The gentlest soul I ever met was a boy from school named Juan.
It was my first year of college, and everything was new. This was the year I learned what it felt like to take care of myself. This was the year I encountered a different kind of responsibility. This was also the year that Juan became my friend.
He had traced a steady circle around the seats of the auditorium that day and stopped in my vicinity of solitude when he said to me:
“Hello, my name is Juan. May I sit next to you?”
And, confused about why someone would want to do that, I looked up at him curiously and said,
“Hello, Juan. Go ahead.” And just like that, I had made a friend.
One of the things I remember best about Juan is something he said to me. We were on a walk one autumn day, looking at all the different colors in the leaves, when his face lit up and he pointed out a deep and luscious purple.
“I didn’t know a leaf could get like that,” I marvelled, and we walked over to see it up close.
“It’s more rare than the other colors,” Juan told me. “Purple takes the most energy for a leaf to make, so it doesn’t last for very long. Usually it takes all the energy the leaf has left.”
“Why would it turn purple, then?”
“I don’t know.” He cradled the leaf in his hand. “If it spends all of its energy on the last color it will be before it dies, maybe it wants to make something beautiful.”
Juan was thoughtful and quiet, and solemnly humorous. With tremendous gravity, he would choose between the two fortune cookies I had taken from the dining hall. We would lean against the trunk of a white pine and unwrap our futures, waiting to pour over the blue ink until after we had eaten the flavorless sweets. And were they true?
“‘You will become a talented writer one day,’” he read aloud one pale afternoon, his voice drifting along the supernatural determination. Slowly he lifted his gaze and nodded once as he said, “Then it must be so.” Crinkles leaned softly around the corners of his eyes as he smiled. “Hey, what does yours say?”
“Never fear shadows. They simply mean a light is shining nearby.” I liked this one. It was way better than the one about keeping secrets or the others with the phony expressions. I slipped it into the coin pouch inside the pocket of my chinos when we walked on. The snow at our feet was soggy, and the air smelled like rain. Juan was the only other student I knew who wore boots. I admired the tracks our footsteps made in the snow, and wondered if it was the last snowfall of the season. The thick blanket it had once been was seeping into the ground.
When it came time to go at the end of the spring semester, I packed up all I had brought with me there. Juan had offered to help me, but I was the only one who could sort everything I needed for myself. Everything buckled into boxes. There weren’t many of them, because it would have embarrassed me if someone saw me attached to too many things.
Juan drove the boxes and me to the storage unit I’d arranged for. After we shut them away, he took me to the train station and parked his car to wait with me on the platform. My only remaining belonging was my backpack, rigid at the sides that held everything I’d need. Poking out of the zipper lip was the corner of a deck of cards, which I still believed I’d use someday. I slung the strap over my shoulder and the weight of it all met my back and bulged there, like a turtle shell. We walked together up the stairs.
Juan and I stood on the platform and breathed the same air, side by side. “When I was in elementary school,” he told me, “we were asked to write a story. So I wrote a story about a boy named Akimoto. It’s a Japanese name that means ‘fall leaves’. When I came home and told my mom that if I had a son, I would name him Akimoto, she laughed at me.”
“Why?”
He chuckled softly. “Because in Spanish, aquí moto means, ‘Here, motorcycle!’”
When I laughed, his chuckle grew a little more bold, as though he could see the moment for the first time again. We stood together, smiling without thinking to smile, and the train sounded like a wind from where it appeared at the edge of our vision. We turned to watch it slow as it neared us, and approached it as it stopped. The door opened, and I stepped forward.
Fourteen years before, when my mother held the door open, I stepped past her and into the classroom. The painting easel caught my eye, which drifted to the familiar sand table and the classmates I recognized there. I looked down to take off my mittens. And when I looked up again, moments later, my mother had gone without saying goodbye. She had always said goodbye. She had always knelt in front of me, and I had always wrapped my arms around her before she’d stand up and walk back down the hall. And I would look through the window and wave.
But my mother was gone. This was not the way things were supposed to go. I didn’t paint, or play with sand, or talk to any of the kids. I sat quietly and could not move forward.
“Wait!” he called. At the threshold, past the platform and the yellow line, I turned around. Juan didn’t say anything; he just brought his arms gently around my shoulders and rested his hands for a second on the rocklike dome of my turtle-shell backpack. In my confusion, I didn’t say anything, either. I closed my arms around his back and felt the light touch of his head resting sideways on my shoulder. When the moment passed, my feet stepped back to regain my balance and my face awkwardly smiled. Juan glanced down at his own feet before turning his head up again and saying quietly,
“Goodbye, Elliott.”
And I didn’t know it then, but it seems like Juan might have known: this was the last time I saw him.
I watched the track next to mine grow prickly with tufts of grass and crinkles of overgrown Lady’s Thumb, until it stopped being a track and ran itself into the ground. As the train swept past the lone trees and the evolving landscape, I watched the houses flicker past like frames of a film reel, before they pushed further into the growing forest.
I thought of Juan, of the strange expression on his face before the train doors closed. It had felt like a movie, like he was looking at me as though for the last time. I didn’t want to think about whether that was true.
I thought of my mother, how she’d called me six days before and asked if I was coming back home for my birthday. I didn’t tell her that I wasn’t coming home for a while. I didn’t want to explain that I couldn’t move forward without leaving her behind. So I pushed the pain into the future. I knew that I’d have to lay it out in a letter, but the words I had now were difficult words. It’s hard to hold someone’s love in one hand while waving goodbye with the other.
But soon I had blurred out these thoughts. And the only thing in my head, as the train rushed forward and the land behind it faded fast, was, “I am leaving, I am leaving…”
And I looked out the window.