Wayward

Wayward
By- Robert Goldsborough

      I have known William his entire life.  We grew up together.  I cannot think of anything that we haven’t done together, until now.  High school was a blur of homework and girls in tight sweaters.  College was fun.  We used to stay up late and experiment with all kinds of things; alcohol, drugs, sex.  I really enjoyed college.  It was after college, when Bill settled down and got that boring job that I started growing away from him.  We still lived together, but I had to start going out on my own.  Bill would wake up before sunrise and trudge off to that tiny office of his to shuffle papers all day long.  At night he would be wiped out, he just did not want to go out anymore.  I knew he would not have liked it if he found out that I was going out without him, so I was careful.  I would wait until he was asleep and snoring.  Bill was never a sound sleeper so I had to be careful to be as quiet as I could.  He never heard me leave.

         On my own, the night was mine.  I would sneak in the shadows finding dark out-of-the-way places that I knew Bill would never visit.  I was back in the days that we had once shared.  Alcohol was a necessity.  I drank myself to the early morning hours many a night.  I left the drugs behind, but the girls were even more important than the booze.  I started trying to collect names, but there were too many.  I had to settle for the faint recollection of hair color or perfumed scent.  By morning I was always dizzy with the smells and colors of women.  Bill was never that much of a ladies-man, but I was a regular Casanova.  I started to worry when Bill had to take phone calls from women he had never met.  I didn’t explain anything.  He just thought he received a lot of wrong numbers.

         I knew I was pushing my luck living like that, but one of us had to.  There was much more to life than growing old in a paper-pushing job.  The living I was doing started to show between us.  Bill started looking more and more haggard.  I was using the life that he wasn’t.  Bill started going to bed earlier and finding it harder to wake up.  This was fine by me; it meant I could live all the more.  There were times that I missed Bill, like now.  We had always been together through everything.  I wanted him to be out living with me, but he had made his choice.  That’s why he started to fade.  The dimmer he got the brighter I became.  He’s now nothing more than what I used to be.  At least he’s still with me even if he is so quiet.  A shadow doesn’t have much to say.