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We were lucky — the clouds were barely wisps, so there was enough sun to say that summer had properly started, just in time for it to end. Papa (I’ll start calling him dad in a few years) set up the PSX on the CRT in his & Mom’s room, and the sliding door was open so I could see outside. When we get Rocco, he’ll be laying near the white lawn chairs on the top deck; that was still a few years away, so Barney was snoring there alone. Sis was downstairs, snoozing on the couch. I was on the floor, half-inside-half-outside, stuck on the ladder puzzle at the end of Magma Cone. I just couldn’t get Spyro to latch onto the rungs before a lava ball would knock me off. I wasn’t bored yet, even though I had been playing Ripto’s Rage for weeks, which was a significant portion of my lifespan.
My brain was still new, so it was a bit useless trying to conceptualize the future, but I could sort of tell that I wouldn’t be able to spend as much time on the game once school started. Really all I knew about the new school year was school supply shopping and checking the class roster. “Look for ‘Pak,’” Mom said later that afternoon as we got to the front steps of Meridian Elementary. I knew this — we had been over it — most people find out today which teacher’s class they’d be sorted into, but since I was starting the Gifted Program (this was before they called it Hi-Cap) there was logically only one choice for me. This was good. I didn’t have to waste any time and could skip to the good part.
“Mottola, Marcello” is always near the middle of the list, so I aimed my eyes there, confirmed I existed and got to scouring the other entries. They were only ever names, no faces, but what I was looking out for was interesting storylines. Could I be friends with someone named Gladkov, Anthony? No — he’s funny and good at soccer, but when he switches schools after the boundary change I’ll never hear from him again. Howard, Kenny sounded promising — we’ll have a few sleepovers in his treehouse next year. Neuemeier, Emily — I wonder how to pronounce that? — if I liked girls yet, I would’ve wondered if she was any cute, despite knowing how in a few months she’ll tell me that my teeth were crooked and yellow. Rossiytsev, Michael — that was the only familiar name. He was in my class last year and we got along well now that his English was improving. That was important, I thought, as a foundation for a friendship that lasts two decades and beyond. It made me sad to know that he and I would lose touch for a few years in our twenties. I kept reading. Truong, Emily — wait, another Emily? Things are going to get confusing, I thought, and they were.
The Gifted Program was ruthless, cutthroat competition. Early in the year Oxsen, Steven couldn’t figure out how to use scissors on his own and his parents sent him back to Crestwood. When I see him again in middle school, he’ll be a skater and a stoner, but not quite a delinquent. He’ll be really smart, actually, and that’ll be his reputation — smart but a stoner. What’s he doing now? I’ll think, as I write a blog post in 2025, and wonder if that persona had anything to do with being told he wasn’t quite cut for the smart class. A defense mechanism. I hadn’t developed mine, yet. I loved being smart. I liked to draw, I was funny, and I hadn’t yet put on the weight that’s gonna cause me so much insecurity for the rest of my life. Jevandre will call me Choji for that in a few months, and it’ll be 15 years before he apologizes, but today I hadn’t even met him yet. I actually didn’t even register his name on the roster: Santiaguel, Jevandre. He was still going by his father’s name, then. Mr. Santiaguel was out of the picture, but Jevandre told me that his mom had a new boyfriend: “I’m gonna be Jevandre Diaz once he adopts me,” he told me the first day I met him. It was one half of a conversation he’ll end with me the day he kills himself. “I think it all started with my dad,” he tells me over the phone, “the core wound.” And a few weeks later — sure enough — Mr. Santiaguel doesn’t even come to the funeral. “That’s fucked up,” I mutter, saying the swear under my breath so Ms. Pak doesn’t hear. Even at 8 years old I can see his melancholy, hovering over the sarcasm and the belly laugh that makes his shoulders shrug. I can see how dark his room will be, the last time I see him.
