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☆ 𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝟷: 𝙱𝚎𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝙴𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐.
I used to know the exact sound of his footsteps.
Not in a poetic way. Not the kind people write about where everything becomes a metaphor. I mean literally. If I was in the kitchen and he came up the stairs to my apartment, I could tell it was him before he even knocked. His steps were heavier than everyone else’s in the building, slightly uneven, like he was always taking them two at a time but reconsidering halfway through.
It’s a strange thing, the details your brain keeps.
Not the important moments. Not the big declarations. Just the small, physical facts of someone who used to exist beside you.
Like the way he pushed his hair back with the heel of his hand when he was thinking. Or how he said my name when he was about to argue with me. Or how he smelled faintly like flour and tomato sauce when he came home from work.
He worked at a pizza place three blocks from campus.
That was how we met.
Freshman year of college is a strange kind of loneliness. You’re surrounded by people all the time and still feel like you’re floating slightly outside of everything. Everyone is performing a version of themselves they think they’re supposed to be. Loud, interesting, confident.
I wasn’t.
I spent most nights studying or wandering around Chicago by myself, trying to feel like I belonged somewhere inside the city.
One night I went into that pizza place because it was open late.
He was my waiter.
He had the same hair he still has now, thick and ridiculous, like it had its own opinions about gravity. And he was wearing a wrinkled black apron and looked deeply uninterested in being there.
He dropped a menu in front of me and said, “Just so you know, the pizza is good, but the garlic knots are the real reason people come here.”
I looked up at him and said, “Are you allowed to admit that?”
He shrugged.
“They pay me eight dollars an hour. I’m not sworn to secrecy.”
I ordered the garlic knots.
When he came back with them he asked what I was studying.
I asked what he was doing working there.
He told me he was an actor.
Not in the dramatic way people say it when they’re trying to impress you. More like it was an embarrassing fact he had to admit out loud.
“I mean,” he said, scratching the back of his neck, “I’m trying to be one.”
I remember thinking he seemed too normal for that.
Not in a bad way. Just in the sense that actors, in my mind at the time, were people who seemed aware they were being watched. People who moved through rooms like the world was a stage.
He didn’t.
He knocked into the corner of a table while bringing someone their soda and muttered “shit” under his breath like he hoped no one noticed.
When I paid the bill he leaned on the counter and said, “You should come back.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Is that because of the garlic knots?”
“No,” he said. “Because you’re the only person tonight who hasn’t asked me for ranch dressing.”
I went back two days later.
Then again the next week.
Eventually he started sitting in the booth with me when the place was slow.
His name was Joe Keery.
At the time it was just Joe.
He was a year older than me and studied theater but complained about half his classes. He talked about movies constantly, half analyzing them and half complaining about them. He auditioned for things sometimes. Commercials. Small roles. Student films.
Nothing that paid much.
I remember once asking him if it was scary.
“Trying to be an actor?”
He thought about it.
“Not scary,” he said. “Just statistically humiliating.”
We started dating without really deciding to.
It happened slowly, the way most real relationships do. One night he walked me home from the pizza place. Another night we ended up watching a movie in my apartment. At some point he left a toothbrush in my bathroom and neither of us commented on it.
The first time he kissed me was outside a bar near campus.
It was late fall and freezing and we had both been drinking cheap beer with our friends. When we stepped outside the cold air hit us and he laughed and said, “God, Chicago is aggressive.”
Then he looked at me like he had just realized something.
And kissed me.
It was not cinematic.
His nose bumped mine. We both laughed halfway through it.
But afterward he looked so pleased with himself that I couldn’t stop smiling.
We dated for three years.
Looking back, those years feel smaller than they actually were. As if memory has folded them into something compact.
But at the time they were our entire lives.
We were broke. College broke.
Shared groceries. Cheap wine. Secondhand furniture.
Joe worked almost every evening at the pizza place and auditioned during the day. Sometimes he got small jobs. A commercial for something forgettable. A single line in a show no one watched.
I remember the first time I saw him on television for maybe six seconds.
He called me immediately afterward.
“Did you see it?”
“I did,” I said.
“Was I good?”
“You were… amazing!.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Stop doubting yourself. You were awesome.”
He groaned.
But he was smiling. I could hear it.
At night he practiced lines in front of the mirror in my apartment while I studied at the kitchen table.
Sometimes he got frustrated.
“This industry is insane,” he said once, throwing a script onto the couch. “They told me I wasn’t ‘approachable enough.’ What does that even mean?”
“You’re very approachable,” I said.
“You’re biased.”
“I’m correct.”
We built a quiet life around each other without realizing we were doing it.
Sunday mornings meant coffee and bagels from the shop on the corner. Weeknights meant falling asleep halfway through movies because we were both exhausted.
My grandparents liked Joe.
That might not sound remarkable, but it was.
