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Confessions work, right? There has to be a real psychological benefit to admitting the things you’ve done wrong. Maybe wrong isn’t the right word. ‘Guilty’ might work better for the depth of gross friend-incompetence I feel in this moment: the embarrassment over every small thing I have said to him since, the explicit repetition of the event whenever I try to sleep, the cringe from any mention of the trip or the city. It is murder.
I’ve done regretful things before, the mark of any past teenage boy. For the sake of (horrific) example, I once attempted to jerk off using toothpaste. Yes. As if Crest was some secret lube company waiting to be discovered, I selected to test it out. After all, toothpaste couldn’t be that bad if it doesn’t hurt your teeth.
I discovered that it burned. Badly. And I was sixteen, so there was no actual excuse to grasp for. Around that same time, I used to bully people over the Internet. Same idea, except I wasn’t hurting myself. People I never knew the name of received random one-star reviews from some unearthly monster by the username of ‘OneyNG.’ And these weren’t individual reviews; Skype groups, forums, and private messages would relay these low-quality (not even terrible) animations to every guy on the website whose pride was stroked by the idea of having more than a thousand fans.
We thought we were hot shit. Our superiority had to be reflected in the numbers near our username --- without those digits, what else would we rely on? Skill, talent? Talent was a thing for losers. I still cringe when someone calls me a ‘savant’ or a ‘genius’ or something masturbatory like that. I’m not a god. I just got on the website at the right time and had the right margin of dick jokes to sandwich myself into the community. Talent isn’t being timely, it’s making great work, and Zach still can’t accept that. He’s the fucking savant! Yet he acts like I’m his boss or his superior. It’s stupid. He can draw and understand politics and fucking navigate social situations, but I’m somehow --- anyways.
You can’t learn that you’re doing something badly if you don’t ask someone about it. Regret doesn’t settle in until you hit that axis of ‘oh shit other people would see what I’m doing as wrong’, and it doesn’t continue on unless you have the concrete blanket of ‘they will either never know about it or always know.’ No one needs to know about the toothpaste incident, but I do. And the kids who got blammed by an army of kids following some idiotic Irish teenager will be stuck with that virtual motion sickness forever. I can wish as hard as possible that they forget about it, or that they don’t care anymore, yet I’ll never get that sort of satisfaction. I wish I could hear their forgiveness, their forgetting. I wish I kept my words to myself.
After a tangent of self-hate, I must ask myself: what the fuck am I going to do? I throw myself into these situations constantly, little paths of mystery that lead a few ways. I trust these paths to be clear enough: my choice between an espresso and a latte at Starbucks will (relatively) lead to the same destination of energy and crash. Apologizing to Stamper instead of trying to convince him it’s his fault that the toilet broke, is the better option. Waking up at 3 PM is a bad path (but I do it anyway.) It’s all copasetic. I don’t live a life where I’m inherently in danger or challenged or anxious because I know I couldn’t deal with it. My job, my art, it’s all independent on purpose. It’s up to me.
But, danger’s a loose definition. ‘Risk’ is better; I’m currently living with a risk. Through a series of long-winded and suspiciously passionate friendships, the path I’m on holds an uncertainty that won’t disappear. He won’t give up at all. He’d walk nine thousand miles across the planet to deliver me a coffee in the morning.
Zach’s not a difficult element of my life by any means, I’m not saying that. He’s the best part of my life, if I’m being honest. He’s so...have you ever held up your hand against a stained glass window? Those windows at church that would scatter rainbows across the pews, onto the hats and faces of people sitting. I remember them dearly.
I hated going to church as a kid. It was naturally boring, singing and repeating phrases for an hour of possible playtime, so I’d come up with some game to entertain myself. Find everything red in the room, daydream a dramatic story to reenact with my toys later, search for the worst name in the Bible, et cetera. One Sunday, like every other Sunday, what seemed like hundreds of families shook off their umbrellas and rolled into the pews.
