California, Brother

6.

And on the third day...

I unpacked my suitcase and put everything away in drawers and hung the now wrinkled shirts in the built-in closet.

The house became familiar; the weight of the doors, their handles, the temperate parquet, the shadows extending from now familiar and anticipated corners.

Eric.

The dogs.

My tumultuous emotions settled like debris after a tornado. The weight of my gaze was growing familiar. This is how I'd always watched him; from a distance, the longing like a dull ache somewhere between my sternum and frontal bone. This, too, I was remembering together with a hundred other memories I'd repressed because if I really thought about it; about how close we'd been over several years, whatever this, this undefined coexistence, was would suck the life out of me. If only for how dull and unsatisfying it was compared to our past.

In L.A., I'd watched him play basketball shirtless probably a million times. Throw frisbees shirtless probably a thousand times. Chug orange juice shirtless straight from the carton probably a hundred. My eyes were once again finding their favorite resting spots on his body. It was like being transported back to a memory. One I didn't think about often, but which, when allowed to slip back, did so effortlessly, as if my mind had longed for it.

Yves Tumor was blasting from the monitors, spilling onto the patio and the lawn beyond where Eric was breaking a sweat, playing tug with Ivy and Millie. It was Eric and the dogs and the big forested hill up and beyond. We might have been the only two people left on earth for how secluded this patch of grass felt. He'd trimmed his beard, which wasn't the only change in him. Eric had grown in ways my eighteen-year-old self couldn't have accounted for. He was tatted. I took in his ink from where I stood leaning against the sliding doors. The more predictable religious imagery on his back; the black and white shapes that were too obscure to make out on his torso and arms, the palm tree on his leg I'd glimpsed several times since arriving in Portland. He looked like the rock stars he and Samson had worshipped. More so than he'd done in L.A. He'd grown thinner since. Looked like the after-picture of those same rock stars, only less strung out from drugs, more from an illness he was reluctant to acknowledge. Or maybe he had, but I doubted it. That didn't stop my ogling, though. Eric was still undeniably attractive. It was the look of his joy; the sound of his laughter, how he was writhing on the ground, every muscle in his wiry body working as he fought back the purple toy from Ivy's growling snout. He'd pulled half his hair into a high bun, letting the rest hang. That and the fresh trim, and that he'd eaten breakfast that morning, and that he was out in the sun playing without a care in the world—it was all doing something to me.

I'd missed him. My longing was strung so tightly, acknowledging it strummed pain, and more longing; shame and regret. I shouldn't have let him go. He didn't want you to begin with. Yes, that. That feeling right there. Hold on to it. It was the only way I found the will to pick up the discarded toy on the patio and make my way over to Millie, who was wagging her tail aimlessly. The only way I could get lost in the music, and the feel of the sun, and the grass crumpling beneath me, and ignore his existence altogether.

If I concentrated every emotion that betrayed my heartbreak into pain, then I would never forget he was the one who'd caused it, right? So why, despite that, did I want to make him happy? Especially now, knowing everything he'd gone through with his divorce, his illness, his parents. I just wanted Eric to be my Eric again. And so, like I'd done one too many times in the past, I locked my feelings into a box labeled, "not right now" and let the possessiveness wash away; relinquishing myself to this... this in betweenness. I forced movement into my body. Forced direction until I was spilling milk from my cereal on the lawn, on my thigh, on Millie, on Eric. Until we were laughing and falling in a heap, the three of us in succession. The sun was red-hot behind my eyelids. Millie had let go of the toy to lick the cereal off of my arm and my chest was lifting and lifting and lifting with Eric's laughter. My neck had gone slack. The rest of my body, drenched in almond milk and Cheerios, followed suit. I could've died and gone to heaven right then, only I opened my eyes and died a different death.