We are trained, at some point in our childhood, to be fearful when the phone rings at 3am. As a kid, I was convinced that those wee hours when evening and morning chit chat expectantly before sunrise were when bad things happened to unsuspecting people. My hypothesis was validated when after spending an entire summer at my ailing grandmother’s bedside, sweaty, sticky summer days with our tennis rackets wedged in the trunk, she finally died at 3am. But, knowing grandma, that could have been just one last funny trick.

So, when the phone rang at 3, I’m sure the blood drained from my face looking like my red t-shirts running to a soft rose in the spin cycle. Sleeping with or near or whatever it is I do with my phone must seem somewhat delusional—like a hungover sentry, napping with one hand on my firearm. I sprung up and pulled the phone to my ear. He called, my friend, that is, without good reason or necessity bubbling over like caramel in the pan. He had been stuck, I would learn, in the Phoenix airport, and so a query about Sky Harbor’s concessions was a suitable entree to headier conversation, about time, about friends, about love, about work, about where the hell time has gone since college, as if we somehow lost control of it. Fortunately for me, I don’t need to have any big revelations, no dollops of creme fraiche wisdom. For the time being, I just needed to be there—echoing his vitality in every ‘mmm’ and ‘uh huh’.

Which is good because I wouldn’t have had the answers anyway. He and I were once inseparable, spending our weekends yelping about music and challenging each other to increasingly impossible and revolting challenges involving White Castle crave cases. We never lived to together in college, but I always got the sense we could have—we’d have gotten a ratty walkup on the fringes of campus and filled it with books, music, dinner, and college boy angst. When we graduated and I didn’t hear from him and, to be fair, I did not make any overtures to find him either, I assumed that we were now in the real world, where adults take responsibility and try to make money of it. Our friendship must have been circumstantial, now a concoction of nostalgia and wondering what could’ve been.

I hung up the phone sometime after 5 and sat on the side of my bed letting my feet dangle below. The pins and needles I had in my feet from over two hours of contorted positions in bed made my toes feel like they were skating over the edge of the nearby pool, dipping in and out of the water with every throb. At some point in our conversation the time we had been apart evaporated. Like dew collected on palm fronds we drank it in, and then quickly picked up where we left off. We were older now, bigger jobs, and bigger bills, but still we laughed and prodded at each other’s narratives, partly interested, partly selfishly making sure we weren’t fuck-ups after all. In it all, every story that he riffed off from a floor somewhere in Terminal 2, came with a vitality of a friendship found, dusted off and turned on. And just like my dad’s old Mr. Coffee 12-cup pot, one of those almond colored monstrosities so big you think it must do more than press hot water through a filter, we clanked and sputtered, but the coffee’s hot and conversation as fresh as ever.