Yet, none of us expected the newly installed stained-glass window arched behind the altar. The scintilla of color leaked onto the wooden seats in the front. I recall my mom gasping, but that might’ve been my reaction; I’d never seen color like it. I didn’t have to convince my parents at all to sit us in the front row, if anything, we sprinted there. I wanted to hold the color. I knew it’d be warm.
Anyways, the simile is this. I’d stick my tiny hand under the ray, and I’d be dazed for forever. The way it slipped between my fingers, the waning of green to purple to red to yellow, how it made my skin look like an alien: I could’ve sat in there for hours. It didn’t change how terribly boring the church was as a whole, nor did the colors permanently imprint themselves on my skin. They just danced with me for a few moments, changing the way I regarded art forever, and knew to leave when I did. Windows let us see out, but stained-glass ones let us admire the world for one minute. We may not be able to see out all the way, but that’s the point: we’re allowed to see the promising filter of the outside world instead of its vile reality. Glass with some dye in it allows us to dream.
Zach’s my stained glass window. He enhances everything I make without any sort of force. His down-to-earth light shines upon lucky assholes like me and I have the highest privilege in the world that it does. He’s brilliant, and shocking, and hilarious, and constantly the most charitable person in a room. Hearing his voice everyday is like having a special comfort blanket for yourself, one that makes you ponder and dream for a few hours more every night. I have no restraint in saying that he has improved me in every single way, and that I’m always in his debt for the compassion he’s shown me.
The confession I’m about to make tests this connection. Admittedly, I’ve never been neck-deep in this level of palpable grey area. I can’t let this regret continue on until I know exactly what the hell happened, and what I’m going to do to alleviate it. Two paths lie ahead: explain everything to myself, steam about it for a day, and explain the situation to him after I make a conclusion; or angrily die alone in my room and let the flies from Cory’s room feast upon my corpse. I wonder if the guys would notice, or if they’d assume I was jerking off or something. Maybe dying with this secret would be better --- no, then it’s all too complex. Here it is. Chris’ big, enchanting, terrible tale ---
All I remember thinking in my head is that I became the risk. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe we both were two cars ready for head-on collision. I can’t figure it out. I should tell the story first, maybe. Or, how about: no more ‘maybe.’ This is factual from here on. Peppered with my (disgusting) feelings, but true.
The streets were slick, and the sky was black. I don’t remember every detail of the city, probably because we were sprinting through it, our footsteps like the raindrops popping off of the sidewalk. The weather inspired high kneed steps to keep from splashing in puddles, which evolved into a full sprint around (and into) people walking past. I learned very quickly that I was not a runner. I can’t even walk straight on a normal day.
I first complained, using excuses like ‘dude, what if I hurt my knee before we get there?’ and ‘oh my god that would be so embarrassing around other people’, but Zach resisted this with ‘oh my god dude wouldn’t it be so fun?’ and ‘dude please, when are we gonna get a chance like this again?’ His words weren’t sarcastic either --- I shivered from the puppy-dog eyes and stubbornness of his inebriated voice.
I only submitted because I thought it would get us to Jon’s house faster. It didn’t. It took us an hour longer to realize we were lost after we went two blocks too far, and another year to retrace our steps. I believe, in any other state of consciousness, the two of us would be infuriated at each other, and I would’ve left him at the nearest SubWay if it meant a pleasant stroll home. Yet, have you ever felt lighter ? Physically, like you’re not touching the ground beneath you.
It’s often a side effect of alcohol, of middle-school crushes, of telling a secret, and chiefly, the winged shoes of adrenaline. I had the esteemed honor of experiencing all that and more in one fateful mile. The airiness in my heart became something of a runner’s high, a carrot on a stick to Ol’ Chris. I couldn’t leave Zach, we had to get home , and we had a job to do: get there fast. His drunken trips on the sidewalk and the tiny, embarrassed laughs were an incentive to keep going (not like he would know that anyway.)
