John Paul Bramer

I never wanted to ask for too much.

So my grand plan for us both was we would continue being best buds until one of us died.

We would move to the city where we would both get jobs and wives, of course, and we could be neighbors, and I could survive off the scraps of affection that he sometimes offered me behind closed doors.

And now that, to me, was dreaming big.

A miserable year like this went by.

Then came the summer after we graduated high school.

I was going to OU about an hour and a half away, and Corey was going to the community college in town.

I didn't know how to tell him how terrified I was at the idea of being apart from him.

I mean, I didn't know what daily life looked like without this guy.

I'd memorized all four of his orders at all four of the restaurants in town.

We knew each other's deepest secrets.

We were each other's deepest secret.

But we didn't have the language to talk about that.

So we didn't.

We just kept doing what we always did.

We kept hanging out, we kept fooling around, and we kept going on hikes.

One of these hikes was Elk Mountain, a two and a half mile trail that we'd done probably dozens of times before.

But that day when we did it, we ran into something out of the ordinary, something really cute.

First came the big wet nose, then two bulbous eyes, then the fuzzy reddish hair, a precious baby bison.

And now this, to be clear, was a death sentence.