“Sure,” Rhett said as he grabbed our pizza. “What’s up?”
“How did you come to join the Navy?”
We sat the pizza down, claiming a table for ourselves before we went to get drinks.
“It was something I sort of fell into,” Rhett said.
“What do you mean?”
“At the expense of dredging up old memories, in high school I didn’t know what I wanted. I had you and I had sports, but that was about it. I didn’t feel like I had a purpose or a direction, and the Navy convinced me they could give me that,” he said.
“So, you just left and enlisted?” I asked.
“Essentially. I went through basic and got stronger. My athleticism was singled out while I was there. I was encouraged by one of the guys at my side to try out for the SEALs, so I did. I didn’t expect to get through their training or anything, but I did. Every task they threw at me, I was able to accomplish, and they recruited me.”
“That’s incredible, Rhett. Really.”
“It’s not very exciting. It was a career that was born from an ignorant boy who didn’t know what he had or what he wanted.”
His eyes hooked on mine, waiting for my reaction as I nodded.
“What are you going to do now?” I asked.
“Hm?”
“You said you recently retired, right?”
“Oh. Yeah, I did. I felt like my time there was up. I’d seen enough horrible shit in my time to know when I’d hit my limit. And I did.”
“I can’t even imagine the things you must have seen and lived through,” I said.
“Don’t worry yourself about that. It comes with the territory. I’m alive, which is more than I can say for some of the guys I served alongside.”
I saw a sadness creep up into his eyes. It was new for me because I had always remembered Rhett as a smiling teenage boy who loved running around with his group. He was always the one settling my mind in high school whenever I got too wound up about my writing or about what college I was going to. When I was overly stressed with exams or finals or worrying about having enough extracurricular activities on my resume, he was the one taking my hand and trying to get me to settle down.
Now, I could see a wave of memories threatening to encompass him. I reached for his hand and took it, curling my fingers around his. It seemed to snap him back because his eyes lowered to mine and stopped scanning the crowd behind my back.
“What about you?” Rhett asked.
“What about me?” I asked.
“Your writing career. Walk me through it,” he said.
“I thought you kept tabs on me.”
“I still want to hear about it,” he said.
“Well, after I graduated from Cornell, I found a paid internship at The New York Times. It didn’t pay much, but it gave me a chance to write for one of the most popular publications in the country. I wrote a piece about a year in on the plight of the millennials and how the ideals of the baby boomer generation are sinking us, and I won an award for it.”
“That’s awesome,” he said with a smile. “Did you win any other ones?”
“Any other awards?”
“Yeah. Your writing is incredible. I’m sure there are others.”
“Not too many. I used the momentum of that award to catapult my blog, and that’s why it did so well so quickly. My blog gets a lot of recognition and link backs on other blogs, but that’s about it. I did write one blurb on my blog when I was angry one night about how gentrification is creating a wider gap between lower middle class and upper middle class, and that got a lot of attention.”
“I assume it probably pissed some people off too,” he said.