Chapter 2 Ren
REN
Here is a list of things I was at twenty-four years old: unemployed, directionless, living in my brother's best friend's guest room, and in possession of a hockey career that had ended not with a dramatic injury or a spectacular failure but with a polite email from the Rochester Americans' front office informing me that my contract would not be renewed and wishing me the best in my future endeavors.
Future endeavors. As if I had any.
Here is a list of things I was not at twenty-four years old: Cole Briggs.
This was the fundamental fact of my existence and had been since approximately age four, when Cole scored his first goal in mites hockey and our father lifted him onto his shoulders in the parking lot and I stood next to our mother and watched and understood, with the preverbal clarity of a child who has been sorted, that there were two categories of Briggs in this family and I was in the wrong one.
Cole was the golden son. The natural. The one who inherited our father's talent and amplified it.
He was bigger, faster, more magnetic. He played hockey the way some people breathe, without effort, without thinking, as if the ice had been invented specifically for him to exist on.
He was drafted in the first round. He played in the NHL.
He fell in love with a Russian defenseman on national television and the world celebrated, because even Cole's love life was more successful than anything I had ever attempted.
I loved my brother. Let me be clear about that.
I loved Cole with the complicated, competitive, deeply loyal love of a younger sibling who has spent his entire life simultaneously admiring and resenting the same person.
Cole had never been anything but good to me.
He'd defended me to our father, who measured sons in goals and assists and found me lacking.
He'd called me every week during the AHL years, checking in with the specific, big-brotherly concern of a man who knew I was struggling and wanted to help but didn't know how because struggle was a language he had never needed to learn.
I did not blame Cole for being Cole. I blamed the universe for making only one mold and then being surprised when the second copy came out blurred.
But I was done blaming. I was twenty-four and I was in Atlanta and I was starting over, and starting over meant accepting that the hockey player version of Ren Briggs was finished and the whatever-comes-next version was still being assembled.
Jonah Park's apartment was exactly what I expected and completely not what I expected at the same time.
The "exactly what I expected" part: it was warm.
Not temperature warm, though it was that too, because Jonah kept his thermostat at a temperature that my Minnesota blood considered tropical.
Warm in the other sense. The walls had art on them, a mix of hockey prints and Korean calligraphy that his parents had given him.
The bookshelves were full but not organized, the books arranged in the haphazard way of a person who read what interested him and filed by feeling rather than alphabet.
There were plants. Many plants. A small jungle of greenery that suggested either a genuine interest in botany or an attempt to compensate for some other absence in his life.
The "completely not what I expected" part: there was a reading lamp on the nightstand in the guest room.
This was a small detail. A lamp. A functional object.
But I had mentioned, once, at a Thanksgiving dinner five years ago, that I couldn't sleep without a reading light.
I had mentioned it in passing, as part of a larger conversation about sleep habits that I barely remembered having.
And here, in Jonah Park's guest room, there was a lamp.
I sat on the bed and looked at the lamp and felt something I couldn't name.
Not surprise, exactly. Something warmer.
The feeling of being known in a way you didn't realize you were being known.
The feeling of a detail about you existing in someone else's memory, preserved and acted upon without fanfare.
Jonah was in the kitchen ordering Thai food.
I could hear him on the phone, his voice doing the thing Jonah's voice always did, the natural warmth of it, the way he talked to every person like they were the most important person in the room.
The delivery guy. The teammate. The best friend's little brother who had shown up at his doorstep with two duffel bags and the wreckage of a career.
He treated everyone the same way. This was what people loved about him. This was also what made it impossible to tell whether his kindness toward you was special or just the baseline.
I wanted it to be special. I had wanted it to be special for longer than I was willing to admit, and the wanting was a thing I kept in a locked drawer and refused to examine because examining it would require confronting questions I had no answers for.
Questions like: why did Jonah Park's apartment smell like home before I had been in it for an hour?
Why did the way he said "hey, man" at the airport make my chest tight?
Why, when he hugged me at arrivals, did every muscle in my body relax as if his arms were the signal my nervous system had been waiting for?
These were not normal friend questions. I was aware of this. I had filed them under "things to think about never" and had been largely successful in maintaining that filing system for the better part of a decade.
The filing system was under strain.
"Pad see ew, no bean sprouts," Jonah had said. He remembered. Not just the dish. The modification. The specific, particular way I ate food, a detail so small and so personal that remembering it required either a superhuman memory or a level of attention that went beyond casual friendship.
Jonah had a good memory. This was the explanation. He remembered things about everyone. He remembered that Mik Volkov took his coffee with two sugars and that Wes Chen's skate blades needed sharpening on the left edge. He was observant. It was a skill, not a statement.
I told myself this. I had been telling myself variations of this for ten years, and the argument was losing structural integrity.
He appeared in the doorway of the guest room. "Food's coming in forty minutes. You want a beer?"
"God, yes."
He disappeared and returned with two bottles.
Not my brand. My brand. The specific craft IPA from a brewery in Rochester that I had been drinking for two years and had mentioned exactly once in a group text last summer.