It was about four months into the school year — fall 2005 — and Jevandre and I were seated at an island of desks together in the back of the class with Michael. Every few weeks, Ms. Pak would re-arrange the seating chart to encourage us to make new friends in the class. She was smart to focus on the internal commingling early. By the time the rest of the school gets all tribal and disdainful of the smart kids, we’ll be grateful for the bonding time.
When the bell rang for PM recess and we filed out of the classroom, a tall blonde girl named O’Connell, Amber waved goodbye to me and ran off with Collins, Naomi. I clocked this, and so did Jevandre.
“Amber likes you, you know,” Jevandre told me, eyebrow raised.
Michael laughed, in that infectious way he always will.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Dude, it’s obvious,” Jevandre said, “she was following you all around the roller rink.”
I couldn’t deny it — the previous night, we had an after-school event at the TLC Family Skate Center. We were growing up in that strange post-9/11 transition period when it was still okay to indulge in a few remnants of late-90’s neon optimism. TLC will eventually turn into a Super Buffet, where the shrimp will give me food poisoning, and that’ll be the last time I’ll enter those doors, where once I had played air hockey with Amber.
“So?” I said, setting up a deflection, “Michael follows us around.” Michael laughed, again — he still laughed at jokes at his expense, so I hadn’t started feeling bad for them yet. I knew Amber liked me, but I wanted Jevandre to confirm it. He was the first of us to be interested in girls, and as he was with all his interests he found himself a prominent expert in the field.
“I wish Codename: EQ would follow me around like that,“ Jevandre added. Codename: EQ was a girl named “Erika Quan.” Jevandre gave his crushes easily breakable codenames, a habit I’d emulate in the future.
Jevandre sighed, indulging in the drama of it all. He did this with his own playful sort of sardonicism, as if he enjoyed yearning for a girl who didn’t know he existed. As if she even could — she was in fourth grade, for Christ’s sake, all the way over in Ms. Brodhead’s Gifted class in the intermediate wing. But what better target for a doomed crush? How romantic? — thinking about what could never be. Even then, I was mesmerized by this idea, much more so than the idea of having my crush be a girl that actually liked me! I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment. Not at 8, not at 28.
“She should be your crush, dude,” Jevandre concluded. He was firm in his wish — he wanted me to have a crush, too, so then we could be in the thing together. It was the first seed of a Pact we would make, post-college, before I moved to LA with Michael.
“But I don’t like her,” I said, “I don’t even like girls yet.”
It’s not that I could tell the future, but logically I concluded that it was coming, eventually. It’s like when Ms. Pak asked me if I believed in Santa and I told her: “Yeah, I still do.” She gave me the strangest look. After this Christmas, my parents will tell me Santa was never real, and I’ll sleep easier knowing I got to the truth before I heard it.
The bell rang, recess was over, and soon after the school year would be, too, and childhood after that. Amber will move away and I’ll never see her again, but in my early 20’s I’ll look her up on Facebook and decide that she was my first crush.

When I gained consciousness on the morning of my 9th birthday, I opened my eyes slowly, looking at the rungs of the top bunk and realized they had… changed. Yesterday, my room was just my room, but today it was a dresser and a bed and a Nacho Libre poster — and not only that, the dresser had knobs and the bed had a frame and Nacho Libre was Jack Black. I squinted my eyes at the fractals, wondering if this awareness would help me on my times tables. Doubtful. I couldn’t get over the injustice that I had, without my consent, shifted into a rich and vivid world beyond my depth. The river of time felt heavy, and I could already feel how my muscles would ache as I raged against it, years down the line.
“What a drag,” I sighed, scowling at the growing complexity around me, knowing that I put off my melancholy for as long as I possibly could. 9 blissful years of ignorance! Oh well, it was fun while it lasted. At least I was older than Jevandre and Michael. Some stuff still mattered, I thought.
A month later, in February, Jevandre turned 9, too, and I went to his birthday party. Michael’s parents wouldn’t let him come, so it was just me, Mom and Papa. It was my first time being at Jevandre’s house, except it wasn’t his house, it was his aunt’s house. And funnily enough, that aunt ended up being my aunt, too. Mom recognized her, realized they grew up together and lost touch, just to be reconnected all these years later. “Only in a Filipino family,” they said, and I laughed like I knew what that meant. We were on the floor, playing Ultimate Ninja 3.
