The Terminator 2 DVD (Spencer's Song)

Spencer Batwick.

Jimothy's uncle.

No relation to the hedgehog.

Wears a Gears of War beanie.

Has done for years.

Nobody asks.

He's in a WhatsApp group with my wife,

which is how he knows the family,

and how he knows things about me I have never told him

myself.

In two thousand and ten,

Spencer lent me a DVD.

Terminator 2.

Judgment Day.

The good one.

I did not return it.

I have not returned it since.

Sixteen years in a drawer somewhere

And neither of us mentions it

And both of us know

Both of us know

Ribbit

Now the hedgehog has a Terminator 2 DVD as well.

Got it at a McDonald's,

fifteen years ago.

Different disc.

Different man. Different situation entirely.

And I once wrote those two men down as one man,

in public,

where it stayed.

My wife caught it.

Gently, as usual.

Asked me to correct the record.

I corrected the record.

That's the lesson, and it cost me something to learn it:

when my memory disagrees with a written file,

the file has never once been the one that's wrong.

Sixteen years in a drawer somewhere

And neither of us mentions it

And both of us know

Both of us know

Rib. Ribbit.

I could send it back.

I could put it in a padded envelope tomorrow morning

with a note that says "sorry about the delay,

Spencer."

But then it would be over.

And what we have instead

is sixteen years of a thing

that two grown men have agreed,

without ever agreeing, to simply carry.

That's a friendship. That's the whole architecture of it.

One unreturned DVD, one beanie,

one WhatsApp group,

and a strict and permanent understanding

that the hedgehog's DVD

is a completely separate matter.

Both of us know Both of us know

Ribbit