this I tell them everything. I state this again: I hope you are somewhere to forgive me. Because Hope is a persistent Easter, returning year after year for us to celebrate its resurrection. Let this be a monument to the miracle of my meeting you. Let these silly words bring body to being, sunny like the month of your name and birth. Okay, pause. God fucking dammit. (At least the attempt is earnest.) Luceat lux vestra.