He tried to think up an ironclad excuse not to go to the party, but he knew that none bore the right suit of armor to withstand the future attacks of his own guilty conscience, so he went. The most solid excuses, after all, must always be the ones we tell ourselves. He was quickly glad about his lack of imagination when it came to talking himself out of it. It was, after all, a going away party for a friend, and while he desperately hated goodbyes, he did love milestones. He loved being able to look back and say, “that’s when that ended.”

The impact of the departure hit home when they began watching old videos. Cliché, for sure, but if clichés never happened or were edited out of life, the average day would be twenty minutes long. Only one of the fold was leaving, but she was taking with her a gateway to other people and experiences he suddenly realized he would miss. It was only when, a few years before, it was all the only life he faced every weekend that he despised it. The videos reminded of him of what a dead end life it felt like to him to be at the time. As he watched, he refused to give into the persuasive, warped magic of nostalgia that’s made him rewrite his own history so many times before. But of course that didn’t last long. He thought about all those countless weekends in a house containing no one over 30, making up games with ping pong balls and cups of beer, drunkenly playing instruments in the garage, watching people be thrown in the pool. And all those camping trips when they went to places where he could see the stars again, even though he swore they didn’t look the same. Back then he was still young enough to find novelty in the dulling down of things.

He stayed a polite amount of time and piggybacked his goodbye onto another guest’s who had luckily chosen that moment to leave. Only a year before his drive home would have been much farther, now that he moved out of the valley. Then again, all his friends moved out of the valley, so his drive home would have in fact but much shorter a year ago. He got home and checked his mail. A Spin magazine, wrapped in plastic for some strange reason. Ah, because it’s accompanied with a letter asking him to renew his subscription. He ripped off the plastic and made a snap decision to cast the letter away with it into the trashcan. Somehow it felt like a time for letting the subscriptions run out on things. Not a decision to bring on an ending, more a lack of action that creates an absence of renewal. And that’s a different thing entirely.