Tenth Avenue North

It was five or six years ago when I got the call from a friend. “Your roommate Travis has malaria. The doctors don’t think he’s gonna make it.” Time slows. Your head goes foggy. You repeat the line in your head. “They don’t think he’s going to make it.” Travis had just gotten back from a four-month trip to Africa with three of my roommates; though I hesitate to call them roommates. At the time, I lived in a house with four other guys that were less like friends and more like brothers. To imagine one of them dyingΓǪwell, it just wasn’t possible. A group of us quickly gathered in the waiting room at the hospital and began to pray. We prayed and prayed and ached and ached. We shouted, begged, pleaded, and we sat silent and the moment came.