Concrete 2019

Page 32

Samuel Levy

Syndrome   At six o’clock this morning, I slouched in bed against the wall of my walk-in, closet-sized dorm room and did what could be referred to as “social media time travel.” I had two classes back-to-back starting in less than two hours and needed sleep desperately, but something compelled me to the point where sleep had to wait: a memory. A cluster of them, really, all about this boy I used to know. Zach Bryer. He came to mind suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere as I lay flat in bed, my eyes open wide toward the invisible ceiling in the pitch-black dark—that’s when I do a big chunk of my reflecting, during that short, quiet period of inactivity after resolving to sleep but before the sleep comes.   I wanted to see what the years had turned Zach into. I wanted to remind myself of the way he looked, because time was beginning to bury the image. Resting my hot computer on my thighs, I sat up in the near-dark with the white burst of electricity radiating toward my face and typed his name into the Facebook search bar. After scrolling down past a list of about thirty other Zach Bryers and clicking “show more results” at least twice, I finally stopped the mouse on a profile picture I thought might be the one. It shocked me to find

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