The last time I saw John Vincent in person, we were meeting for dinner at International District in a now-defunct restaurant that served teppanyaki — cheap steak cuts on sizzling iron plates with a mound of rice in the middle. My clothes always smelled like smoked meat whenever I ate there, a smell that is somehow able to be both annoying and pleasant. The restaurant itself was often just half-full, its manga-papered interior with cold metal chairs a hangout for Asian migrants in their late twenties. Vin — not John, or Vince, and certainly not J.V. — and his wife were visiting the city from Virginia, but we were alone at dinner. He’s telling me about his work at the psych unit, doling out this story of his patient who’d successfully hung themselves in their hospital room, at the most suicide-proofed place one could think of. He told the story with his usual cool offhandedness, a touch awed at the determination of a human being to circumvent all and any obstacle to reach a desired goal, before finally diving into a rant about the amount of paperwork the incident entailed.
Whenever we got together our table was always loud; vulgar, too, if they speak the language. Stories, anecdotes, and gossip laced with explosive laughter and swearing. I curse more around Vin and often forget what we’re eating (though this time the choices were at least narrowed down to the sirloin variety). The world could be burning outside and there won’t be a break on his telling of where and how he met his latest side-piece, and where and how they’re doing it without his wife knowing. When I’m with Vin my moral bar is set at the bare mininum, suffocating that part of me that could or should be offended.
If there’s anything in my life that I can call an absolute mystery, it’s how Vin and I ever became (and remained) such good friends, specially considering that when we first met he thought I had a screw loose.
We’d spent several years in the same school never knowing each other’s existence then suddenly on our senior year we found ourselves in the same class, seated together because our last names followed the teachers’ favorite abcederian seating arrangement. He stank of cigarette from a smoking habit that he hasn’t overcome even now, while I had a terrible mannerism of picking on the split-ends of my hair but that which I’ve since, thankfully, outgrown. (I can still remember, though, the oh-so-satisfying way that one thick strand of hair separated into two thin ones like a ballerina doing a grand jeté.) He would whisper to his other seatmate on his right, snickering and pointing at me and commenting about how I was, quite possibly, very weird.
And then, I don’t know, somehow one of us started talking to the other, and we each thought we were funny — no, hilarious —, would-be grand conquerors of the world with our cunning wit, looking down on our peers as if we both knew better, had figured the rest of it out. I went through a Nobody gets us phase with Vin; it’s always us versus them. We were spending too much time for two people of the opposite sex who weren’t dating.
The thing is, I still don’t get it even now. Vin and I don’t really have that much in common, which further deepens the mystery. I was raised strictly on monogamous values whereas he enjoyed the other, less-strings spectrum of that. Even our very personalities seem to have been borrowed from two different protagonist tropes from two different films: I, the brooding antisocial who read and wrote pretentious shit, bored and boring; he, the bad boy with the cigarettes and the alcohol and the marijuana and the skipping classes. Even so he was clever. Even so he got his girls. Even so he was the boy with whom I made that pact: if we’re still single by forty …
I won’t deny that there was that touch of possible romance that this kind of friendships always brings. I wasn’t so naïve as to believe that it was ever going to be completely platonic. Someone will always start thinking that there could be something more. When we both happened to be single at the same time, Vin and I tried, albeit only half-heartedly. Not even something the Americans would call the “old college try” — there was too much at stake to do anything rash. Whether or not the attempt was enough to effectively validate or negate any potential, I can’t say, nor did I feel the need to do something about it. I, who base romance on the initial spark — à la Sleepless in Seattle, if you will — found nothing of the sort with Vin.
Months and years would pass on us: through college, different social circles, immigration; across continents and an ocean and then, more recently, across states. We’re both married now to different people, living on opposite coasts of the country, navigating careers and our thirties. Before I knew it Vin and I were “old friends.” I watched our conversations mature and grow, like tectonic plates shifting slowly, from “I can’t have a girlfriend who likes Twilight” to “What kind of car insurance do you have?” We were not usually in constant contact apart from the unfailing birthday and Christmas greetings, and yet we seem to have this innate ability of picking up where we’d left off with nary an effort.
That teppanyaki dinner was in October during the first year of the pandemic. The following year I talked with him when our dog died. The year after that he messaged me with gossip. Then —
Then he missed a birthday. I chucked it as a slip, though historically we’ve never missed each other’s birthdays. Mine comes before his, just two months apart, and despite that slip I greeted him the same way I always have when his came up. He said thanks. I asked how’s everything doing but he didn’t respond. I knew then that it wasn’t a slip anymore.
I remember the second time I went home to the Philippines, over a decade ago now. Vin was still living there at the time. I was newly single, with the shimmer of one’s early twenties, eager to make my next romantic mistake while on holiday. He was volunteering as tribute, but I wanted someone else, a decision that finally solidified the limitations of our relationship, dotting the j’s and i’s in “just friends.” This caused a bit of a rift between us, but like everything else — jealous girlfriends, jealous boyfriends, distance — we soldiered on. We got over it. Hell, if we got over that, there couldn’t be anything we won’t. I thought.
People change, though. One thing I didn’t really account for.
Both our birthdays this year have just passed, and neither of us greeted the other. Mine was, at least, a conscious decision. My brain still recalled the occasion the way it always did: with the intuitive thought of “Oh, it’s coming up” a few days prior, to finally arriving on the day itself, remembering it as soon as I wake up. But there was no pulling up a Facebook message this time, no composing that reflex greeting, coupled with an unabashed “Miss you!” and consummating throughout the day in a satisfactory catch-up.
There are things that just come to an end like that — not with a sudden crash, but with a slow, dwindling stop; a car running out of gas. Things that just fade in the background, reminisced on sometimes. Like old habits, like split-ends: once done fondly but now outgrown, solved by a maintenance snip.
TINY WORRIES 