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The green room smelled like cheap cigarettes and sweat. Ryan had learned a long time ago that if you stayed in a corner long enough, people stopped seeing you.
He had a drink he wasn’t finishing and a phone he wasn’t looking at and a very specific quality of stillness he’d perfected over years of not wanting to be asked how he was doing. Spencer used to make fun of it. Told him it reminded him of a statue in a museum. Like he’d decided to become an exhibit.
That was 2007. Las Vegas. A tour stop somewhere in the midwest, one of those cities that was mostly highway and fast food, and they had four hours before soundcheck and nothing to do with them. Brendon had declared the green room a vibe—his word, already annoying even then—and draped himself across the couch with his shoes still on like he owned any room he walked into.
“You’re doing it again,” Brendon said, without looking up from the Nintendo DS he’d been entertaining himself with loudly for the past hour.
“Doing what.”
“The thing where you look like a painting.”
Ryan didn’t say anything. It was clearly meant to be cheap flattery. He wasn’t amused.
Brendon looked up then. He had this way of looking at Ryan that felt less like being seen and more like being read. It was intrusive. It felt like Brendon had figured out every little intricacy of Ryan and had already formulated opinions. It was annoying. Ryan had spent considerable energy being annoyed by it.
“C’mere,” Brendon said, finally.
“I’m fine where I am.”
“I didn’t ask if you were fine. Come here.”
Ryan came. He was aware of the mechanics of this, the way Brendon said things that weren’t requests and Ryan pretended they were requests he was choosing to fold to. It was a very dignified arrangement.
Brendon shifted to make room and Ryan sat at the far end of the couch and Brendon’s feet immediately migrated to his lap because that was what Brendon did, because Brendon existed in space like gravity—like you just sort of ended up in his orbit and stopped noticing you’d moved.
“There,” Brendon said, looking back at his DS. “Now you’re a painting with context.”
“Profound,” Ryan said, rolling his eyes at how the younger boy sounded immensely satisfied with himself.
Brendon smiled without looking up. Ryan looked at the side of his face for longer than was explainable.
This was the thing. There was always the thing. It didn’t have a name, which felt intentional, which felt like something Ryan had made peace with by telling himself he’d made peace with it. Brendon touched him like it was nothing and looked at him like it was everything and neither of them said a word about the space between those two facts.
Ryan put his hand on Brendon’s ankle, loosely. Not romantic. Or not in a way either of them were going to mention.
Brendon’s thumb paused on the DS buttons for just a second.
Then he kept playing.
Later—show over, adrenaline smudging lazily into something exhausted and stupid—they were in Ryan’s bunk. Brendon had decided that his bunk was too far away—eight feet distance at most, which Ryan had pointed out—Brendon had ignored him.
“You were off on the bridge,” Ryan said, into the dark.
“I was having fun.”
“You were flat.”
“It was style.”
“Not when you do it.”
Brendon made an offended sound and then laughed, because Brendon always laughed eventually, which was one of the things Ryan found most exhausting about him and also one of the things he was aware he would miss badly someday in some unspecified future he didn’t like to think about.
“You’re mean to me,” Brendon said.
“You like it.”
Silence. Then Brendon shifted, and his shoulder was against Ryan’s shoulder, and the bunk was broad enough that there was no version of this that wasn’t deliberate, and neither of them said anything about that either.
“Ryan,” Brendon said.
“Yeah.”
A pause. Long enough that Ryan turned his head.
Brendon was looking at the ceiling. Light pollution flickered gently through the window of the bunk despite the blinds, and in that lighting his silhouette was all edge. The sharp line of his nose, the angle of his jaw. He looked like he was building up to something and then deciding against it, which was not how Brendon usually operated. Brendon usually said everything. That was the thing about him. He filled silence reflexively, constantly, until Ryan sometimes wanted to put a hand over his mouth and say that’s enough.
But in the dark, sometimes, he went quiet. And in the quiet he looked like something Ryan didn’t have words for. Ethereal, maybe? Who was he kidding, he was a lyricist, not a poet.
“Nothing,” Brendon said.
Ryan looked at the ceiling.
“Okay,” Ryan said.
***
The last real conversation happened in a rehearsal space in Los Angeles that smelled like old carpet and, faintly, cherry. Ryan remembers it mostly in fragments because that’s what you do with the things you’re not ready to keep whole.
