Still My Best Friend

A family photo from December 2022.

I had such a powerful dream last night that I felt compelled to write it down. Somewhere in its depths was an entire epic I wish I could have held onto. I was a werewolf navigating a post apocalyptic Long Beach in Southern California, clawing my way through a crumbling urban landscape just to find medical treatment. The kind of story I've always wanted to try writing someday slipped right through my fingers as I woke up.

What I do remember is worth preserving, if only because of how heavy it sat on my chest when I opened my eyes.

I was in a hospital room, a curtain drawn around me for privacy. The room had the bones of a break room, a folding table pushed against the wall, a tungsten bulb pulling everything into a dim amber warmth, the faint ghost of a coffee smell baked into the walls. Someone had done their best to make it functional for patients. I was sitting there feeling strangely fine, no pain, no obvious injury, nothing that explained why I was there. I started patting myself down out of curiosity more than concern. That's when my fingers found it on my lower back. A small square machine pressed flat against my skin, with three small nodes anchored around it in a triangle, each one pierced just beneath the surface like a dermal piercing.

I held very still, trying to understand what I was touching.

A young woman appeared through the curtain before I could make sense of it. She carried herself like someone I had known for years, easy and familiar, settling into the room the way an old friend does. Before I could even ask her about the device, the curtain parted again and my parents and my son filed in behind her.

"Do you know what this thing is?" I asked her, reaching back to let her see it.

She looked at it without flinching. "I don't know what it's called," she said, "but it artificially keeps you alive. As soon as someone pulls that wire powering the mesh network, your body gets left to fight on its own."

I stared at a spot on the floor that wasn't really anything. The words settled over me slowly, the way cold water does. When I looked back up she was gone, as cleanly as if she had never been there. My parents and my son had taken her place, watching me with the particular stillness of people bracing themselves.

"I need to tell you all something," I said.

I looked at my mom first. "You and dad need to eat better. Lose the weight, tend to your health, treat your bodies like they matter. Good health is the foundation everything else rests on. Without it, comfort becomes something you're always chasing instead of having. I don't want either of you suffering because you waited too long." I paused. "And Hepan doesn't have a mother. After I'm gone, you're everything he has. You're both in your 70s and he's only 10. Please take care of yourselves for him."

Nobody spoke. My mom's jaw was tight. My dad stood with his hands at his sides. Tears ran quietly down faces that were doing their best to stay composed.

I turned to my son. Hepan was watching me with wide, patient eyes that were too calm for a ten year old, the kind of calm that only comes from not fully understanding yet, or from understanding completely.

"When I was a kid," I told him, "your grandparents signed me up for this program called ident-a-kid. They sat me in front of a VHS camera and asked me a list of questions. Who are you, what's your life like, that kind of thing." I smiled a little at the memory. "One of the questions was who is your best friend. And without even thinking about it, without skipping a single beat, I said my dad."

I could feel my father behind me as I said it.

"I want you to know the same is true for you. You are my best friend. The same way my dad was for me at your age."

I had more to say. I wanted to turn to my dad and find the words for everything he had been to me, the sacrifice and the steadiness, the example I have spent my whole life trying to live up to. I wanted to tell him that none of that was lost on me, not a single bit of it, that he is still my best friend and the person I respect most in this world.

But the curtain moved and a nurse stepped in. She read the room immediately and slowed her pace.

"Do you need a few more minutes?"

"No," I said. "You're fine. I'm just saying some things that need to be said before I pass."

She tilted her head. One eyebrow climbed slowly. "Pass?" She almost laughed, not unkindly. "You're not dying. We just need to transfer you to remove that device."

The silence that followed felt like stepping off a stair you didn't know was there.

She walked me to the mirror on the wall. I had avoided looking at myself until then. My lower back, my legs, the backs of my thighs were mapped with deep scarring, wide and textured like the skin had been pulled apart and stitched back roughly. It didn't read like an accident to me. Something about the pattern felt biological, like an infection that had worked its way outward and taken the skin with it. The device, she explained, had been knitting the muscle back together underneath all of it.

Then the dream let go of that thread and picked up another.

I was walking through the streets of Long Beach in a hospital gown, the pavement rough under bare feet, the city worn down to something barely functional around me. I found the second hospital only because I spotted a nurse in scrubs stepping into an elevator cut directly into the side of a building, right off the main street. No lobby, no signage. The elevator had no door. As we descended I could see the shaft walls up close, a layered mess of insulation, exposed pipe, and wood going soft with rot. Then we reached the bottom and I walked into the lobby. I had turned into a werewolf somewhere along the way, but nobody seemed affected by my appearance. Either they couldn't see what I was, or in a post apocalyptic world, it was just another ordinary thing.

I never got to say what I wanted to say to my dad.

After writing this, maybe it wasn't a bacterial infection that caused all of those deep scars. Could it be that I was attacked by a werewolf and had been afflicted with its curse?

I think what caused this dream is something my son said a few days ago. I was sitting in my SUV smoking a cigar when he came out the front door and stood at the edge of the porch. He had something to say and he needed to say it then and there. He told me I wasn't the same person anymore. That I don't play video games with him anymore. "What changed?" I asked. "You used to be a dad," he said.

Those words hit me like a dagger to the gut.

I immediately thought of the ident-a-kid video and realized I don't think I'm being a very good friend to my son. I don't think I am his best friend the way my dad was mine when I was a kid. I've been selfish with my time and not prioritizing the memories he wants to make with me.

"My best friend is dead," he continued. "You won't play with me. I have no one to play with."

Since then I connected him with some local gamer kids I found through East Mountain Facebook groups. But maybe the emotional weight of what he said can't be solved so easily. Finding him a friend was the logical answer. Being a better one myself was going to take something more. Something I had to work on. I knew he liked playing Minecraft with me but I really couldn't stand playing it, so I went looking for something that might change that.

I found a server called KingdomsMC, a large public Minecraft server built around medieval roleplay. We started playing it together and I actually enjoyed it. A few days later, after spending time with his new friend and playing together regularly, he told me he was happy again.

Regarding the words I said to my family when I thought I was about to die, we shouldn't wait until the very end to tell people what we want to tell them. It would be easy to sit down with my son and have that conversation. Telling my dad what I feel is another matter entirely.

I don't know why expressing emotion with him is so difficult for me. Maybe it's something that needs to be done anyway. I wouldn't be afraid to cry in front of him. I think what stops me is not wanting him to see me that way. There's something about that image, his son breaking down in front of him, that I'm not ready for.

Last night's dream gives me a lot to think about.