I Hate Missing You.

I had always been the one to heed adults’ warnings about strangers. Growing up I had steered clear of anyone and everyone I didn’t know. This made making friends extremely difficult, well that paired with the fact that my family never once stayed in one place for any significant amount of time.

I was an Army brat through and through. My dad, a Lieutenant, was my hero, my mentor, and my best friend. Daddy’s girl, yes, that was me. It’s safe to say I was spoiled a tad growing up, I admit the obvious. But even a father’s love isn’t quite enough for a teen girl looking for her place in the world.

The majority of my life, I hid behind my father. He was a big man. Not in the physical sense, although he was rugged, he was an Army man after all, but in mentality. He believed that if you wanted something done right you had to do it yourself. He believed you controlled your future. Me? I’d just nod and agree although I feared taking control of anything, especially my own life.

It was a boy who did that for me, a boy who weaseled his way into my life, not once asking permission to be there. He never took ‘no’ for an answer. He grabbed life by the horns and ran for it. His mentality was similar to my fathers’, which is most likely the reason why I was drawn to him down the line.

We met when we both were in high school. My father had received orders to move to Arizona my freshman year, not a place I was thrilled to go. I hated the heat. Don’t get me wrong, the sun is a wonderful thing, but I enjoyed a gentler climate. I had lived in many different places in the fourteen years leading up to this particular move, Maryland, Washington, and New York amongst them. Truthfully, I enjoyed Washington the most. Maryland was nice. Quant. But it didn’t feel like home to me. New York was better, I enjoyed walking down the city streets and admiring the buildings downtown. But, again, it wasn’t home. Home for me was Washington. Not in the literal sense, I had never really known one place as my home, dad’s profession causing us to up and move at any given time. But being in Washington was the closest I had come to feeling at home. I don’t know if it was the dreary, overcast days, often mirroring my moods, or because no one in the small town just off the base bothered to attempt to enter my perfectly manufactured bubble. All I know is I had grown to love rainy days and quiet nights, of which I spent alone. As I mentioned before, I wasn’t one to make friends easily.

Arizona was different in so many ways. The sun and heat weren’t the only things Arizona had against it, it also had the O’Callaghan’s. Somehow my family-mom, dad, two older brothers, and little sister-had had to live off base. Normally I wouldn’t have cared too much about what house we lived in, but this one was different. Our neighbors were extremely friendly, especially their eldest son.

John O’Callaghan. That boy didn’t know when to give up. Ever sense the first day, when he introduced himself as I was unloading my bags from the family car, he’s been insistent on us becoming friends. Why? I had absolutely no idea. He was a year older than me, and about a foot taller too. We were complete and total opposites, but never once did he shy away from my uninterested persona.

I was thankful to know someone when the first day of school rolled around, even if that someone wouldn’t leave my side for two seconds. Oddly, even though I had no desire to communicate with the gangly boy, I couldn’t help but craze his presence. Slowly, we began to spend time together, and even slower, I opened up. My brothers, sixteen and nineteen at the time, were baffled by this. They had tried and given up on finding me friends, yet here I was with a friend.

Yes, John and I became friends. Our friendship was slow starting but long lasting. I traded my nights of solitude for nights sitting in John’s room. My activities were still very much the same. I read, or did homework-most of which was for weeks in advance-just like always, except now while I did my thing, John was sitting on his bed or the floor strumming his guitar-that is, when he wasn’t pestering me to put down my book.

Freshman year was full of firsts. My first friend: John. My first high school dance: with John. My first party: again, with John. My first kiss: a friend of John’s, on a dare. Basically John had a way of pulling me out of my comfort zone and forcing me to try new things.

And that is why, six years later, I am sitting on an airplane, waiting to take off. I hate flying. Not only because it is a form of public transportation but also because of the whole ‘I’m x amount of feet in the air and could drop at any moment’ feeling.

I am coming from New York where I go to school majoring in photography and interning with some well-known photographers. John, on the other hand, is home in Arizona. I haven’t seen John in almost six months. It’s Christmas break at school and my mentors are letting me take a few weeks off for the holidays, hence the need for this plane. I am flying home. I’ve considered Arizona home ever sense John and I became inseparable, even though my family moved to Georgia two years ago.

John begged me to come home for the holidays, and pushed even harder when he found out I had nothing keeping me in New York for the next two weeks. Because I can never say ‘no’ to John when he begs and pleads-our web-chats only working in his favor seeing as how I have get to see his puppy dog face, that he knows works every time-I agreed. The things I do for John O’Callaghan.

To calm my nerves I took out my iPod, placing a piece in each ear. Instantly, John’s voice played through the speakers. His voice was the one thing in the world that allowed my mind to go blank. I was no longer thinking about the plane that was getting ready to take off. I was no longer thinking about the crying baby, the teen girl smacking her gum loudly, or the man annoyingly tapping his fingers on the armrest between us. I was now thinking back on my many memories of John and I as teenagers. Nothing could break my unconscious stroll down memory lane.

I don’t know when I had fallen asleep. I awoke to a slight jostle. I took out my headphones, which were still spilling out my best friend’s melodic voice, so I could hear the captain’s voice over the intercom. He informed the cabin that we were experiencing slight turbulence and that the seatbelt light was being turned back on. I hadn’t even known it had been turned off.

Now slightly on edge as the plane bounced through the rough patches of clouds, I stuck my ear buds back into place attempting to calm myself once more. This time to no avail. Even John’s voice, singing about the nights we used to spend with friends, couldn’t ease my anxiety.

My fears were valid. Only a handful of minutes later, not that I was keeping track of time, the turbulence became worse. Once again the captain’s voice came over the intercom, this time informing us that there was trouble with the plane and we had to do an emergency landing.

I pulled my legs up to my chest, panicking silently as the cabin erupted with chatter. Memories came flooding back to me. I thought of all the people I loved, all the people I would miss. I thought of all the things I hadn’t yet done. Everything I had yet to say. The last thing to run through my mind, before the plane began its rapid descent, was John; all of my wishes and regrets about John. And just as the plane should have come into contact with the field below us, not at all a safe landing, I bolted upright.

Breathing heavy, I looked around me. I was sitting in bed. I was still in New York, in my small studio apartment. As I tried to steady my heart rate, my roommate stuck her head in my doorway.

“You okay, Mal?” she asked as she came to sit at the foot of my bed.

I nodded slightly, still attempting to calm myself. I had dreamt of John, again. I had been doing that a lot lately, although never like this. Usually it was just past memories that I never thought about while conscious.

I hadn’t seen John in over a year. We hadn’t spoken in just about as long. He had been on tour almost constantly with his band while I was in New York finishing school and working my way into the photography world. I missed John terribly. But couldn’t find the courage to reach back out to reconnect with my old best friend.

“I need to see him,” I stated to Angie, who had moved next to me to wrap an arm over my shoulder. She knew the whole story about John and I. She had never met him but knew how much I missed him and how guilty I felt for how things ended between us. “I need to go home,” I added after a moment of silence. I needed to fix things between John and I. I needed my best friend back. I needed John.