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Heaven
is all preposition—above, among, around, within—and if you must, you can live any place that’s a place. A failure of courage is still a victory of safety. Bravery pitches its refugee tent
at the base of my brain and slowly starves, chipping into darkness like a clay bird bouncing down a well
~Kaveh Akbar, I WOULDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH A THIRD CHANCE
You’re good and then you’re better and then you’re the best— both too good to remember him and too good not to— and then you’re a few mistakes, scraped knees, and sleepless nights older and he’s there, jumping all over the place like a frog, and you want to insist, I didn’t order this, but you’re out of luck because the universe doesn’t accept returns or do refunds.
No one trusts anyone 100% and then, him.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant. Nothing too fancy, nothing too casual, and you’re wearing a shirt, but he’ll ask for a straw. You’re wearing gym shoes, but he’ll chew with his mouth closed.
He comes in and here’s the best-kept secret of your life:
He comes in and if you could forget him just to experience remembering him, you would.
*
He’s a bother, he’s a nuisance, he’s a moron, he’s too much too soon and too little too late, there’s no hope for him or is there, he’s graceless but grateful, he sucks but maybe, somehow, sort of, kind of, he’ll change the world one day. He can lick his elbow but can’t lick his nose, he knows better than to lick poles in winter but not in spring, and he’s low maintenance in a way that terrifies you. You want to say, easy with the smiles and the jumps and the thank yous because you know the dangers of forgetting yourself and taking people for granted.
Over the months, the ‘will he be there?’ of it all slowly morphs into a ‘he will be there’ and you can’t tell if that’s a good thing or bad because he’s never not there for you to learn the difference.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant, and, so far, you’ve dropped your menu twice. You’ll order a cold drink and restrict yourself to small sips to avoid it going down the wrong pipe because, while it’s unlikely he’ll make you laugh, he’ll probably make you gasp.
The tablecloth is spotless, and you won’t stain it. The chair is sturdy, and you won’t fall off it. The world is spinning, and it won’t stop just for you, but you wouldn’t be too surprised if it decided to stop just for him.
You owe him a letter, a postcard, and a phone call. He owes you nothing, but he’ll be here anyway because today you’re paying back all your debts.
*
When you meet him for the first time, the universe bursts out laughing.
Not funny, you think furiously months later, when you meet him for the second time.
You’re older and taller, if not necessarily wiser, and you want nothing to do with him, but tough: you’re well-acquainted with the laws of physics— gravity, Newton, motion, Ohm, the whole shebang— and you call feel the pull of it as soon as a new one comes to life between you and him. Something is created in the time between the first time you deny him and the third time you don’t and you’re almost tempted to take a step back, cup your hand around your ear, and listen instead of participating— shoes squeak on a floor that gleams almost clean enough to see yourself in, the ball hits his hand, and there’s no equation to be wrangled out of this, no piano score to be scribbled down, but just because the energy of it all won’t be saddled doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
You pull off this choreography of yours ten, twenty, two hundred times, and it’s the twelfth or the seventieth or the two-hundred-and-first time when you think, I could kiss you.
But you never do kiss him and, as debt collectors go, he’s a poor one.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant and when he comes in even the sun shuts up.
*
This is later:
People recognize you sometimes and, every now and then, you have to fake a smile and shake hands. When it rains, you open an umbrella and when it’s sunny, you wear a hat. You jog and you do your stretches, and you never stop playing but sometimes you stop sleeping— to skip practice for him would be unforgivable but sleep can be sacrificed and, well, there’s not much more to be said. He’s the altar, you down the energy drink; he’s half the world away, you toast him; he keeps calling, you don’t pick up; he’s alive, you mourn him.
There’s a memory of him that you pocketed long ago and remembered in time to save it from getting eaten up by the washing machine. It’s not the grandest— in fact, it might be the most diminutive of them all— but it is your favorite.
Back then, you were still stumbling, drunk on that no-push-without-pull thing you two had going and desperately struggling to hide it. You could still remember your life without him in it, but you could no longer imagine it, and then it happened: he started jumping around and all of him was red, but the back of his neck was redder.
“I don’t know,” he snapped when you raised an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know, okay? It scratches and itches and what if I have fleas?”