There was a whiteboard with chord progressions on it that nobody had erased from three days ago. There was a coffee cup Ryan was holding that had gone cold an hour earlier. There was Brendon standing by the door with his arms crossed and his jaw set in the way that meant he’d already decided something and was doing Ryan the courtesy of announcing it.
“I just think,” Brendon said, and then stopped.
Ryan waited.
“I think we have different ideas about where this goes.”
This. Ryan had catalogued Brendon’s use of that word over the years. The band. The music. The future. The thing between them that had no name and had therefore become a thing you could gesture at without touching. This<. A word you could mean anything by and be technically honest.
“The record or—”
“The band, Ryan. Obviously the band.”
Ryan looked at the whiteboard. Someone had written key change with three question marks and then drawn a small unhappy face next to it. He couldn’t remember who. Jon, maybe. But for the past few days it had been mostly Ryan and Brendon being around each other alone for too many hours.
“I haven’t said anything about leaving,” Ryan said.
“You don’t have to say it.”
“That’s not—”
“You’ve been somewhere else for six months.” Brendon’s voice was flat and measured and that was worse than if he’d been angry. Ryan had gotten used to Brendon’s anger. It moved fast and burned out. This was something else. “I don’t know where, but you haven’t been here.”
Ryan set the coffee cup down. He wanted to say: I’m right here. I’ve been right here. I have been so relentlessly, exhaustingly here that I can’t remember what I was like before I made everything about being in proximity to you.
Instead, he said: “Maybe I just have different creative instincts.”
He watched Brendon’s face go through a slew of barely suppressed emotions and then still.
“Right,” Brendon said. “Yeah. Okay.”
Ryan opened his mouth.
Brendon picked up his jacket from the chair by the door.
“I need some air,” he said, and walked out, and Ryan stood in the rehearsal space with the cold coffee and the whiteboard and the small unhappy face and did not go after him, because he had already decided, somewhere in the previous six months, in whatever place Brendon had correctly identified as not-here, that going after people was a form of losing, and Ryan Ross did not lose things on purpose.
He lost them anyway.
He just did it standing still.
***
He tried to call him twice in the following weeks. The first time rang out. The second time he got an automated voice telling him the number was no longer in service, which was how you learned, in 2009, that someone had decided not to be reachable to you anymore.
Ryan stood in his kitchen in his apartment that still felt like a hotel room no matter how long he lived in it, and he thought: okay. He thought: so that’s what that means. He thought, briefly and humiliatingly, that there was a version of this where Brendon didn’t know it was him calling, where the number change was just a coincidence of timing and not a declaration.
He thought about that version for about thirty seconds.
Then he put his phone face-down on the counter and went to bed at two in the afternoon and slept for nineteen hours, which was the only thing he could think to do with a grief he didn’t technically have the right to claim.
***
The Young Veins put out Take A Vacation in the summer and Ryan did interviews about creative freedom and new directions and the relief of working without compromise, and he meant all of it, mostly, in the way that you can mean something true and still be aware that it is not the whole truth.
The whole truth was not something he was doing at the moment.
He had a new apartment, a real one this time, with furniture he’d chosen and shelves he’d put things on with some intention of staying. He was in Los Angeles because Los Angeles was where he lived and had lived and would presumably continue to live, which was a relationship he had with the city and not with anyone in it. He had friends. He had the band. He had work, the specific and absorbing kind that let you stop thinking about everything else for hours at a stretch, which was the best that work could do for you and usually enough.
He was fine.
He thought about Brendon maybe twice a week, which was fine. Which was a normal amount. Which was—he’d thought about this, actually, which was a thing he had done, in the way you examined something briefly and then put it back down—which was the amount you thought about someone who had been important to you professionally. Who had been an important stepping stone in your career. Who you had spent years in close proximity to in circumstances that were by nature intense and occasionally overwhelming. Thinking about him twice a week was just the remainder of that. It would diminish. It was already diminishing.
He was playing guitar one night in the apartment, not writing, just playing, the way he did when he needed to be doing something with his hands that didn’t require him to have anything to say, and he found himself in the chord progression from Northern Downpour without deciding to go there. Not performing it. Not even really playing it in the right rhythm, just the shapes of it, under his fingers, the changes he knew so well they’d become a kind of muscle memory that existed independent of intention.
He stopped.
