When you’re never physically together, everything must be intentional.
I guess one could make the argument that intentionality should always matter and be present in all situations, but in my experience, it’s easy for that to fall by the wayside when things are, well, easy.
Sean and I have been friends for years. We met in an entomology lecture during our freshman year and ended up partners for the final project that was something like sixty-five percent of our final grade. The universe couldn’t have plopped two more different people together: me, with my chipped black nail polish, combat boots, and obsessive love of Sapphic literature, and Sean, who showed up to 8 a.m. lectures in a backwards Braves cap and Nike joggers, fresh-faced and somehow still managing to look clean-cut.
To look at us, you’d think we would never have worked. Yet here we are: fifteen years later, on complete opposite sides of the world, settling in to watch a movie together. A monthly ritual that we rarely miss.
Not that it’s been easy getting here.
“It Happened One Night or Hook?” He’s sharing his computer screen with me, and I can see him scrolling through options on Netflix.But neither of those are on the screen, so I’m not sure where they came from or if either of them is even available on Netflix.
I shake my head and tilt the screen of my laptop so I can see better. “Not like the Hook kind, but I am kind of in the mood for fantasy.”
He groans and keeps scrolling. Flicks past five or six options I definitely would’ve been fine with, like he’s holding out for something specific he can’t quite name. I try not to feel irritated. This movie night only happens once a month. Between time zones and work schedules and life, this – plus some scattered texts and the occasional spontaneous phone call – is about all the time we get with each other.
It annoys me more than I want to admit that we never pick the movie in advance. Sitting here in silence while he scrolls feels like a waste of precious, limited time…even though I know it’s not. It’s still together. And that’s what counts.
I didn’t always feel this way. Back when we were younger, time felt endless. There were entire afternoons we spent doing nothing: lounging around our apartments, walking across campus just to grab coffee, or laying out on the green until it got dark. We didn’t need a plan. Just proximity. Back then, showing up for each other wasn’t a choice; it just happened, almost by accident.
Maybe that’s because undergrad—and life, up to that point—was so easy for both of us. Neither of us had faced any real hardship or friction. And certainly nothing that ever got in the way of our friendship.
But then we graduated. Sean got a job out of state. I stayed behind and started grad school. We both liked to travel, and for a few years we made an effort—meeting up once or twice a year in whatever city sounded good, splitting hotel rooms, getting lost on purpose. Sometimes we managed to time things so we were both home for the holidays and could sneak in a catch-up lunch or walk around the old campus.
But those visits got fewer. Work got busier. He moved abroad. I moved apartments, changed jobs, changed routines. Travel started to feel more like a chore than a break. We were still close – I thought – but something shifted. Not all at once, and not because anything went wrong. Just...naturally. That’s how it happens, I guess. You blink, and suddenly all your friendships require effort.
Suddenly my small picture-in-picture view of Sean’s face, which until now had been furrowed in concentration, two little lines forming between his eyebrows like choosing our movie is the most serious thing he’s ever done, starts shaking and then tilts. Now I’ve been rotated ninety degrees to the right.
“Argh, fuck.” He reaches his arms and swipes at the empty air, and that’s when I realize his laptop has fallen just beyond his reach from the spasm in his legs. He tries again, this time rocking his shoulders like he’s building momentum, reaches his arms out again, and lurches forward.
“You really had your computer just chilling on your legs?” I ask, stifling a laugh. “Are you jonesing for a new computer or something and the only way Margot will go for it is if this one break?”
He doesn’t answer me as he maneuvers the laptop back onto his lap, pulling with his arms and wrists, not his hands and fingers, which are extended but limp, but I can see a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
“Don’t tell,” he says, huffing quietly from the effort of getting the laptop back in place, then glances at me and holds his right thumb, which he can kind of flex, up to his lips and makes a Shhh face.
I pantomime zipping my lips and throwing away the key. Then, before he can lapse back into scrolling, I add, “Let’s take that as a sign from the universe and just pick something already.” He pauses and there’s only one title I recognize, and I’m pretty sure it’s a kid’s movie. But it’s time to get this show on the road. I point at it even though that’s pointless since we’re just sharing a screen and not a computer. “Bridge to Terabithia, go.”