He didn’t have fleas. If he’d had fleas, by then, you’d have had them, too.
“Come here,” you sighed, and he came, just like that. Not docile, not exactly, not at all, but—
(No one can trust anyone 100% and yet, later, you’d squander that trust anyway, all 120% of it.)
“It’s the tag, you idiot,” you said when you pulled the neckline of his T-shirt aside to inspect the scratched skin. Your fingers drummed the top knob of his spine like they would a door and the blood beneath his skin rushed up to meet you. “Don’t you know you’re supposed to cut these off?”
“Oh,” he gasped. “It’s because I don’t let Mom touch my gym tops.”
You called out, asking if anyone had scissors but no one heard. There’s a chance that the universe had orchestrated it, but it hadn’t orchestrated it all: at best, you were collaborators when it came to making it happen.
“You’ll have to be patient,” you warned, and he hadn’t been patient a day in his life, but he’d been waiting for years.
“I’ll have to be patient,” he repeated with a nod, as though to memorize it. His skin shifted under yours and that tiny bone knocked right back. He’d spent years bouncing volleyballs off walls and then he met you.
You leaned down and you bit the tag off, millimeter by millimeter, and he— the chronic fidgeter and perpetual squirmer— stood there and never moved an inch.
And then you kept the tag. He didn’t ask for it so of course you kept it. He’d have given you more— you knew as much, even then— but you’d only ever been entitled to so much less.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant and what if he doesn’t show up?
*
This is earlier:
It starts as a joke when he forgets to wear knee pads like the idiot that he is.
“I scraped my knee,” he observes calmly, staring at the welling up blood with curiosity. “Will you kiss it better, Kageyama-kun?”
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant, and you wonder if his favorite dish is still the same. You’re sitting in a restaurant, and you wonder if you’ll even get as far as food.
*
You hold on to hatred with a collector’s stubbornness: you hate oceans and time zones, hate planes and boats, hate post and sand, hate night and day, hate him and hate yourself.
Will you kiss it better, Kageyama-kun? over bruised elbows, stubbed toes, and nosebleeds, and now he’s half the world away.
You hate the world, too. Sometimes— your second best-kept secret, this— you even hate volleyball.
Here’s the thing about you: it’s been over a year, and you keep the tags on all your shirts.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant, and he comes in: he who drinks rain and jumps in puddles instead of seeking shelter, he who rolls around in sunlight like a dog might in leaves, he who is changed but the same, the same but changed, sun-kissed and sand-scraped, sun-scraped and sand-kissed. He probably smuggled half the beach through security in his pockets but if you could ask him for something, you’d settle for a single seashell.
You’re sitting in a restaurant, and you’ve been practicing holding your breath, but you haven’t practiced enough.
*
“Kageyama-kun,” only once, “my tooth hurts.”
“Too much soda,” someone scolds with a laugh and you brace yourself because any moment now—
“Will you—?” and you’ve braced yourself, but he changes his mind. “No, forget it.”
Only you don’t forget it. Not ever.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant and you’re not stupid, you know all about it: he’s been places, he’s met people, he’s cannibalized, made, and remade himself, and now here he stands, recognizable but autonomous in a way you have no choice but to accept.
It’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so tragic— for too long, you’d see him in every crowd even though no everyman passerby could ever hope to be him, and you’d hear him in every generic pop song even though he’d been tailor-made for you.
Things are different now. You’ve messed up and he’s recovered, you’ve grown but so has he, only half of your friends are mutual, and there are other people he can be fast for.
And yet.
So much about you two was motion but so much wasn’t.
There are other people he can be fast for now, yes, but, as he reaches your table and gives you a small, hesitant smile, you can’t help but wonder whether you’re still the only one he can be still for.
*
This is then:
You’re sitting in a restaurant and your hands are trembling, which is why you keep them under the table. You’re wearing a shirt, and he asks for a straw. You’re wearing gym shoes, and he probably wouldn’t chew with his mouth open, but it ends before your food arrives, so you’ll never know.
“This is weird,” he says halfway through his juice. “Why are you wearing a shirt?”
