huck

DAN

It was no surprise to see him fall toward me, his features taut and dry, eyes all full of junk, left hand holding an open bottle of Moet & Chandon, which I later learned he had taken from the liquor cabinet of a friends convalescent father.
  He slowed, smiled, nodded, and having raised its mouth to his own, he tipped the bottle upwards in a crescent, pausing with its wide base aimed high like a horn as the passing traffic produced a sarcastic urban fanfare, tragicomical.
  Some history we had shared college grounds on the eve of the twenty-first century, where we worshipped the same benign goddess (yet to be proven mortal), and there was never any rivalry. The two of us laughed about something that was never funny, and that's all.
  Some kind of bond remains today; the faintest line stretching out across the city, of no consequence unless drawn through the minimum of brick and flesh, when our paths will cross and there follows an incidental.
  He told me how his housemates wanted him out, how his habits had sunk below the scope of pity, how he knew he was running on empty, while my head filled up with sound advice - there is change if you will it - a slope is not a pit, it can be overcome - and other horribly valid maxims.
  But I spoke nothing of the sort, because I am in some ways a coward (these ways being pretence, deference, etiquette), and I responded with the weakly sympathetic.
  Soon enough he became distracted and said he had to meet a guy in the multi-storey car park, which means just one thing to a misfit who, at the age of sixteen, arrived in social felicity only to watch some of the brightest links of a circle become gnarled and lost into pointless forms of habit.
  Goodbye was said with zero contact and only the slightest suggestion that we would get together some time, and laugh again.
  He turned right onto the lip of the hill, borne willingly into darkness, and with a parting salute from his incongruous bottle, I headed home, confused and sick with fortune.