“Guess we’re cousins,” I told Jevandre as I activated my Nine-Tails form.
“That means you’re my kuya,” he said, “That means older brother in Tagalog. And I’m your ading. That means little brother.”
“Brothers,” I said as Jevandre won the round with a decisive Fireball Jutsu, “I never had a brother.”
Roxanne, Jevandre’s mom, overheard us from the kitchen. Roberto, her boyfriend, put his arm around her and they let us have our moment. In a few years, they’d be married, Jevandre would take Roberto’s name, and Jevandre would have two brothers of his own, real brothers. My only brother would ever be my cousin, and he just kicked my ass 1v1. But instead of gloating, he used the moment as teaching opportunities. He was good at that. Sagely, he said I needed to work on the timing for my Substitution Jutsu.
The next round, I actually beat him using what he taught me.
“Call me Jevandre-sensei,” he said, proud that even though he was ading, his kuya was the disciple. He would always be good at fighting games, and eventually, he’ll become a real fighter, too. At the same time, I’ll become a musician. Lightyears of spacetime away, in a parking garage in South Lake Union, Jevandre and I will shake hands to seal the Pact as I prepared to move down to LA with Michael and the rest of the band.
“I’ll come down for your first big show,” he’ll vow, “and you fly back up to Seattle for my first big fight.”
Like always, he’ll want us to be in on it together. We’ve been setting up this Pact for years, remember. This was just the formalization. The rules were simple — we’ll call each other, every week for a year, to talk about our progress. We were to pursue our goals relentlessly, journal every day, and if one of us falls into a deep depression and calls it quits then the other one must carry that weight of both torches forever more (that last part was implied). My forever accountability buddy. When Jevandre loses his job, and the calls stop, I already know what will happen. At this realization, I looked over at him, newly 9 and cross-legged on the floor of his aunt’s house and found it impossible to be present and enjoy the birthday party. He calls me, finally, after 6 months, his head is shaved, he’s put on some weight, and he’s sweating in his car in the middle of a historic Washington heatwave.
“What’s up, asshole?” he says, and his usual sarcasm irks me this time. I’m relieved to hear from him, but it’s hard to be happy because of him ghosting my calls.
“You shaved your head,” is all I can say. I search for the words, but it’s 7 o’ clock in the morning and the FaceTime feels strange and uncanny. To find common ground, I try to engage in accountability-call mode, and ask him, “Have you been keeping up with fighting?”
“No, man,” he says, “that was just something to keep me alive for a little longer.”
I don’t take this seriously, despite the pitch-blackness of his melancholy seeping through the screen of my iPhone. I’m simultaneously too upset with him, and too eager to tell him about everything that happened over the last half-year.
“Well, I’ve been keeping up with music,” I say, still waking up, “And I finally got something to go viral.”
“Wait, let me see that!” at this, I notice a bit of his fire comes back, and I send him the TikTok of me and my friends in the garage, jumping around to “Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted.”
“This is amazing,” he says.
I’ll imagine, later, as my shattered psyche tries to integrate this final conversation into my personal narrative, that as Jevandre scrolled through those likes and comments he knew it’d be okay if he let up his end of the Pact. One in, one out: my life will begin, the day his ends. I’ll feel guilty, wondering if maybe I hadn’t found success, that he would have had a reason to get back to fighting, to hold me accountable, to keep me going.
