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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 inventedspecifically 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 thanalphabet. 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 hesaid "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."