So, we chased each other through Manhattan. We ran like two tryhards in a high school PE class, and the joke only became funnier and funnier every time we paused at a streetlight. The suits and ties were maybe not the best choice for running, a product of the party we attended an hour before, which tightly squished everything and made our sprinting motions look far more hilarious. Oh, and the way we communicated: few to no words were passed between us. I’d label us both as introverts, shy kids who had louder, cooler siblings, and in this similarity, we speak telepathically.
Zach’s better at it than me, a (failed) theatre kid, with his shifting eyes that signal ‘I actually despise this asshole’ and his shrugs that scream ‘please get me out of here.’ My body language is concrete and obvious, nothing to analyze about it. I have a resting bitch face, but not in the Kanye West way -- in the Michael Cera way. A ‘bitch’ whose rosacea was on the verge of criminality. If I’m rejected, I’ll look visibly crestfallen. Zach acts like a brilliant psychologist when he asks me ‘what’s wrong?’ before I have verbally prompted the question. It’s charming.
In every way, no dialogue was needed between the brilliant artist and the idiot with the blushing face. We knew neither of us were going to stop running until the other did. We knew this was a dumb choice. And we knew that whatever was in our drinks that night would’ve kept us drunk until 7 AM. We silently bonded in that joy, the hushed glances over at the other’s face, the attempts to catch our breath. The moon was our only witness.
I can’t count, and we zoomed straight past 28th because I thought it said 26th. You may ask: how are you supposed to read street signs if you’re running? Good point. You can’t. I was the soul entrusted to lead us to Jon’s house, the one who diligently repeated his address when he told it to us, but it slipped my mind in the exhilaration of our adventure. I’d blame Zach if he forced me to run with him, but he didn’t. He merely flashed me puppy-dog eyes and promised happy memories. I merely swooned.
I detest running, which may be half the reason I forgot how long it took us: drunkenness, and a need to emotionally blot the exercise out. I hate the way it makes you feel heavy and strained. To a non-runner, it feels like your insides are being sucked out through a paper straw, and your knees are turned into sawdust; as someone who sits down for nineteen hours a day, this is not preferable for me. If I shut my eyes and think, I can conjure up a memory of Zach opening the front door at nine AM, drenched in sweat and palpable depression.
Stamper jovially asked, “Did the kids on the playground try to run from you again?” Zach was too tired to create any retort and silently stumbled up the stairs. I never asked him about it, but I assume he was jogging the block when the house wasn’t awake yet. It seemed off-color for him then. This underlying skill came to light when he started to outpace me.
“Oh...my...god...fuck...you...dude…” I could barely get out a sentence, my lungs collapsing and my eyes darkening. Where the fuck is Jon’s house and why is it so far away? My competitor didn’t even turn his head --- he kept motoring on as if I was roadkill. “Hey! Hey...Za--” I adjusted my voice, fearful as I collided with an older lady, and sputtered out a curt, drunkenly sincere apology. A squeaking, swallowed laugh ahead of me let me know he didn’t run off. He watched me whimper over that poor woman.
Stumbling towards him, legs like spaghetti noodles, I heard, “‘Zaaaaaach, Zaaaaacharrry I want to go home, Zaaaaach let’s go get pizza babe...’” The motherfucker mocked me! Like I’m the one who thought running around was a productive idea! He watched me walk towards him, his face dressed with one of those perfect grins produced only in the ecstasy of (inebriated) ignorance.
Once I was within two feet of strangling him to death in pure exhaustion, he galloped -- yes, with the shuffling feet and hopping, no, not with the horse noises -- away from me in hysterical laughter. I didn’t have the energy to react to his antics. I decided to stare, staring at the poor and brilliant loser who was skipping around the sidewalk and casting dangerous smiles in my direction every few seconds, as if tonight was the funniest comedy special on earth.