4 years later, when I almost give up music and move to New York, I’ll find my way into a boxing gym, and I’ll hit the heavy bag in a way that feels different than before, just like the rungs of the bunk bed were different that morning on my 9th birthday. Before, a punch was a punch, but that day at the boxing gym, a punch will be an ever-expanding sequence of muscle movements and breath control and footwork, infinite opportunities in the blink of an eye to express that inherent quality that makes my mind, body and soul mine. I’ll think of Jevandre, and remember something he said about Bruce Lee’s philosophy of play at a pho restaurant, in that nebulous post-college haze. I won’t understand the weight of it in the boxing gym, at least not immediately, but that day a crack will form in the fractal engine, after which I’ll begin to unravel the idea that the universe is a zero-sum game, and start to think that perhaps Jevandre’s death had nothing to do with the Pact at all. I’ll laugh, because I had been stuck wading in this particular moment for 4 years, and the river was starting to flow change around me again. The current will feel good, familiar, sad and lustrous all at once. I’ll laugh, in the middle of the boxing gym, because it’s just so funny how even as ashes Jevandre-sensei can help me find the way to insight.
“That’s who he was to me,” I’ll say on the podium as I spoke his eulogy, “My rival, the Sasuke to my Naruto, my cousin, my old friend.”
“I know you two were brothers,” Roberto will say to me after the service, and I’ll wonder why I left that out of my speech. There will be hundreds of people, spilling out into the street, and I’ll look for Michael, hopeful that after a year of no-contact the funeral might have got him to come around. But he won’t be there, and I’ll wonder how badly he’s stuck, too.
The next day at school, Michael didn’t ask about the birthday party, but we told him anyways.

There were still enough bees this spring for us to feel comfortable capturing them in gachapon capsules. The trick was to follow a fat furry one and wait, in zen, until it started the pollination process. I found it difficult to sit still that long, but Jevandre knew the secret.
“I can meditate for 30 minutes straight,” he told us, eyes closed, full lotus on the knoll, sensei-mode.
“That’s boring,” I said. Truth be told, the thought of slowing down my brain for any period of time terrified me. In about 20 years, I’ll be laying awake in my bed, having an anxiety attack after a breakup, struggling to remember everything he taught me about how to slow my mind down. I’ll count to 8: 7 seconds of inhale, 1 second to pause at the top. When I inhale, I’ll hope my lungs inflate past that feeling Jevandre referred to as the threshold, once, on one of our weekly accountability calls in 2020.
I’ll find it difficult to even count properly. At this point, I’ll still be spelunking deep in my psyche, looking in vain for jewels to bring back to the surface, and my tired mind will be jumping too fast across spacetime to recognize the meaning of a second. What does a second feel like? Is it possible to memorize the feeling of 8 seconds without counting? I’ll think — no, probably not, but I could memorize 8 seconds of a song and use that as proxy. Perhaps music is the paint we use to cover the canvas of time, and musicians are the artists who experience life in terms of chronology, always moving forward, relentlessly and callously, and in vain we capture this flow in tiny gachapon capsules of verse, chorus, bridge. I’ll think of this brilliant metaphor and wish that Jevandre was still alive so I could tell him, but currently his focus is on a daisy topped with a black honeybee, and I don’t want to disturb him. Instead, I’ll count out another 8: 7 seconds out, 1 second at the bottom. By this time, Jevandre shoved the capsule in pocket and he emitted a faint buzzing sound as he walked back up the steps and into the classroom, me close behind, Michael trailing further.
In my bed, my mind will finally slow down, and I’ll feel guilty that Jevandre was still helping me now when I couldn’t help him then. I’ll look around the high ceilings of my loft and squint around the room, and like it did on my 9th birthday, the fractals will show themselves. This beautiful loft will be the ultimate bachelor pad, but tonight it will be an overly expensive bucket list item; 1,000 sq. ft and a patio of undeniable proof that I was better off post-breakup. My new multi-level producer desk will be a collection of dusty equipment that felt much more musical when it was a folding table in a garage on Melrose. My Hail Mary year alone downtown will be a desperate attempt to keep me in Los Angeles for a little while longer.
I’ll jolt awake, uncomfortably cognizant that Jevandre said something similar to me, on that last FaceTime. I’m concerned about this comment all day, so I call him back later in the afternoon. In the 5 hours in-between, he’s aged 50 years, the room is dark and he’s sinking into the floor.
“What are you going to do for a job?” I figure talking about the future might get him motivated again.
