A Block Away

A romantic comedy was playing on his big screen with the five channel Bose surround sound powerfully and yet soothingly playing the soundtrack in the background. The man sitting alone on the couch went by the name of Bret. At age 29, Bret thought of himself as, I suppose you could say, a satisfied man. He had all the money he could have ever wished for, and he had the best house in the best neighborhood of town. There was nothing quite like waking up every morning to the sound of the California waves crashing up onto the beach a block away, except for maybe being on the beach itself. Of course it hadn’t always been like this. But Bret was a hard-working man. He had always known he had the power to create change, at least in some areas of life. But that’s a story for another time. This story focuses on the events leading up to one certain moment. The moment where Bret realized he wasn’t happy with where he was.

Bret was born on a hot summer day in a little town just outside Lincoln called Marysville. Marysville, Nebraska. Yep, he was born and raised in Nebraska and darn proud of it too. You see, Marysville was a town in which everyone knew everyone and there were no gangs or anything like that. It was a quaint little town in the middle of a wide open state.

Bret’s family consisted of four children and two happily married parents. He was the oldest of the four. They did have one old and grumpy dog named Chester, but that was all dad would allow. He always said he didn’t need his children becoming too attatched to anyone, and that included animals.

Now in fifth grade Bret was eleven years old, and was at the stage in his life where girls were actually cool instead of gross. They began to mean something. Well, to most boys anyway. By the end of fifth grade Bret didn’t really pay much attention to the change. He didn’t really want to.

He had his share of guy friends at that age. In fact, Bret was even starting to find friends outside of his normal circle. When I say outside his normal circle I guess I mean outside of his gender. There was a girl named Amanda. To Bret she was what I suppose you could call a girl (notice the space) friend. They lived across the street from each other and saw each other pretty much every day. In fact, back when he began using the telephone, the first number he learned was hers. He could dial it almost as fast as the speed dial. They developed a friendship like no other. They would ride their bikes down to the school playground, they wrote fake letters to the president, explored the creek behind their houses, all the stuff that kids do. But in fifth grade things seemed like they were turning into somthing more.

So when Bret told Amanda about his thoughts on the matter he was surpised when she responded with nothing but a blank stare. They had always told each other everything. This was the first and only time when Bret would ever regret it. She was probably right though. They were friends, and had been so for a long time. It’d be too weird to change that now.

Of course Bret realized years later that he shouldn’t have been surpised when their frienship slowly ebbed away into nothingness. Even in the small town he was in there were still enough “other guys” to catch Amanda’s attention. But as Bret moved into high school he made new friends. A number of these friends were, ironically, girls. These girls were people that would be special to him throughout high school and a long period afterwards, even now. Two especially. Their names were Olivia and Lauren.

Now I have to admit I’m unaware as to exactly how they became friends. They were not in the same classes, they were not at the same lunch, and they weren’t even at recess with him in his younger days. The only times they saw each other was at school between classes. But they did talk on the phone almost everyday. They became closer and closer as the weeks and months passed.

Interestingly enough, Bret had a number of other female (just) friends too. Perhaps surprisingly, a lot of them were pretty popular. And most of them were quite pretty as well. Bret wasn’t ugly by any means, but he had never really been able to get into the “popular crowd” – at least when it concerned the other guys.

But Bret had found his niche with the girls. He would be “the friend”, and a good one at that. Always kind and understanding, always willing to help. But while the couple on the screen walked down a beach and the sound of the waves came through the Bose speakers just like they came through his window every morning, he realized that his self-proclaimed title was something he despised. And no matter how nice of a house it was and no matter how nice of a neighborhood it sat in, it was still a block away from where he wanted to be.