text: I was sitting at the terminal bar drinking a double, smoothing over thoughts of catastrophic engine failure, making small talk with the bartender J. I’d taught J how to cook when he was just a kid. He’d been a bright one, with the air of future swarming around his excitement as he’d picked up the knife and learned the treasured skills of the craft. J’s dead now, overdosing on fentanyl in a car only minutes after getting out of jail, needle still hanging in his arm and foot resting on the brake pedal with the car still in drive, leaving a bright, young, fatherless daughter in his wake. He was twenty-three. But for this moment, we were both still alive. “I’m telling you man,” J said, wiping sweat from his forehead with a bar towel, his pale skin and toothpick frame betraying his energy. “This place ain’t nothing. My buddy in Nashville’s got me a gig set up. Second he calls, I’m driving to freedom.” I downed the gin, gesturing for another. “Sounds good bud.” “He’s working the trainyards, I’m talking big bucks. This town’s dead, I ain’t staying. You could come with, blow this joint together.” I hadn’t seen him in months, knowing his crowd, feeding my own addiction yet still retaining enough brain cells to know that his crowd wasn’t mine. But the idea was intoxicating--the chance to flee all my troubles only to find them waiting for me in Music City. “Sounds real good, but I’ve been thinking about going back to school. Maybe,” I said. I’d run away twice already, learning just enough to know that I was the source of my troubles, even if I couldn’t articulate what they were. A figure approached the bar in my periphery. I turned, recognizing him immediately: S, our city’s college basketball star, fresh off a national title run, packed bags behind him, ready to skip town and go pro. We’d met once. I’d gone to a baseball game with his father, Big Papa. We got so drunk the security staff made us leave, not taking kindly to our shouting at opposing pitchers, but still being gentle for Big Papa’s sake, his royalty, the father of a king, practically apologizing as they escorted us to the property line. The taxi deposited Papa at S’s doorstep, son carrying father in the house with a glare in my direction telling me that I was not welcome. Here at the airport bar, I was anonymous, a nothingness. He sat down beside me, ordering a beer. Yo dude. You’re S,” J said, his excitement turning heads of the bar’s patrons. S smiled, a daily repetition he endured with humility. “That’s me,” he said, and sipped his beer. J looked to me, reaching across the bar to push my shoulder, “It's fucking S, bro.” He turned back to S while pouring me a fresh double. “Let me ask you something. You coming back to play next year?” I was downing the last drops that were simmering in the bottom of my glass, hardly a speck of booze left, and coughed when I heard his words, knowing S had graduated, feeling embarrassed by proxy, covering my eyes in apology. S laughed, smiling again. “Nah man, I love this place but I’m out of here. Draft coming up next month.” “Damn shame man. If you ask me, you were one of our best player, maybe top three. We’re gonna miss you.” S finished his beer and left. J looked at me. “Fucking dumbass.” “Who?” I asked, already drunk but genuinely confused. “Dude’s wasting his time when he could stay here and slay. Fucking loser.” I threw a tip on the bar counter and caught my flight. J called me asking for a cooking job a year later, after I’d come on as morning manager at one of the city’s top restaurants. I let it ring to voicemail, hearing the desperation in his voice, knowing he had a toddler, listening to it twice before deleting the message and removing his name from my phone’s contact list. He was sixteen when we met; troubled, like me, but full of hope. I’d kept him under my wing until my wing wasn’t even big enough for me. He was gone within a month of the phone call. His daughter is ten now and I don’t know what happened to her, and if I did, I don’t know how I could help. I pray every day that she is full of life, that the wind picks her up and never lets her land.