A Different Kind of Same by Kelley Clink

Author:Kelley Clink
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2015-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

second chance

I thought I would know when I was ready to look for answers. I also thought being ready meant everything would be easy. And though I’d convinced myself that I was waiting, that I wasn’t capable of facing any part of Matt’s past, I renewed my friendship with Tim—one of the first friends my brother had made after we moved to Alabama.

After the move, Matt and I were the sole sense of familiarity and safety left in each other’s lives. We became, for a while, close in the way we had been as children. Alone together, again, we spent hours playing video games, listening to CDs, or watching MTV and Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Because we were “Yankees,” in addition to being new kids, the friends-making process was slow. The few friends we did make in those early months we shared, and Tim was one of them. I hung out with Tim a lot, more than any of Matt’s other friends. I crashed their jam sessions and horned in on Sega Genesis marathons. When the three of us were together, we most often listened to music—shutting the blinds and turning off the lights in Matt’s room so we could dance in the pulse of a strobe light.

By the time I finished high school, Matt and I had carved out separate social lives; we no longer needed each other as we once had. I’d started college, moved out of the house. We had new friends and new interests. Matt and Tim still traveled in the same circles, but I didn’t see him at the house anymore. I didn’t see him anywhere anymore. In fact, I’d forgotten all about him—until the memorial service we had at my parents’ church in Alabama.

The service was well attended, to say the least. Ryan and I had gotten married in that church, so I knew that it sat three hundred people. Our wedding had filled two-thirds of the pews. Matt’s memorial service was standing room only. Rows packed with my parents’ friends and coworkers, fellow parishioners, and a few dozen of Matt’s friends.

Afterward the priest asked everyone to stay for coffee and donuts, which would be served in the rec hall. The hall was a large building next to the church, the two doorways joined by a short stretch of sidewalk. Since my parents, Ryan, and I were the first to leave the church, we were the first to arrive at the hall. The door was propped open, and the light from inside spilled halfway across the sidewalk, dwindling into darkness before it reached the church.

Once we entered the hall and turned around, we saw that a line had already formed. Our intention was for everyone to come in straightaway, have a seat in one of the hundreds of folding chairs at one of the dozens of folding tables, and let us make the rounds. But somehow we ended up pinned at the door, greeting each guest like a receiving line at a wedding.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the heels of my feet were sore, the backs of my knees stiff.

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