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Here's how it goes.
You give it up in bits and moments: your first casual word about hovering teachers in the middle of his schoolyard fight; learning his route home from school in cut corners and shared steps; history homework swapped under desks; an extra box of bandages at the grocery to toss at his idiotic head; sake bought and half-sneaked out of your uncle's refurbished bar at eighteen, split between three glasses; tasting violently colored concoctions fresh out of the pan; smoothing down the smoke-riddled tie of a yakuza man; cigarettes and low-voiced stories to a boy with palms tight against his knees and early fire still caught beneath his eyelids; running out of an apartment with your tie snaking loose, a phone clapped to your ear and pointed shoes sailing overhead; looking up addresses for Go clubs and accordion bands in nearby districts; blankets flung over his sprawl; clearing windowboxes for exotic perennials; fingers curled in his shirt at the darkening end of a day and saying—
There's more. There's always been more. It unwinds in fits and starts until you see it whole: your life, wound like a thread through the hands of the two most careless men you've ever known.
It doesn't feel like giving up at first. You kick his bike tire and grin, all teeth and mild innocence, as his brows twitch together; you bring him home to your narrow apartment, a real latchkey kid's place, force him into the least rickety chair and get him to read instructions out to you while you beat eggs and boil broth; you listen when he shuts his eyes and recites all the fastest ways to take a bigger guy down. You don't have to ask, by the time that strange kid's set loose from the hospital, what he'll do. Only once do you ask him anything.
Years race by like boys. You go on together. You stay up to two in the morning scrawling equations and snapping English poems until he falls asleep in self-defense. You spend forty-seven minutes ringing up every grocer in the city for hazelnut extract. You race, sometimes, too. Suppliers and errand boys memorise the hours that your company's least likely to wake for, and stick to them like clockwork. Your cousins on the mainland learn to ask after them during your holiday calls. A resurrected clan's second-in-command turns her head up to you as you stroll through her parting ranks.
You smile. She doesn't.
They laugh at you for that later, while you're drawling through the alignment and rumors surrounding the blue clan's reformation and the ways your own might have to start working around them. You laugh, too.
You go on, and it's easy. The fall often is.
That, you think, might be the strangest part: that a life of forethought and guarded intentions could have been built on a foundation you never meant to find. The boy you once were planned to be someone else. Cleverer. Taller. Fitted with better glasses. You didn't mean to invite danger and whimsy into being your only constants, didn't mean to open your hands to flames or to stand halfway to fifty with a string of women's numbers that will never take your calls again.
You didn't mean to need them.
But here lies need—in every sense the phrase could mean. You need them, it means, and maybe you always have. Need makes lies, it means, and the lie is the thought that need can't be outgrown. Here, it means, rests the last of what you have come to need: here in his slow exhale, the sling of his shoulders as he turns towards the dark past the empty door. Here, only here—and later, as you leave the slush and rubble, your need will not follow you.
The final call is yours; the first last breath is yours. It's your ear that listens to his strained, husky laughter, your mouth that bites out the order for someone to follow you to the roof. This, you think, is fitting—seeing, even then, the sparking slow burn of what's to come. But you do what you must. Your hands turn on the light at the bottom of the stairs. Your knees shift along the floor as you lean to thumb the blood from his mouth. Your voice leaves a king in mute vigil at his side while you call his clan, man by man, to break the news.
You must have known by then.
The cliff is cold, but you only remember that later. The sword crackles against it, and the fire that answers flares like a star going out. There are no ashes, after. You don't reach out for any.
You go back. Days slip by. You flick the bar's sign around, change water for the roses, note what's left in storage. You fry breakfast for a girl who never leaves her window, and wait for the calls that will tell you where to start.
You don't look for him.
There's only a question between you now, and it's no question at all. No use in hard blows, in shouting, that's my life you've got caught on your heels, that's my damn life you're taking into the fire. No one asked you for your bicycle wrenches, your French quotations, your lectures or your sleepless hours. Every man lives for himself. You can't grab hold of him, can't push his bones into the framing you need: the shape of a man who will hold his grief and carry it forward. You are what you are. You tend; you keep. Nothing you know will remake him for you.
Only one person ever did that.
Was it love, then, more than need? But you can't be sure now. What you remember most are the small losses: his brand of smoke unraveling from your shirts, every puzzle book and canvas and carved soap figurine boxed and sealed away, time eating at the echo of each voice. But loss came before those, too: bruises earned from half-familiar boys in a stretch of deserted hallway after classes; old flames sniffing your name in disdain; lenders turning you down, one by one, with murmured apologies and a tremble in their wrists; sitting in the dark with ash on your tongue. You've lost and been lost, and the feeling is no simpler on either end.
What scars over loss is love, you're aware. But you're far past the days for that.
You go on for the same reason he doesn't—that is, after all, life. Your life returned, spooled back under your ribs. Worn down, less than there once was, but yours. You will go on, tending to women with snapped shoeheels and ice-sharp mouths, keeping peace and a collection of koto recordings in a little apartment elsewhere. You will sleep and wake again, with an ache in one shoulderblade like a wingbone on the mend. You will not forget yourself.
Understand this: you can be selfish, too. You didn't rail against the world when it turned against you all like a baited dog; you never caught him by the shoulders to drive him against the wall; your lungs never strained with shouting until he bowed his head to your sound and living warmth. You knew, and you looked away. You waited.
Even for him, you didn't change.
It may be what you understood best in him: that stubborn, impossible persistence, the philosophy of living against circumstance. You were never men for ifs and history; neither of you carried a dream you couldn't make with your own hands. All change is circumstantial, a platitude, an invention of need. He never owed you that.
Here it is, then, paying respects and debts to dead men: in the worn polish of the counter's woodgrain beneath your fingers, in holding the buttons of your phone until its light dies out, in smoke and old whiskey at the back of your teeth, in the stillness of an emptied bar. You live. You remember.
But you're lying after all. This isn't about a debt, or love, or things to give up. Not really. You are, at the core, a selfish man—gentle and dangerous, shaped by need and loss.
And so you go on.