your best friend flies to your hometown and slots right into the gaps of it like he grew up filling them. he waltzes into the place that you could never fully call yours and makes it his by driving your car around the streets you grew up on and wearing the clothes in your closet without asking and making your little brother laugh harder than you ever could and taking you apart in your childhood bed with his hands and his mouth until you think you can never lie in it again without remembering how you writhed and gasped under the heat of his body. you start feeling like a stranger in your own house because he's pulling into your driveway and unlocking your front door and your mom is kissing him on the cheek. he skates on the same ice you did as a boy, hungry, not yet knowing the lengths you would go to but willing to do whatever it takes, and you think you're the same, and you are, except you aren't really. you aren't really because for the first time ever, you're on the ice and you're watching him and you're overcome with a determination for something else, something different. your dad watches him like he used to watch you, and you want him to be good enough, like you wanted to be good enough, even though nobody is ever good enough. he sees your dad shake his head when he misses a pass, and he turns to you with a smile and a wink like it's easy, like it doesn't matter. and you resent him a little. you out-drill him, you out-fish him, and off the cliffs, your entry is a clean pinhole splash while his sounds like an explosion. you beat him at everything there is to be beaten, and then he has to leave. he has to leave, after lodging himself into the gap between your teeth, after he's made a home out of your city and your dinner table and your ribcage. he says he has to leave, but he says it like an invitation, like a prayer, and it's just a matter of course that you say you'll go with him. and you resent him, just a little. on the way there you're quiet, so he asks you if you're okay and you look at him and you want to say, no, because you've ruined me, you've ruined me for anyone and anything that isn't you. but you don't say that, you just follow him, feeling vaguely sick, around this city that he loves and that loves him back. this city whose gaps are in the shape of him and seems to long for his return, the way you do. you think about your dad's frown, and you think about your childhood bed—the way you'll never lie in it again without remembering the line of his body pressed against yours. and you resent him, but only a little.