The movie opens with a little boy – well, little to us, but probably not to the intended audience – running through a cow pasture and thinking about an upcoming race. The movie opens with a little boy – well, little to us, but probably not to the intended audience – running through a cow pasture and thinking about an upcoming race. Something about the way the boy moves – fast, unthinking, all limbs and energy – makes my chest ache a little.
Twelve years on and it doesn’t seem to bother Sean much anymore, but I still try to be sensitive about it. Maybe that’s dumb – patronizing, even – but I can’t help it. Because the truth is, I still remember when Sean used to move like that. Not in cow pastures or whatever, but in the way he’d vault over benches on the green in college just to make me laugh, or jog backwards in crosswalks because it was funny, or race up a flight of stairs for the sake of sheer competitiveness. He had this loose, easy physicality, like his body was just another extension of his thoughts.
And then it was gone.
I remember when I found out. Not just the facts, which were absurd enough on their own, but the moment I found out. The way time collapsed a little. The way that there was suddenly a Before and an After.
It wasn’t anything dramatic. He just slipped. That’s it. It was a weird, rainy Tuesday, a work trip somewhere north of Copenhagen, and the sidewalk was slick with rain and foliage. He was carrying a tray of coffee that he’d picked up for the team and trying not to spill it. It was the first day of the conference, and even though he had an intern to do such things for him, it was in his nature to just do things like that himself instead. He slipped on the sidewalk and went down hard, landed wrong, and…just didn’t get back up.
I’ve read enough and heard enough since to know how fragile the cervical spine is. How a twist, a fraction of force in just the wrong direction or the wrong place can sever everything you know about your body. But I didn’t know any of that then. All I knew then was that my phone buzzed on Friday morning and there was a message from his cousin, one that I’d met a handful of times over the years but didn’t really know, asking if I’d heard. Then it was hospitals and surgeries and time zones and long pauses on the phone where neither of us knew what to say.
It's stupid and self-centered and I still feel guilty for it, but one of the real kickers of the whole thing, one of the parts that got me the most – beyond the word “paralyzed” – was that I hadn’t even known he was on the trip to begin with. We’d been in the height of our hyper-independent era. We were in our late twenties, ambitious, always in motion. Sure, we still kept in touch, but every conversation was some half-finished text about travel delays or work stress or a meme. It had gotten harder to stay in sync, but I hadn’t quite realized how deep the chasm between us had grown until that moment. And then suddenly nothing else mattered to me but this new version of Sean. The Sean who couldn’t hold run. Who couldn’t sit up. Who, for a while, couldn’t even breathe on his own. The Sean I was convinced was utterly changed, who I didn’t have a mental framework, who I felt like I’d never know again.
Before and After.
But the Sean on my screen now is still Sean. That’s been the biggest relief and strangest revelation. If anything, his best parts are even sharper now. Like, he got funnier. Wryer. Quicker, somehow, even though everything else about his life slowed down. He listens better now, too – really listens, with that quiet, anchoring attention he never quite had when we were younger and multitasking through every conversation. He doesn’t pretend not to care anymore or bother to hid his feelings anymore, either. About people. About showing up. He says what he means. He makes the time. I don’t think he used to realize that time was something you could make on purpose.
It seems a little unfair that it took something so big to bring the best parts to the surface. But maybe they were always there and just easier to miss when everything was easy.
But every so often, like when his laptop tips off his lap due to a spasm or his hands don’t quite obey him, I still catch myself holding my breath. It’s not pity – I swear it’s not, he’d hate that, and I know better than to pity someone just for being paralyzed now – but something quieter and harder to name. Grief, maybe? That sounds dramatic…yet accurate. Not just for what he lost, but for how easily it could have gone the other way. How easily I could’ve missed this – missed him afterwards – entirely.
He laughs suddenly – at something characters onscreen are saying, not at me – and the sound breaks my reverie. I shift, pulling the blanket I’ve got over my legs tighter as his laptop wobbles slightly as he nudges it into a more secure position with the back of his arm. A few more minutes go by and he shifts again. Over the years, he’s gotten good at making adjustments look casual to the point of being almost imperceptible, just small movements – angling his shoulders, tilting his neck slightly like he’s trying to stretch without really moving. But even with that, and even though the picture-in-picture is small, the movie taking up most of the screen, I still catch it.