I don’t recall what the fuck I was thinking as I looked at Zach. I do however, recall a stale mixture of arousal and puppy love zooming through my brain. It’s the catalyst of this haunting event, after all. A motherfucker galloping. Snorting for air after his run, yet still hyper on a few drinks.
Rethinking this situation, I briefly considered the possibility that I’m a closeted furry whose passions were ignited by my best friend sprinting around in circles. I then considered the thought, ‘Oh my god. That’s not true at all.’ So...crisis averted. I played it back in my brain a million times from every perspective on the street: my view, Zach’s view, the old lady’s view, the window view above us. It all didn’t add up to a thesis of why I did what I did. Or why he did it.
Maybe I thought it was cute. No, I thought it was adorable . Imagine yourself as the night, and look at him. He’s 5’10”, greasy-haired with a blushing face, in a suit that’s two sizes too big in the shoulders, and his smile is fuzzy, pulling tight at his cheeks whenever you smile back at him. You don’t hear much lip from him like you usually do, no, he speaks in laughter. In your corner of the world, your inability to tell a good joke about his weird movements is a harmony to his singing. He’s tripped over his feet two times, he’s using far too much hip, and he’s beckoning towards you to join him.
We probably should’ve died in the cold. I think that would’ve worked best, considering.
As all best friends do, I joined his galloping to absolve him of embarrassment. Now, whatever apartment tenant --- or omnipotent being --- above looking down upon us saw two crazy people running in circles on an empty, wet sidewalk. In hindsight, there was no real reason why we stayed in that certain area of the street. We might’ve wanted to be closer.
Every new giggle was an added hyphen to our sentence -- let’s stay here forever -- why are we doing this -- don’t stop babe, it’s -- Zach, oh my fucking god, stop -- Chris, let me have this dance, babe -- you’re a fucking nerd, y’know that -- says the loser who can’t walk more than twenty feet to the local Wawa . Finally, my head cooked up one coherent thought.
“That’s right, you…” I gasped a breath in, spinning out of the séance circle to catch myself from fainting and/or vomiting, “You bitch, you do it for me…” The inhale felt like swallowing a cup of insects.
“Huh?” The audible pause of his squeaky dress shoes left a dent in the world. I had to rely on the sound of passing cars to ground myself; I was kneeling at this point, black slacks on the dirty ground.
“You -- the coffees -- the cups. I know,” The explanation easily slid from my mouth without matter, but my heart started pounding the second I figured out what I said. The single thing I tried to cup quietly in my hands and lock in the shadows of my mind, slipped out like it was some sort of comeback. Like I hadn’t spent nights lying awake about that seven-word concept. As if I ‘knew.’
Zach didn’t respond, either because I was moments from gagging, or poked at something delicate. We gave each other a moment to wallow in the ‘out’ for this conversation, which wasn’t successful in our drunken minds. I could barely figure out how to get up --- four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out, four seconds hold.
After a moment, he whispered, “Yeah, okay.” I believe he meant to not say anything at all. I couldn’t bother myself over the weight of it though, dry-heaving out obscenities. It’s funny how rain never ends quite when you’d like it to; I would’ve appreciated not feeling like I’m in a shower as I narrowly avoid painting the sidewalk with vomit, but the weather didn’t cooperate. It became an accent to the terrible situation.
Silence, again. Zach eventually kneeled down beside me, and though I appreciated the gesture, all I could think about was the grade-school teachers who would do that if you were crying in class. The lean. I didn’t have the enthusiasm inside of me to keep dramatically lounging on the sidewalk, so I stood upright. “You’re okay,” he cheered, an accusation instead of a question. He shook off his shoulders and reached forward, wiping the rainy sweat off of my forehead. And then, like a flower reaching for the sun, I leaned my face into his neck.