He takes almost 20 seconds to answer, and I sit there staring at him, politely. Time is stuttering all around him, stopping here and starting there, and I know it’s rude to finish sentences for someone with a stutter, so I figure it’d be equally rude to try to speed up time as it’s collapsing around someone.
“I wanted to — or, I mean, I want to — I will — ah, fuck,” he says, flipping plans through tenses, past, present and future each feeling equally wrong. He settles on the future, but he winces like he made a mistake. “I’m lying. I want to make videogames,” he says, finally, and it sounds more like a guess than an answer. He’s childlike in his answer, sheepish. I’ll be honest, his lack of conviction bothers me. He’s supposed to be the sensei! If he doesn’t know what to do, then what hope do I have?
“It’s going to be a long time before you make any money from that,” I say, trying to help him like he had helped me a million times, but I find it unnatural. Even as I say it, I feel flimsy.
“Can I ask you a question about elementary school?” Jevandre says.
“Uh, sure,” I say, entirely unsure, finding it difficult to keep track of the conversation as he jumps all over space and time.
“Do you remember when I broke my arm doing karate? In the summer after third grade?” he asks, but before I can confirm, he continues, “I lied. It wasn’t from karate. I broke it from punching the wall.”
“Why did you punch the wall?”
“I was mad at myself, for lying about liking Codename: JK.”
“Codename: JK? What are you talking about?” I ask, trying to keep up, but the inside joke returns to me quickly, “Julie Kim? The girl you liked after Codename: EQ?”
This time, he takes so long to answer, it could be two minutes, it could be two hours. I can’t help it – I try to speed him along.
“Why don’t you think you liked Codename: JK?”
“Well,” Jevandre answers finally, “Uh, I think it’s because I liked you.”
I don’t know what to say to this. We’ve talked about his sexuality before, and how it’s been confusing for him, so rather than address how blindsiding it is to hear this, I try to be empathetic.
“That must be a weird thing to live with,” I say.
“Yeah,” Jevandre chuckles knowingly.

“I don’t know how it got there,” Jevandre said to me over the phone, almost in tears.
“Is the Charizard there?” I asked, breathless.
On the other end, I could hear Jevandre flipping through the binder. Eventually, he found it, and I was so relieved I could cry. That 2nd Edition Base Set Holographic Charizard was my most prized possession in the world. I’ll sell it for $100 in 2020, months before the Pokemon card boom, and I’ll curse my haste in selling it too early, and then a few years later I’ll curse my haste in selling it at all.
“I promise I didn’t steal it,” Jevandre said, “Someone put it in my backpack.”
I believed him, but I couldn’t believe the situation. Mom said if I brought my card binder to school, someone would steal it. It just so happened that someone stole it and framed the crime on Jevandre. Who would do such a thing? Now that I knew the Charizard was safe, I could safely engage in the whodunit. There was only one suspect…
Michael admitted it, the next day, when we confronted him.
“You guys are best friends,” he said, “Why do you even need me?”
“We’re the Troublesome Trio,” I said. That was the name we called our little group. “There’s three people in a trio.”
“Not anymore,” said Jevandre. He was, understandably, hurt by Michael’s betrayal.
Michael’s methods were effective, but messy, childish — but that’s to be expected, he wasn’t even 9 yet. Despite my Charizard being the scapegoat, I understood Michael’s purpose — Jevandre and I were closer, and he wanted to disrupt the dynamic. When we get to high school, and Michael and I go to Kentwood while Jevandre goes to Kent-Meridian, Michael and I will share proximity but we’ll never be brothers the way Jevandre and I were. Even when we go to LA, Jevandre and I will have the Pact across the country and Michael will be stuck in his bedroom coding for his day job, 30 feet away but miles apart. Always the odd one out, always the quiet one, but always and supremely there — until one day, he won’t be. I’ll regret not holding Michael’s melancholy with the proper gravity on the day he shatters the mirror in his room.
“I just need a little time away,” Michael will say to me and the band, as he cleaned up the glass and packed his backpack. “Facebook is driving me crazy.”