But then his head dips for a second, like he’s thinking, and then he pauses the movie, which surprises me.
“Is this movie about to emotionally devastate me?” he asks flatly.
I shrug because I truthfully don’t know. It’s a kids’ movie and I’m a forty-year-old woman. “Doesn’t matter now,” I tell him, “we’re eighty minutes into it, we’re not stopping now.”
We both chuckle in soft agreement as he starts the movie again. The boy from the beginning is back on the screen, and he’s watching a rope swing sway above the creek. Even though I don’t know exactly what’s coming, I can guess, and I feel my stomach drop.
I glance down at Sean’s picture-in-picture. His expression is still, eyes slightly glassy all of a sudden, but his mouth is set in that stubborn, slightly ironic crooked half-smile he always wears when something hits too close to home and he doesn’t want anyone to say anything about it.
We’re both quiet as the scene onscreen continues. Jesse, the boy, learns that his best friend, Leslie, is dead, that she tried to swing across the creek without him and the rope snapped. Just like that, she’s gone. It’s the kind of accident that happens fast, without much warning, and changes everything. It’s a kids’ movie, sure, but it’s also about the randomness of loss, about how no one ever thinks that moment is going to be the moment.
As the credits roll, Sean lets out a long breath. One of those slow, shaky exhales that people try to play off as a sigh but is usually something else.
I make his picture-in-picture full screen now that the movie’s over. One glance at his face and there it is: the unmistakable shimmer of tears in his eyes. Just a trace, nothing dramatic. He’s still smiling, sort of, though there’s a twitch at the corner of his mouth that gives away the effort it’s taking to keep it there.
“You okay?” I ask gently, smiling softly. Truthfully, I feel just as verklempt. I’m just not as comfortable showing it as he is now.
He wipes at his face with the back of his wrist. “If you tell anyone I cried during that kids movie, I’ll block you.”
I start to laugh at the irony of my thoughts against his words, but before I can respond, there’s a blur of movement and the laptop pivots smoothly away from Sean. Suddenly Margot’s face fills the screen, her hair a mess, wearing one of Sean’s old college T-shirts that somehow looks chic on her.
“Penny!” she says brightly, her French accent lilting, making my name sound like Peh-nee instead of Pen-ee. “You are keeping him out of trouble?”
It’s the line she always uses when we talk – something Sean must have told her early on, about how I was the more responsible one in college. “Trying,” I say, grinning. Then, a little teasing, a little apologetic: “Afraid I may have actually caused it this time.”
Margot laughs, and the screen jostles again until she exclaims “Yah-ha!” and Sean yells “Cheater!” I can tell she’s standing now.
“He cried at the end, hmn?” she stage-whispers.
“Can confirm,” I say, delighted.
Sean groans in the background.
Margot gives him back the laptop and disappears, but not before kissing his cheek and whispering something that makes them both laugh. The light in his room shifts; the lamp beside his bed clicks off, leaving his face lit only by the laptop glow. I hear faint sounds of movement in the background—Margot getting ready to start their nighttime routine. It’s the middle of the day for me, but late there. We both know we’ll have to wrap up soon.
I stretch in my chair and start folding the blanket in my lap. “Hey, so Jason says we should plan a virtual game night again soon. Something low-key, if you two are up for it.”
Sean nods, mouth twitching. “As long as it’s not charades.”
I laugh. That's a game night suggestion that my husband will never live down. There’s a beat of comfortable silence. We sit like that for a moment, just sharing the space while we still have it.
“You good?” I ask again, and this time not about the movie.
He nods, his expression softening. “I really am.”
If I were there, I’d reach for his hand. He’d squeeze back, weakly, barely a flicker, but something. Instead, we trade soft, knowing smiles. We sign off the way we always do: no big goodbyes, no forced sentiment. Just a wave, a promise to text soon, and one last lingering moment before one of us clicks the red button and the screen goes dark.
We don’t get the luxury of ease anymore. Not with time. Not with distance. Not with a million other things.
But that’s okay. Because nothing between us happens by accident now.
And maybe it never really did.
