I liked watching JD write, his eyebrows furrowed and his chin resting on his palm and his fingers tapping on his upper lip. Every so often he would look up and smile at me, as if he was checking I was still there, sitting on his bed with my legs criss-crossed and my back up against the headboard. His checkered bed sheets were faded and stained, and I liked how I could trace my fingers over the patterns. How soft they would feel under my legs. 

When he was done, he would push off from his desk, his chair rolling back to where I was. The sound of the wheels going swisshhh on the wooden floor. 

“Do you wanna hear it?” I remember he’d ask me, even though he already knew what I would say. 

 Sometimes it was an opinion piece. Sometimes it was a personal narrative, something that happened to him when he was eighteen or whatever. Sometimes it was a love story, and I was a flower and he was a bee. I was the ocean and he was a little fish bobbing along in the waves. Or every so often it was just us, everything exactly the same except for our names. 

“It’s so easy to write about you,” He told me. “I have so much to say.” 

He would tear out the stories that I liked, the ones that made me laugh and the ones that I told him I wanted to remember forever. He’d paperclip them into a scrappy pile and secretly slip them into my shoulder bag just before I left his apartment each morning. I would reread them over and over again on the train ride home, and when I got home, hair a mess from the wind, I would place them carefully at the corner of my desk. 

But things started to pile up, books and resumes and 10-paged essays eating up the space and soon covering every last word JD wrote. I began to slowly forget what his handwriting looked like, the same handwriting I used to be able to recognize from miles away. 

Two days before Halloween, I took the F train down to JD’s apartment. We sat on his couch and watched an old movie that we both loved. But as we watched it, listened to all the same dialogue and sat through the same climax scene and even watched the same ending credits, nothing went through us. I knew he felt it too, as I watched the expression on his face, two blank eyes staring at a flashing screen. It wasn’t good anymore. I wondered if it was even any good in the first place, or if we had just tricked ourselves into liking it when we first watched it together months ago. 

The screen went black and we looked at our reflections staring back at us. “What happened?” 

He answered back, in a voice that was almost a whisper. He looked upset, more sad than confused. “I don’t know.” 

He didn’t have much to say that night. 

Now JD’s stories sit in my bottom desk drawer, an ugly beige replacing what was once a warm yellow.