We won’t see him for three days, and when he gets back he’ll tell us he’s going to move out of the Melrose house and into an apartment down the street.
“I just need a little alone time,” Michael will explain, “but we’ll see each other all the time.” I’ll notice that he doesn’t ask any of us for help with the move, and when his room is finally empty we’ll realize that he never told us his address. By November 2020, after a few weeks with no word from Michael, I’ll bring it up with Jevandre on our accountability call.
“It’s just a phase,” Jevandre will say, “You remember how he gets.”
I’ll be annoyed at his sagelier-than-thou attitude, because I’ll know that Jevandre gets the same way, and he’s a hypocrite because by January 2021 he’ll stop returning my calls, too. In June 2021, I’ll leave a voicemail to Michael to tell him Jevandre died, and I’ll send him a text, too, to make sure he got it. He’ll read the text, so at least I’ll know he’s alive, but it’s frustrating knowing he won’t make it to the funeral.
“The Trio has to stay together,” I plead. We were on the swings, and I wasn’t wearing my sweatshirt because it was nearing summer again. Jevandre was still in his brown sweatshirt, head shaved, sweating. Michael was silent, not answering me. I was scared, because I knew how critical it was for me to save them, in this moment, because I wouldn’t be able to save either of them in the future.
They agreed to a stalemate. The three of us could hang out, but Jevandre and Michael wouldn’t talk directly to each other. They’d have to talk through me. Not ideal, but I could accept being the middleman. This went on for months, years, lifetimes. Michael would pass the soccer ball, but Jevandre wouldn’t touch it until I kicked it first. Later, I’ll update Jevandre on Michael’s status — someone saw him walking down Melrose, downtrodden but alive. After that, when Michael and I finally reconnect, we’ll catch up on everything we missed since Jevandre died.
“I live in Austin now,” Michael will say over coffee at Dilettante in 2023. There will be a brightness about him that I’ve never seen before. He’ll tell me how, before that, he spent a miserable year alone in LA, completely isolated, coding for Facebook and subsisting exclusively on Skittles and red wine.
“How did you end up in Austin?” I’ll ask him.
“Well, after Jevandre…” he’ll trail off, lift up his shirt, and show me a massive tattoo of Itachi’s Mangekyō Sharingan.
“That is twice as big as Jevandre’s,” I’ll say, laughing in surprise. Jevandre had the same tattoo, and even that one took up his entire shoulder.
“I’m sorry I missed the funeral,” Michael will say, wiping away a tear, “It reminded me of…me.”
Michael will tell me how, eventually, an elderly Czech woman who lived next door to him in his lonely apartment became his sole human connection. She told him a story about how when she first came to America, she passed through Austin on the way to California. Eventually, Michael will say, he had to unstuck himself, get out of LA, so he left the apartment behind, with no plan, and just drove east. This woman’s brief mention of Austin struck him somewhere on the highway, so he took the exit, stayed the night there, and never left. Now I have a girlfriend, Michael will say, and money saved up, and friends, and I’ve never been happier.
It’ll be almost too good to be true, but I’ll look for any signs of his melancholy and won’t see any. I’ll be worried it’s a manic phase, or something, so I’ll peek ahead to Sis’s wedding, but 2 years later he’s still in Austin, still laughing.
“I’m so happy for you,” I’ll tell him, and I’ll mean it, even though I feel guilty that it took him so long to find change. I’ll wonder how much quicker it would have happened if I had let the Pokemon card incident end the friendship. “I’m sorry I made you come to LA with me.”
“Made me?” Michael will laugh, “No, that was fun. I didn’t know what I was doing, so I just did your guys’ thing. I just had to find my own. How is LA, by the way?”