I think it’s right at this moment where I forgot where we were going. Entirely. I forgot each custom and taboo, each right or wrong. There was no ‘Jon’s house’ then, because I didn’t need it. I was comfortable in the home of Zach and his cold yet warm, boney yet soft neck. I stayed there too, as if it was crafted single-handedly for me to rest upon. My nose pressed against the vein on the side of his neck, right where he seemed to store every spritz of musky cologne. I remember the way he shivered.
Forward, I know. Maybe, up until this point, he thought that I was significantly more drunk than him. This Chris just had too much to drink, and he’s anxious, and he needs a friend’s comfort. What, should he have been angry? His angriest response to someone putting their head on his shoulder would be an exasperated sigh. Should he have pushed me away the moment I tried it? Did I want him to push me away?
I don’t think I was more drunk than him. If anything, remembering the night is easy. My mind didn’t black out from any sense of common sense or logic. He, however, must’ve been more drunk than me if he doesn’t remember the following incidents, because if something like it happened to me, I would think about it constantly. He was the one running around town in useless circles; he must’ve been the one who was more suggestible. He had to be. I knew what I was doing when I put my head there, yet it wasn’t with any sort of perverted or bad intention. Yes, I wanted to kiss him, marry him, build the house we planned together as kids, but at that moment, I wanted only his presence. His inarticulate brilliance. His wordless warmth.
The shiver ran up his spine, skittering up to his fingertips in a perceptible jolt. He didn’t expect me to do that, and I’m sure he wasn’t envisioning the jump from ‘hapless idiot vomiting on street corner’ to ‘loving bro hug on the cusp of romanticism.’ I would’ve had a stroke if he did the same. I didn’t see the way his hands moved behind my head, but I saw his back slightly arch into me, tentatively. He was careful with this movement, and careful with placing a hand on my back, finger by finger. Each fingertip was a gift he was precisely giving in his own way.
While he slowly processed my position, I threw my arms around him. Rather than keep it to a hug, I rubbed my head deep into his neck. It was a stupid scheme. The thought process was if I make this action as grandma-like as possible, he’ll think this is just a friend's thing or a joke and forget about it entirely. Of course, it wasn’t that simplistic. It failed when he didn’t release his hand after five seconds of burying myself into him. As slow as possible, I picked up my head, and gave his back one pat as a signal of exit. Yet, when I started to peel myself from his grasp, Zach acted in a non-Zach way.
I couldn’t hear exactly what he said over the sounds of the cars. However, I definitely felt the sharp breath of his voice against my ear as I leaned away. He murmured, groaned something dulcet under his breath at the right volume for me to hear the tone. Intense. Oddly guttural, it sounded like he didn’t need to process what he was telling me, only that he needed to get the thought out of his head. He never spoke in that frame of voice to me --- maybe once, as a joke, but it was objectively a...an intimate voice. Zach couldn’t fake something like that that well.
Nervous in his hands, I stuttered out a laugh and tiptoed one step back. All I could say was, “Zach…” And he didn’t break eye contact for one second. The use of his name wasn’t a roll call of who stood before me, nor a scolding to he who was doing something ‘bad’; it was a confession. A drunken one, but a true one. There was nothing else to say at that moment. I would’ve never been able to fully admit any sort of crush to him without the façade of beer and laughter, and ‘Zach’ was an indefinite request. A ‘come hither.’ The streetlight caught just enough of his face to depict a tipsy smirk, and the closing of his eyes as he leaned into my face.
He missed. He didn’t touch my lips on his first try (acting on pure instinct, I guess.) I found his scruffy jaw under mine, and caught him kissing the corner of my mouth. He was drinking the excitement and the fragmented tension from me. And as passionate as I found it, I needed to help the drunken bastard. My dumb-hopefully-as-intoxicated-full-of-moxie-truly-enamored ass grabbed him by his chin with my thumb and index finger, guiding him to my lips. He stayed there for a year, forehead pressed perennially against mine.
