A quiet stairway at summer camp. The scent of redwood trees. We sat on the steps and talked. We discovered each other the night before. That next day, we blew off all the camp activities and spent the day together.

We laughed at each other’s stories. Your voice was soft and low; your eyes younger yet wiser than mine.

We lived too far away from one another to really make a go of it, but we tried anyway. Far from the days of algorithms and the forever-instant-now, we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I wrote to you in my tortured grade school cursive; you wrote back in clean, smooth lines.

All the letters from you I kept snug in a paperboard box. I crave to read them now. But there came a day, when I knew no more letters would be coming, that I threw them all away.

Instead, I search for you in the places lost friends go to be found. I envision your family: your children on the first day of school; on vacation, playing at the edge of the lake. Finally, there would be one of you, and I would see your face gazing, wary and wise, back at me once more.

You are not there. I can find no word, no news of you. We have no friends in common that I can talk to, who could relay that I was asking about you. Would we find talking to each other now as easy as it was back then? Would we still be kindred spirits, or are we forever the people who stopped writing letters to each other?

On another shelf, there are albums from when we used to print out pictures to show our friends and family.  I pick one and turn the pages until I find my photos of that summer. There are none of the two of us together. They are all of you. Your younger self is embarrassed to be under my camera’s eye.

Among the pictures I took is a little wallet sized print, your senior portrait. I peel back the Mylar sheet and gently lift the picture from its page. There is a note on the back, in your hand, one last letter. I hear your sly humor, your soft voice, once more.

And I am back on that quiet stairway with you.

– KJ Cartmell