So you open your mouth to insist that it isn’t weird, shut the fuck up, only what you actually say is the truth and the truth is that you love him.
Because of course you do. Gravity, Newton, motion, Ohm, and all that.
So you open your mouth and you treat him to an ‘I love you’ and he sits there and stares at you and inhales, about to reply, when you ruin it all.
“Just kidding,” you blurt out before he can break your heart because if it has to be broken, you’d rather break it yourself, thanks very much. “I have a discount thing but it’s only if I bring a plus one.”
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you’re not a coward after all because the look he gives you— the absolutely mangled look he gives you— is way scarier than that rejection that made you chicken out would have been.
He clears his throat. Wipes his mouth with his sleeve. Reaches for his glass.
“50% off,” you say because what’s the use of breaking something if you’re not going to break it to pieces?
He plucks the straw from his glass and dumps what’s left of his juice over your head. From now on, heartbreak will always taste like apples.
“I’m going now,” he says calmly before sliding out of his seat. “See you at practice, Kageyama.”
You watch him leave because you don’t deserve the luxury of looking away and then you reach for that straw he dropped on the table and put it between your lips where he was worrying at it with his teeth.
It’s fine. He’s gone and people might be staring, but no one’s looking anymore.
See you at practice but here’s the thing: it’s your high school graduation tomorrow.
*
You keep all your tags on and the more it scratches, the better. When a forever passes and you hear from someone that he’s coming back, you’re not hopeful, and you’re certainly not optimistic, but you start practicing holding your breath anyway.
He’s every stranger in every crowd, he’s every song on every radio station, and, whenever you kneel to retie your shoelace, you always look up to check if he hasn’t magically appeared before you, as has always been his way.
*
This is now:
You’re sitting in a restaurant and God didn’t make him for you but perhaps he made him around the same time as he made you for a reason.
“It’s the same table,” he observes as he slides into the seat opposite to you. “Only I see we’ve swapped sides.”
And you don’t say it’s so I’ll have to crane my neck to watch you leave if I fuck this up, but he hears it anyway. He spent years bouncing volleyballs off walls and it’s the loneliness of it, really. The lack of reciprocity.
He orders orange juice this time and that drink with a straw dunked in it is your hourglass. Your hands are shaking, which is why you keep them on the table, and he’s been changing the world without you, but you wonder what it’d be like if he considered changing it with you.
“It turns out that the world is too round for running,” you tell him. “If you run long enough, eventually, you’ll end up right back where you started.”
“So what you’re saying is that you used to be a flat-earther?” he snorts.
If you had more time to do this, you’d do it like this:
I painted the walls of my apartment your favorite color, I only ever eat your favorite flavor of ice cream, and I don’t cook, but I always cook for two. I bought you a chair, broke it because you weren’t there to sit in it, and then I made you a new one, from scratch. I sweep crumbs off the table but only because you’re not the one who left them there. I don’t talk to my neighbors because they’re not you, but you’re the only thing I talk to them about. Once, I chased you down three streets and followed you on a train, only it wasn’t you. When it rains, I open an umbrella but, if you were here, I’d forget all about it. Pretending that my pillow is you would be pathetic, so I don’t have a pillow. I wasn’t made for you, but I was made alongside you. By now I’ve smiled seventeen times, and sixteen of those were because of you. As for crying— Well.
“What I’m saying,” you say instead, “is that I love you.”
He goes still so beautifully, and you broke your heart only to love him all the better with it.
“Let’s order to go and take this outside,” he says after a pause. “I want the sun to see this.”
*
“I bought you a fridge magnet or five,” he says as you walk down a deserted street, looking for a good spot for an impromptu picnic. “I threw it into the Atlantic.”
“Take me diving there and we’ll look for it together,” you say, thumbing the shirt tag you’ve had on you for four years now.
It’s the good old paradox of I hope nothing hurts and I hope everything does but he’s always been good at making the most out of contradictions, and look:
“My mouth hurts, Tobio-kun,” he smiles, stretched out on grass with rice all over his chin. “Will you kiss it better?”
Newton’s fourth law of motion is all about coming back and you can’t wait for all his new friends to hate you.
*
You’re sitting in a restaurant, and you order one happy ending to go.