It didn’t feel calming at all, which was the most shocking part. He tasted like vodka and skin. I probably tasted like sweat and asthma. My hand stayed on his chin, but less as a comfort, and more as a maneuver to keep his head from drooping. It was humid between our faces, unbearably warm in the strange gridlock of our arms, and sweat formed on my brow the moment he kissed me. Or, I kissed him. We stood, gently levitating from side-to-side, as we waited for the other to direct something more. Two games of solitaire leaned against each other, hoping to be played by one other.
In the strength and gravitas of a few too many, Zach took over the role. He leaned a little higher on his toes so he could reach about my height, made tiny noises at each movement, and his hands began to explore my suit. One tightened on the small of my back, snaking carefully under the blazer. It felt more like tickling than affection. I nearly giggled, but quickly 86’d the idea when I realized this was my one chance. One laugh could blow the whole relationship. But, I couldn’t stow away each emotion. I suddenly ripped myself away the second he started to turn his head in just the right way to touch my mouth, and pet that one part of my inner arm--
I gasped, “Wait,” and he paused. It was too perfect. It was too comfortable. I felt like I was about to fall into him and never quite get up. I must’ve been so horrified by the prospect of my dreams ‘working out’ that the panic rammed into me like a freight train. Fuck. The anxiety intensely rumbled in my hands and head. I felt like crumpling to the sidewalk once again. His arms unraveled from mine and the frigid rain once again clamped down upon me. It only invigorated the complete stop of the night’s inertia.
One quick glance at Zach. His jaw was tight, and he stared right through me; I could tell he was biting his tongue. He was holding back something that he wanted to say. To regain any sort of mental agency, any comfort, I looked away from Zach and at the window behind him. My lungs filled in and out, alone, voracious for his humidness again. He breathed through a sigh and delivered an unfiltered question.
“Do you...are you sure.” He needed clarification, but it thrummed in the back of his throat. He might’ve not wanted it.
A timer went off in my head as if it was an SAT question. Was the emphasis on ‘you’ in his question? If it was, that meant that he was the one with the qualms about this tragic situation. I’d be the sure one, the one who had a vision and a stake in this romantic attempt, and he’d be the asshole who ruined the friendship. To that, I had to respond ‘no’ or else he’d be embarrassed by himself. We’d have to walk home in separation, silent steps without direction. We’d probably never get there.
What if the emphasis was on ‘sure’? That makes him the one who’s safe in understanding his sexuality and his moral perimeters with his best friend. Though a reach, this may be his question. He, the assured one (whose decision-making skills were highly altered that night), would want to hear from me that I also would like to continue whatever was going on here. Whatever touching/feeling marathon was going on here, which was near impossible to translate. What the fuck do I say? The timer rang like fireworks.
I turned my head back to him and stared between his eyes. “Since forever.”
You would assume that rejection polarizes the heart stronger than anything else. Grief, tragedy, betrayal, being forgotten: they all encapsulate the complete refusal of yourself or a loved one. You are rejected from happiness, or the love of a loved one, or care. Nothing is for you. To be perceived as the guy he ‘has fun’ with, the friend, the companion, instead of the guy he fell in love with, is one of the worst feelings in the world. It settles in the back of your chest, from that first person in elementary school you slid the “yes or no” note to, to your creative muse, that one person in your career you never forget about.
Sometimes, when I dwell on this specific feeling too deeply, I have this dark, dark wish that my religious upbringing made me homophobic. Not in the ‘kill gay people’ way, or else my ass would be dead. I mean, enough to push down these emotions. I know in my heart that being gay isn’t a bad thing, but I also know it’s not nationally acclaimed or anything. If I was instructed to hate myself at the age of seven, it’d be a lot easier to see the ‘crushing on your male best friend’ thing as some sort of defect. A bug in the programming. Something to be concealed and confessed about, rather than a slight speed bump in the way I live my life. But it isn’t, and I know it isn’t. I was born like this. I’ll live like this, happily, if I get it right. But, rejection makes me feel like I’ll die this way.