They had raised me, which meant they had strong opinions about the people I spent time with. I had never actually introduced anyone I dated to them before. Joe was the first.
My grandmother liked him immediately.
My grandfather took a little longer.
He watched Joe carefully the first few times we had dinner together, asking quiet questions about school, work, what he planned to do after graduation. Joe answered all of them with the same slightly nervous honesty he used with everyone.
Eventually my grandfather seemed satisfied.
That Christmas they gave him an acoustic guitar.
Not an expensive one. Just a simple wooden thing from a small music shop a few blocks from their house.
“Every actor should know at least three songs,” my grandfather said when Joe opened the case.
Joe looked genuinely stunned.
“I don’t even know how to play,” he admitted.
My grandmother smiled.
“Then you’ll learn.”
For weeks afterward he sat on the floor of my apartment practicing the same clumsy chords until his fingers hurt.
Sometimes we talked about the future.
Not in a serious way.
More like a game.
“What if you become a huge actor,” I said once, “and forget about me completely.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Why?”
He looked at me like the answer was obvious.
“Because I wouldn’t want to forget you.”
I shrugged.
“You’d regret if you did.”
Then, one afternoon during our third year together, he called me while I was in the library.
His voice sounded strange.
Not upset.
Not excited.
Just… stunned.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I think something just happened.”
“What kind of something?”
There was a pause.
“I think I just got a part.”
I sat up in my chair.
“Like a part, part?”
“A real one,” he said slowly.
He explained it in fragments.
A show.
A role that was supposed to be small but might grow.
Filming in Atlanta.
He didn’t even seem convinced it was real yet.
The show was called Stranger Things.
At the time it meant nothing to either of us.
That night we celebrated with takeout and cheap champagne.
Joe kept shaking his head like he couldn’t believe it.
“It’s probably nothing,” he said. “These things fail all the time.”
“Don’t say that,” I said. “This is amazing, Joe.”
“I don’t even know if I’m ready.”
“You,” I said, kissing him once, “are more,” I kissed him again before finishing the sentence, “than ready.”
He left to film a few weeks later.
At the airport he hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.
“I’ll be back before you know it,” he said.
I believed him.
For a while everything was fine.
We called constantly.
He told me stories about the set. About the kids in the cast. About how weird it felt to have a trailer with his name on it.
Then the calls became less frequent.
Not dramatically.
Just slowly.
Life filled the spaces between them.
When he finally came back to Chicago months later, the first thing I noticed was that he looked different.
Not physically.
Just… slightly out of rhythm with the life we had before.
Like someone who had spent time in another world and hadn’t fully returned yet.
We lasted two more weeks after that.
The night we broke up was quiet.
He sat on the edge of my couch and stared at the floor for a long time before speaking.
“This isn’t working,” he said eventually.
It wasn’t angry.
Or cruel.
Just final.
I remember asking, “Because of the show?”
He shook his head.
“No. Because everything is changing.”
I waited for him to say something else.
He didn’t.
So I nodded.
And that was that.
The strange thing about heartbreak is that it doesn’t end when the relationship does.
For a while we stayed in touch.
Birthday messages.
“Happy New Year.”
The occasional “How are you?”
For three years it continued like that.
Then one year I sent him a birthday text and he didn’t respond.
Not out of malice, I guess.
Just silence.
And eventually the silence became permanent.
Ten years had passed since the break up.
Long enough for entire lives to change shape.
Long enough for the boy from the pizza place to become someone the whole world recognized.
People talked about him constantly.
My coworkers mentioned him sometimes when they were discussing movies or television.
I never said anything.
To them he was a celebrity.
To me he was someone who once fell asleep halfway through making spaghetti in my kitchen.
By the time I moved to New York, he had become something abstract.
Famous faces on magazine covers.
Songs released under the name Djo.
Interviews.
Awards.
A person visible everywhere.
And nowhere near my life.
There were other things that happened during those ten years.
Real things.
My grandparents died.
Losing them felt like losing gravity, like the center of the world had quietly disappeared.
Joe never knew.
By then we were strangers.
The only pieces of his life that remained connected to mine were quiet ones.
His mother still texted me on my birthday.
One of his sisters occasionally sent me funny photos.
Sometimes when they were in the city visiting, we even had dinner together.
We never mentioned Joe.
It felt unnecessary.
Now I live in New York.
I work as an art curator in a gallery in TriBeCa.
My days are filled with paintings, installations, and conversations about lighting, composition, and donors.
My coworkers like to gossip about actors.
Sometimes his name came up.
I never reacted.
As far as anyone there knew, he was just another celebrity.
Not someone whose footsteps I could once recognize on the stairs.
And most days, I didn’t think about him at all.
Time had done what time does best.
It had taken something that once felt enormous and slowly turned it into a memory.
Or at least that’s what I believed.