My brand, in his refrigerator, in Atlanta, Georgia, which is not a city known for stocking niche New York craft beer.
"How do you have this?" I held up the bottle.
"The beer? I saw it at a shop in Decatur. Thought you'd like it."
"You saw a beer from Rochester, New York, in a shop in Atlanta, and you bought it because you thought I'd like it."
"Is that weird?"
"It's... specific."
"I'm a specific person." He took a drink of his own beer, which was something completely different, something mass-produced and inoffensive. He didn't even like craft IPAs. He had bought this beer specifically for me.
The filing system rattled.
We sat on the couch. His couch was large and comfortable and broken-in in the way that couches get when a single person spends a lot of evenings on them alone.
I sat on one end. He sat on the other. The distance between us was approximately three feet, which was a normal distance for two friends on a couch and which felt, for reasons I was not examining, like it should have been less.
"Tell me about the AHL thing," he said. "The real version. Not the version you give Cole."
"The real version is the version I give Cole."
"No it isn't. The version you give Cole is 'I'm fine, it didn't work out, I'm moving on.' The real version is the one that keeps you up at 3 AM."
I looked at my beer. The label was peeling at the corner. I picked at it.
"The real version is that I wasn't good enough," I said.
"Not talented enough, not fast enough, not special enough.
The real version is that I gave everything I had for two years and everything I had was insufficient, and the hardest part isn't the failure itself.
The hardest part is that I'm not surprised.
I've been waiting my whole life to not be good enough, and it finally happened, and the relief of not having to pretend anymore is almost worse than the disappointment. "
The words came out in a rush that I hadn't planned and hadn't authorized, and the silence that followed was the kind of silence that happens when you've said something too true and the room needs a moment to absorb it.
Jonah didn't fill the silence. He let it sit.
He let me sit inside what I'd said without trying to fix it or reframe it or make it smaller.
And then, after a beat that was exactly the right length, he said: "Relief isn't worse than disappointment.
Relief is your body telling you the fight is over and you survived.
That's not weakness. That's your system saying 'we can stop now. '"
"Since when are you a therapist?"
"Since I started going to one. Highly recommend."
I laughed. The sound surprised me because it was real, and real laughs had been in short supply for the past six months.
Jonah smiled at the sound of it, and his smile was the Jonah smile, the one that made everyone feel included and important, the one that was warm and easy and completely undifferentiated from the smile he gave every other person he cared about.
Except.
Except when I looked at him, I saw something at the edges.
A flicker. A quality in his eyes that I had noticed before, over the years, in scattered moments that I had cataloged without understanding.
A quality that suggested the smile was not as easy as it appeared, and the warmth was not as casual as it seemed, and the attention was not as general as he worked very hard to make it look.
Or maybe I was projecting. Maybe I was a twenty-four-year-old failure sitting on his brother's best friend's couch, drinking beer that had been purchased specifically for him, reading a lamp like a love letter, and seeing things that weren't there because seeing things that were there was too terrifying to contemplate.
Cole called at 8 PM. Jonah answered in the kitchen, and I heard his voice through the wall.
"He's good. Yeah, he's settling in. No, the guest room's set up. He's fine, Cole. I've got him."
I've got him.
Three words. A casual reassurance from one friend to another about a mutual responsibility. I've got him, the way you'd say "I've got the check" or "I've got the door." Functional. Transactional. Unremarkable.
Except my body heard it differently. My body heard "I've got him" and translated it into something possessive and warm and deeply, fundamentally safe, and the translation happened below the level of conscious thought, in the place where the body makes decisions the brain hasn't approved.
I went to the guest room after dinner. The bed was comfortable.
The sheets were clean. The lamp was warm and the room was quiet and through the wall I could hear Jonah moving around in his bedroom.
The sounds of a person's nighttime routine: a drawer opening, a faucet running, the creak of a bed accepting weight.
Through the wall, separated by drywall and paint and a decade of carefully maintained friendship, Jonah Park was breathing.
I could hear him. Not with my ears, which would have required supernatural hearing. With something else. Some sense that wasn't auditory but was tuned to his specific frequency, the way certain instruments resonate with certain notes even when the note isn't being played.
I lay in the dark and I thought about the lamp and the beer and the pad see ew and the reading light and the three words.
I thought about the way he'd hugged me at the airport, tight and warm, and the way my body had responded, every muscle unclenching as if his arms were the one place in the world where tension was not required.
I thought about the flicker at the edges of his smile.
I thought: what if this is not what I think it is?
And then I thought: what if it's exactly what I think it is?
Both possibilities were terrifying. The first because it meant I was alone in this feeling, constructing significance from coincidence. The second because it meant I was not alone, and not being alone meant the locked drawer was going to have to be opened, and opening it would change everything.
I turned off the lamp. The room went dark.
Through the wall, Jonah was still breathing. Steady. Present. Close.
I fell asleep to the sound of it, which was either the most normal thing in the world or the beginning of something irreversible.
In the morning, I would decide it was normal.
But in the dark, alone, with no one to lie to, I let myself consider the alternative.
-e