Zach never turned me down. He didn’t, even though I’ve spent two years psyching myself up for him to reject me. “Sorry, but…” or “I don’t feel like…” never came. He instead doled out a collection of inscrutable emotional trinkets for me to muse over every night since this one. I told Zach “since forever” as if it would be the last thing he’d ever truly hear from me, and it felt like it when he looked at me.
His brow furrowed yet mouth perched open, cheeks red and eyes squinted, his expression was unplaceable. For the first time, I couldn’t understand what he was thinking. He seemed like he was calculating, but how could he be? He was drunk off his ass and must’ve realized in that moment that he made a mistake. Or, in that moment, he found out that the one secret he hid could very well become a lovely reality. Was he sure?
He stepped away from me first. Tentative again. The night, in retrospect, was a waltz of steps forward and backward. His eyes were still on me, but he turned away when he recognized I was waiting for his answer to the same question. He exhaled, scraped his feet on the ground, and kept walking. In surprise, I stood there for a minute, waiting for him to circle back and reveal his thoughts to me. He didn’t. It only took ten seconds of running to catch up to him on the other end of the block. Zach didn’t even turn his head when I met him at the corner.
The night was the soot and gunk and trash strewn in the nooks and crannies of buildings. Though the rain smothered the smell for an hour, it still rose. It wasn’t hidden for very long, and the scent ripped through any façade of a movie-like setting or happy ending. A moonlit confession. A kiss in the rain. The sweat on my neck. I wanted to vomit again, but this time, it was less of the beer and more of the embarrassment. He couldn’t even tell me, I thought. He’s too scared. He bitched out. Oh my god. Oh my god.
Nauseous and hyper, I searched for any sense of a comment, anything to fish this conversation from the depths of silence and incompleteness. Fuck, this pedestrian light takes forever! or Are you hungry? or Is your phone dead? We should get back to Jon’s. It all died on my tongue. I couldn’t. I couldn’t tip the balance. He said what he wanted to. He’s done. He doesn’t want to talk anymore. He doesn’t want to run. But, why is he so cold now? Why is he fearful of talking to me, when whatever happened a moment ago was the loveliest shit on Earth? When he started it?
We walked without words for another five minutes. Slosh, slosh, slosh. I felt the need to tell Zach that he could avoid the puddles he kept stepping into, but he probably didn’t want to hear it. His posture was bone-straight, and his eyes were trained forward into whatever abyss awaited. I tried to distract myself by gazing at everything else: the SubWay, the apartments with the lights still on at 2 AM, the shady conversations going on at night. The cigarette butts on the ground reminded me of the Sleepycabin house. I thought of Abington. I thought of Mick at home, whether he was awake and however the hell I was going to explain this situation to him.
He screamed. He was hunched over towards the ground like he was about to throw up, a few steps ahead of me, and shaking. The volume frightened me, a broken tone I’d also never heard from him before. Zach screamed, scared and awake, crazy and dazed, screamed out to the city, “Why couldn’t we have just fucking--talked about this...shit...forever-ago!!”
I watched Zach from afar. I didn’t know what to say to him. He stood up, shook his shoulders out like they were rocks, and kept walking.
So, we’ve kissed before. He won’t tell you this though, either because he’s too embarrassed of it happening, or he didn’t remember it happening. I pray, every time he’s spoken to me since then, that it’s the latter. Everything would be so simple if it was the latter. I’m not sure if I forced him to do anything, but it sure feels that way after three months of no mention about it. Nothing. He still brings me coffee every morning or so like I didn’t make fun of him for it. It makes me feel loved, but chronically unsure.
I’ve accepted the narrative that he drunkenly forgot about it. I think that’s the most comforting idea, at least. In a once-again-drunk state, I quizzed Mick on the situation (because he’s the only person in this house who I could trust to not tell everyone else in the house about a secret [Niall, you bitch.]) I didn’t mention that the ‘girl’ in the story was actually Zach Hadel, but I was able to explain pretty much everything else to a T without him freaking out.
