The next few days were like that for Charlie. He went about the room clearing out trash that he looked at with new eyes. On his third day, he sank to his knees and realized that in some corners, it was eye level. “How?! How?! How did I become this?! How did it come to this?! How long was I...gone?!” He asked himself, sometimes in hushed whispers, sometimes in regret, sometimes they were mere thoughts, but when his treadmill arrived, that was his break from cleaning.

‘It’s probably for the best that all that stuff couldn’t be shipped together…’ He thought as he grunted with the effort of hauling the waste down the stairs on his fifth trip of that afternoon. Insects were swept up into the bag with everything else, and he could hear them crawling, scratching, scrambling around, confused while he destroyed their homes and desperate to escape from his indifference.

Charlie grunted with effort while he pushed the bag into the green bin outside, it landed with a clang and broke a glass bottle which tore open the bag, he lingered just long enough to see the bugs scatter over the dark, dirty, grimy place like they’d found themselves in a paradise.

Then he returned to his apartment, turning the handle to his door and entered again. Charlie unboxed the treadmill on his bed, slicing the tape off and sliding it out, he dropped the box out the window to the bin below and looked around the room. ‘I need a little more space… but really not much more. I’m getting there!’

It was a heady moment that brought a smile to his face that was truly genuine. ‘If I keep at it, maybe in a week or so I can actually have people over.’ For a moment he closed his eyes at the potential, a TV properly in place, music playing through speakers, a little playful flirtation, and some good wine.

“First though, I have to make ‘friends’ with them again.” Charlie grumbled a little bit at that, rebuilding his life as it was, proved difficult. They ran each time and left him behind, but each day he got a little better. He reached down to his gut, it was definitely still there. ‘But progress… with time even water can carve a canyon. Though I don’t exactly have millions of years.’

His thoughts turned to Judy’s last biting comment, “My turn to run off.” She’d laughed when she said it, but it clearly stung her that he ignored them for so long. Her comments were usually like that, “Running isn’t hard. You just ‘go’, you’re good at that.” or when he’d asked if they minded if he lay a short route that he could manage one day, “Just do what you want, that’s your whole thing, isn’t it?”

The remarks were cutting, frequent, and the more he thought, the more it seemed to mean more collectively than any one of them on their own.

He was still thinking about it while he worked at prying off the foam packing and other debris and throwing it away out the window and down to the bin below, when a thought came to him. ‘It’s not like I wanted to be… for things to be like…’ He looked around, at the ruins he was trying to clear out ‘to be like this.’

‘Wait… did I… did I ever make that clear? I just… I walked up like nothing happened and just expected them to let me back in if I bought them coffee…’ Charlie froze in mid-motion, box cutter still halfway through a piece of tape holding the warranty to the black tread material.

“Fine, I’ll make it right.” Charlie promised himself.

“Phone… where’s my phone…” rushed over to the wall, kicking aside garbage, his fat fingers flailed and legs kicked like he was trying to stay afloat in the sea, until he caught sight of the little white cable, grabbed it, and followed it with his trembling fingers until he found the device.

For a moment the phone was a blur through the sheen of water in his eyes, over nine hundred missed calls.

He hit the code and then held the button for the auto assistant before tossing the phone onto the bed. “Group call, Hash House Harriers.” Charlie commanded and went back to peeling away the tape which he crinkled into a ball before snatching up the manual and warranty paperwork and crinkling that up as well.

The ringing noise on speaker went on for several breathless seconds before a friendly voice picked up.

“Charlie! What’s up! You ‘found’ your phone again did you?!” Josef said in a voice so cheery that Charlie could see the smile even without the video chat.

“Yeah… I kind of did, I thought I’d, ‘reach out and touch someone’.” he chuckled at the old slogan reference.

“Ah, sure, first invent that technology, and then you can do that, but what’s up?” Josef asked, and Charlie suppressed a sigh.

“It’s an old slogan, Josef, I was cracking a joke.” Charlie replied.

“Uh huh, and you’re bad at that, so… what’s up?” Josef said dryly before repeating the question.

“Okay, so I called the group, but you’re the only one who picked up… I want… I want to explain, I owe them an explanation, I owe them an apology. I bailed on them all-”

“Charlie, you can’t tell them the full truth, you know that.” Josef said, suddenly serious.

“No… but I can give them close to it. They deserve to know why one of the HHH who started all that, just ran off, I know they’re not mad about me leaving for work. We’ve all got careers, well… they all have careers. I don’t anymore. But what happened after that… I just want to make things as right as I can… I hate to ask you for anything, but can you get them over to my place?”

Charlie asked the question rhetorically, he knew how that would go.

“You bet. When?” Josef asked.

“Are they working today?” Charlie asked.

“Charlie… it’s Friday. Nobody works on Fridays, you know that.” Josef answered.

Charlie frowned. “Ah… if you say so, yeah just today is good, if it’s not too much trouble, can I have them over all at once? This won’t be easy for me to say and I don’t know if I can do it multiple times.”

“Course. Just ah… promise me you’ll be showered and dressed, funky won’t fly.” Josef pointed out.

“You’ve seen my apartment, Josef.” Charlie replied with withering self criticism.

“Yeah, just… don’t make it worse.” Josef retorted.

“Point taken.” Charlie replied.

“I thought it would be.” Josef chuckled a bit and the phone call disconnected.

Charlie did as Josef suggested, he opened the shower door and stepped inside, turned the water on, cleaned up as quickly as he could. Every motion of scrubbing and rinsing was accompanied by a composed speech in his head of explanation and apology, until he killed the water, confident that he knew what to say. Once out, he dried himself with a long thick blue towel and went to the box on his bed and opened up the one that would contain some of his clothing. He held up the big round waisted underwear and jeans a few minutes later and reluctantly put them on with a hopeful glance at the treadmill before he put on his new shirt.

Josef was true to his word, an hour later Charlie heard a knock on his door, before he could say anything or walk over to it, he could hear Judy’s caustic voice.

“This better not be a waste of time, Josef, I wasted enough of my time on him before he took off and forgot that I- we- existed.”

“Judy, c’mon,” Josef’s muffled voice had gone up a little, like this wasn’t her first complaint, “just trust me, alright.”

The grumbling that followed his request for trust was not Judy’s alone.

‘You can do this… you can do this, you can do this, you can do this, you can do this… you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this!’ Charlie was repeating the words in his head on a loop, keeping his quiet thoughts as loud as he could and shouting at himself to show some balls. He sucked in his teeth, took a deep, heavy breath, and reached for the knob of his door.

He turned, it clicked, and he opened the door.

Their chattering outside went stonily silent as soon as they saw him, before he could even speak to welcome them or say hello.

The speech he’d been writing and rehearsing in his head, it was gone.

Instead, devoid of smile, grin, or happy welcome, he stepped aside, ignoring the pile of garbage he was disturbing when he moved to one side to make way for them.

“Come in… I won’t ask you to stay long, I promise you.” Charlie said as they universally grabbed and pinched their noses shut against the smell.

“I just have a few things to say… and then… whatever you want to do is fine.” Charlie didn’t meet their eyes, but it was no surprise at all that Josef was the one to take the first step into the room.

But it was a surprise when Judy was the second.