I won’t know how to tell him that I want to leave LA, too, that is was so hard to be there without him after the band broke up, after Jevandre died, after everything, so I tell him that things are amazing as ever. Michael will fly back home to Austin in the morning with just a backpack and I’ll fly back to Hollywood with all my luggage to an apartment too small to fit it all. Next year, I’ll move out and into a house in Silver Lake, with a dog and a girlfriend and I won’t have enough stuff to fill it. After we break up, I’ll move downtown, and into that loft with the high ceilings. I’ll hope that if I keep moving incrementally eastwards, down the river, that eventually I’ll be spit out of Los Angeles without ever having to make the choice to do so. But the river will still be stymied, too clogged with my melancholy.
“I’m excited to change,” Jevandre says, on the phone, unpausing himself.
“What was stopping you from changing before?” I ask him, pretending not to know. Pretending to wonder if, by change, he means getting a new job, or losing weight, or finding a new hobby.
Jevandre takes only about 30 seconds this time to answer. “I don’t think I’m ready to answer that.”
I’m frustrated at the non-answer, so we switch to talking about anime, which seems to be the only thing that we can level on. The conversation is getting boring, and I wonder why he’s not hanging up, but I won’t hang up either. I’m stuck in this moment, with him, forever, locked in the Pact.
In front of us, the future reaches relentlessly forward to its end. Jevandre kills himself that night, I reunite with Michael, I travel the world, I become rich and successful, my children turn 9 years old, someone speaks the last sound of my name, society as we know it crumbles and the universe reaches maximum entropy, all without me ever hanging up the phone. Behind us, the past stretches backwards, to the beginning. My song went viral the night before, I lost touch with Michael, Michael and I moved to LA together, I looked up Amber on Facebook, the TLC became a Super Buffet, Jevandre broke his arm by punching the wall, and Michael and Jevandre were still not speaking to each other by the 2006 end of the year assembly.
Jevandre was on my left, and Michael was on my right. I was excited for summer vacation, because I needed a break from playing messenger pigeon. I hoped that after a few months of not seeing each other, they wouldn’t want to be friends at all, and the fourth grade could be a clean start for all three of us. We’d be in a new class, and Ms. Brodhead probably wouldn’t seat us together the way Ms. Pak did, and we’d drift apart, so when Jevandre switched high schools we would lose touch and never make the Pact, and when I go to LA I would be so estranged from Michael that he wouldn’t have moved with me.
I was daydreaming about this beautiful alternate future when the bell rang, starting the assembly started and jolting me back to the past. The new student body president took stage to give the opening speech.
“Who is that?” Jevandre said.
“Codename: JK,” said Michael suddenly, “Julie Kim. She was in my ESL class.”
It had been so long since the silence had been broken, I almost didn’t recognize how sweet it was to hear a word pass between them without going through my ears first.
“Forget Codename: EQ,” Jevandre said, “Codename: JK is my new crush.”
Michael and Jevandre burst into laughter, and I looked between the two of them, wondering if Jevandre knew, then, that this olive branch was built on a lie.
“I’m sorry,” Jevandre said, without missing a beat.
“What for?” said Michael, “I’m the one who stole the card.”
But I knew what Jevandre was sorry for. He was sorry that we were three boys intertwined by our melancholies. He was sorry he just destroyed my beautiful daydream, where he would have been saved before the melancholy killed him, and Michael wouldn’t have had to save himself before it did. He was sorry that he was going to call me on June 23rd, 2021, and I was going to be stuck on the phone with him for eternity, thinking of something to say.
I’ll have a dream about him, some months after he dies, where he came back to life for just one day, and I have that one day to convince him to stick around for good. In the dream, I brought him to Pacific Park in Santa Monica, which was a poor choice, because I don’t even think that place is very fun, but it was all I could think of. I bought him an ice cream cone, and a helicopter hat, and we got in line for the rollercoaster. I took my eyes off of him for one second to scan my ticket, but when I looked back at him he was already tying another noose. I pulled him down, and begged him to give the rollercoaster a chance, but at the top before the drop he tried to jump out, and I dragged him back in. The time between each attempt got shorter and shorter until every second of the dream was spent trying to stop him. This went on until the sun went down and it was time for him to go back home. That’s when I’ll wake up.
