MONTHLY MUSE WRITINGS & AWARDS
WINNER: “Jordan & Karyn” by Jude Brewer of Portland, Oregon
TOPIC: Friendship
STORY/ESSAY/POEM: Story
MONTH: October 2017
Jordan & Karyn
by Jude Brewer
My friend Jordan spreads almond butter on his bananas. Peel, spread, bite, chew. He talks between swallowing and spreading.
“My world view is fucked,” he says.
My friend Karyn switches one hat off the rack for another.
“That’s more rivery-hatty,” she says.
Jordan calls daily until he starts calling monthly, and I wonder if it’s the turning point of our friendship where we’ve forgotten of our lives outside of our routines.
Karyn helps me pick out a new pair of frames for my prescription glasses. I wonder if it’s the turning point of our relationship, the downfall, so to speak, since she’s fonder of them than I am. I wonder if maybe she doesn’t want me looking too attractive.
Jordan reveals he’s started a podcast around the same time I’ve started a podcast, and we’re listening to both and saying we’re proud of the other and we like how it sounds, but I wonder, fleetingly, if we’re being honest. I know I am, but is he? And is he wondering the same? I’m wondering how to express pride for him without expressing too much, without appearing too eager or too wrapped up in the minutia of the conversations we used to have when I didn’t analyze how they went hours afterward.
Karyn writes a song about our cats, but it could be mistaken for a song about a cranky old couple which is exactly what she wanted, but some of her lyrical choices are not my favorite and I want to tell her that but I don’t because I never have before, so why would I start telling her now? A crowd is divided in half, split down the center where I walk toward Jordan. Then Karyn walks toward us. He says to us and to the crowd, “Love is an action, not a feeling.” He says this among other things before asking us to read what we’ve written down, before we exchange rings. Karyn cries, and I can no longer count how many times she’s cried with me on just two hands; now I’ll need ten fingers and a toe.
Karyn is three time zones over on tour playing music for strangers, and Jordan is a time zone over jamming on the guitar with old friends in his basement, and I’m listening to classical music for a change, and the television is off, and I’m ignoring whatever notifications pop up on my smartphone, and my tea has grown cold, the gingerbread flavor stiff, but I’m still sipping away and listening for the rain they’ve promised us.
Jordan texts me:
If life/perception is on a continuum of nihilism and its opposite (i.e., everything fucking matters), then living life accordingly to one or the other will certainly yield very different outcomes. It’s truly unknowable…whether this all matters…or whether we’re all just bacteria floating through space on some giant alien’s galactic turd.
Karyn texts me:
I wonder what our farts will smell like when we are old?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jude Brewer’s writing has appeared in New Millennium Writings, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Scintilla Press, and Cultured Vultures. His nonfiction short, 2012, 2016, 2017 was a finalist in the 2017 Montana Book Festival.
He also hosts the literary “radio theatre” podcast Storytellers Telling Stories. New episodes available Tuesdays.
Jordan & Karyn © 2017 Jude Brewer
Find the complete list of winners and finalists here.
Hiney talk is always the best way to show someone you care. Love you.
I liked the last part of the story regarding the two texts from Karyn and Jordan because it made me realise yet again how I can be SO up my own ass sometimes.