He laid sprawled across the couch, legs over its arm. “There’s a phrase for that, fucking...uh…‘in vino veritas.’ When someone’s drunk, they’re most likely to reveal their true feelings about shit.” He suggests, “Remember that one time Jeff was drunk at the Christmas thing and called Shad a fa---”
“Yeah. But if h--she was being truthful, why would she ignore it after it happened?”
“Probably too drunk to remember. I mean, if she’s hiding those feelings about you to everyone else, she’s probably hiding them to herself too. Doesn’t want to get hurt by it.”
“But I...I still. I feel so guilty about it. Like a predator or something. It’s like...I was using her niceness t’ me to get out what I was feeling all the time. That’s not good.”
“She kissed you, dude. That’s all I know. I’m not aware of the rest of your relationship at all, but if she turns a hug into a kiss, that means something. Seriously.” A ruckus breaks through the front door, and in walks Cory, Nikki, and Zach all chattering about some weird occurrence at the Wawa. They wave at us and scuttle into the kitchen. Zach’s hand is on her waist. “Or maybe, she gets horny because of alcohol. It’s 50/50.”
I mutter a half-soaked, “Thanks Mick,” and go up to my room, uninterested in whatever they have going on downstairs. I feel like a monkey. Like a leech. I don’t want to ask Zach anything about his day. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to be enraged at my best friend all the time for having a girlfriend or not wanting me like we’re some middle school on-again-off-again couple. I don’t want to constantly play watchman over all his activities, overseeing all of his projects and achievements with enough praise to make him happy, but not too much to remind him of whatever happens. I despise the tightrope, and the memories that come along with it.
He still does the galloping thing sometimes. He did it as a joke once, when Jeff was picking us up from the office. He taps his fingers more, on desks and chairs and plates. He calls people more; oftentimes it’s NIkki. He talks about New York more. He might be moving, but I don’t want to push him about it. He still brings me coffees like I didn’t make fun of him for it. It used to make my heart soar in happiness, in the possibility of requited something , but it now makes my stomach drop. How many more coffees until he moves to New York? How many more until someone notices I get depressed without him here? I keep having dreams about the apocalypse, as if this decision he’s making with his life involves me at all. As if I should constantly pry and worry about him.
More-than-platonic feelings create some sort of predator-like attitude inside of you -- what is he thinking, what should I say to him, where is he going, it all drums behind your ears like it’s the sole responsibility of your life to make sure he lives to know how much you love him, or at the very least, understand how much he means to you. It’s dull work. A job that can only be done in increments, nothing too overbearing that would chance him asking questions about it. Gradual. Most of the work’s done half-asleep as you lie in bed, trying to recall the exact way his lips curled in happiness at the dumb joke you made or the way he said ‘good morning’ while scratching his beard with three fingers. You feverishly analyze every gesture he makes (smile, thumbs-up, frown, shrug, glance, laugh, cringe, middle finger, standing, ) to feast yourself on a hypothesis of ‘maybe.’ Maybe he does look at me in the same way. It might be that everytime you stand up to leave, he stares at the back of your corpse-like figure to make sure you get there safely. Maybe. You live in uncertainty. You’re not sure if you’ll ever leave this zone of eternal maybes, but you’re maybe more comfortable here than him knowing. You’ve only ever known the present.
I never want to tell him about this. I don’t want to hear what he has to say, and I’ve wanted to hear him say every single word in the dictionary since he first spoke on Skype. It’s a strange paradox of emotion. Do I tell him again, or does he already know?
I’m solid on one thing, though. After all of this speculation, and worry, and hush-hush: I’m glad it happened. It gives me one ten-second clip of unfiltered love and bliss to contemplate when I’m alone. Even if Zach doesn’t remember one of my favorite moments with him, I do. And I’ll keep it in the back of my head next to everything else that made me fall in love with him. Maybe one night, he’ll remember.