“I got you something,” Jevandre said, and reached into his pocket and handed Michael a gum wrapper and a golf pencil. He didn’t prepare for this moment, but it was a good joke, so Michael jumped across me to tackle Jevandre in a violent hug in the middle of the assembly.
“The Troublesome Trio is back together again,” I said, happy despite everything. It was just a few pieces of junk, but a gift was a gift.
A crack in the fractal engine.
If a gift could be a gift, then why couldn’t a dream just be a dream?
Why can’t a punch just be a punch?
Starting from that first crack in the boxing gym, the fractals will continue to collapse, back towards my 9th birthday. I unfocus my eyes, and my room becomes my room again, and Jack Black transforms back into Nacho Libre. Blinking, I’ll look around at my loft apartment, and the black hole of post-breakup baggage will shrink back down to a fun experiment to try to live in downtown, after Silver Lake and Hollywood. I’ll think of Michael in Austin, and I’ll think of my own slippery movement eastwards. I’ll realize that the river is going to sweep me up and physically spit me out of California eventually, sure, but unless I let go, my heart is never going to leave LA.
But how could I? I promised Jevandre that I wouldn’t give up. We made the Pact.
So I’ll look around at LA, too, now that the fractal engine has collapsed, and it won’t look like all my hopes and dreams anymore, nor my great divine purpose, not my failures, not my triumphs, no, it won’t look like any of that, because it’s just a place, after all, and all along this has all just been life.
“Alright, dude,” I say, “I gotta get going.”
“I’ll talk to you soon,” Jevandre says.
“I love you, man.”
“I love you, too.”
I hang up the phone, and that’s how it went, and nothing can change that. But that doesn’t mean that nothing changes. That night, Jevandre changes, and later, Michael will change, and despite how much I wished I could have stayed in place forever, I had been changing the whole time, too.

***And just like that…***
A recursive auto-fiction Gonzo-memoir becomes a blog post again.

I’m sitting in my apartment, finishing up this piece that’s taken me weeks to write, but in reality it’s taken me 4 years. I haven’t written about any of these things before, since Jevandre died. I haven’t really written many songs about it. I think I thought if I waited around long enough, the feelings would burst out of me and it would all write itself. I’ve learned that’s not the case, and very rarely do things just happen to you. Especially not to someone like me, who likes to assign meaning to every little thing. Because for something to Just Happen™, you have to just… let it happen. But sometimes, when something does Just Happen™, like a song going viral, or a friend dying, or the itch to move to New York gets too strong to ignore, I wait around to figure out what it means before leaning in and following. But a life spent stuck waiting to learn the rules is no life lived, and no game played. The game is figuring out the rules. So after 4 years stuck in this moment I decide to close the Quantum Fractal Loop™ and move the fuck on.

***So — I’m letting go of the Pact***
I’m sorry Jevandre, but I’m sure it’s a weight off your shoulders, too.

I’m not quitting music. Far from it. I’m letting go of the baggage, the pressure, the idea that I have to succeed to keep up my promise to Jevandre, and the equally Complex & Illogical feeling that my success is what killed him. I will live, for me, because my life is my life and I’m running out of time to waste. And it has nothing to do with leaving LA physically, although I very well may spontaneously move to New York next month. It has everything to do with leaving behind this idea of “LA” that I have held onto since I was a kid, that I solidified with Jevandre, that I said had to go this Exact Certain Way™ or I would stay put, stubbornly, until everything was perfect. No more. I got stuck, 4 years ago, when you died, Jevandre, and I’m no longer mad at you for it, and more importantly I’m no longer mad at myself. My life didn’t begin the day you died. I’m sorry I’ve been assigning so much personal meaning to what you did. That’s pretty narcissistic of me. You were just sad, and tired. And I’m sorry. I wish I could have saved you, but I’m done playing Orpheus and Eurydice. I just love you, and I miss you. And there’s not much else to say besides that. Before, I may have said, I’m going to “keep living for you,” or whatever, but that’s a sorry excuse to stay stuck in my grief. It’s time I start living for myself.

‘Til next time
-mbk