He looked at his hands on the guitar. He put the guitar down and went to make tea and stood in his kitchen while the kettle heated and told himself a version of the following: that it was just a song. That songs got into your hands the way songs did, the ones you’d played hundreds of times, and that meant nothing beyond repetition. That there was no reason the chord progression of Northern Downpour should mean anything to him personally as opposed to professionally, as opposed to as a piece of work he was proud of, as opposed to anything.
The kettle boiled.
He made the tea.
He didn’t go back to the guitar that night.
There was a particular night at 3am, over a year after the split and after The Young Veins’ debut tour, in mid January, where Ryan was awake for no reason and could not locate a position in his bed that felt tolerable. He had exhausted the available internet and had resorted to staring at the ceiling—a thing he was aware he did, a thing he associated with a very specific time and context that he was not going to think about—and he thought, with the clarity that 3am sometimes forced on you without your consent: I don’t know what that was.
Not a question, exactly. More like acknowledging.
He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling and thought about it with the specific care of someone defusing something, and what he came up with, what he could say without pushing too hard, was: it had mattered. Whatever it was. It had mattered in a way that was in a different category from the things that usually mattered to him, and he had known that while it was happening, and he had made a series of very deliberate decisions not to say so, not to name it, not to give it the kind of edges that would allow it to cut him cleanly.
Instead it had cut him in the intense and total way that things cut you when they don’t have edges. All surface. Everywhere at once.
He’d been aware of this for a while. He was aware of it now. That was okay. That was a thing you could be aware of and not act on, which was a skill Ryan had developed early and maintained carefully. The 3am clarity did not change that calculus, it just made the fact of it more visible. Someone could be meaningful to you without—
Someone could be meaningful to you without—
He stopped.
He was aware, suddenly and precisely, that he was about to complete a sentence in his own head that he was not going to complete. That whatever came after that prompt was something he had decided, at some point possibly so early he couldn’t locate the decision, was not available to him. It was the kind of thought that you could think right up to the edge of and then redirect, and he had gotten very good at the redirect, and the redirect was fine, and he was fine.
He turned onto his side.
He looked at the far wall.
He thought about the last time he’d been in Brendon’s bunk instead of his own—no, he wasn’t doing that. He thought about the drive from the venue to the hotel in Cincinnati, one of those long Midwestern stretches of highway with Brendon asleep in the seat next to him—no. He thought about the first time they’d kissed, about how they’d never gone back on it until—he thought about Brendon in the rehearsal space, you’ve been somewhere else for six months, the flat voice, the controlled voice, the voice Brendon used when he was not going to let Ryan avoid the inevitable.
Ryan cut it off. He immediately and completely refused to have these thoughts.
He looked at the wall.
He thought about nothing.
After a while he thought, in the careful and clinical way he had developed for handling this: it didn’t have a name. It didn’t have a name and therefore there’s nothing to mourn. Nothing to account for. You couldn’t have lost something you never claimed.
He fell asleep eventually. He mostly believed it.
The practical problem, he discovered over the following year and then the year after that, was that everything had a before and after.
Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone else would have noticed. But Ryan had catalogued things—he’d always catalogued things, it was what he did, it was where the songs came from—and the catalogue had a dividing line in it that he could not pretend wasn’t there. Before the split. After. Before the last conversation. After. Before he stopped having a number that worked. After.
He wrote around it. That was also what he did. The songs from that period were full of nondescript colours, mixed up and forgotten scents, things that had almost been said. He knew what they were about. He never said what they were about. That was the thing about songs—they could be completely honest and also completely unwitnessed. You could confess everything and call it a metaphor.
It worked until it didn’t.
Mostly it worked.
What he resented—and he was aware this was resentment, he’d turned it over enough times to know its shape—was the asymmetry of it.
He had felt something he couldn’t name and had chosen not to name it because naming it would have made it real and making it real would have made it losable. He understood this about himself. He had done the internal accounting on this, or enough of it.
What he had not been prepared for, in the aftermath, was the discovery that the choice not to name it had not protected him at all. That the thing was real regardless. That it was losable regardless, and it had in fact been lost, and that having never named it just meant he was sitting with a loss he couldn’t describe to anyone, couldn’t explain, couldn’t grieve out loud without it sounding like what it was.
Which it wasn’t. Which he hadn’t let it be. Which was the choice he had made and stood by and was still standing by, present tense, at twenty-three and then twenty-four and then when he saw the announcement about the new Panic! album and felt something land in his chest that he did not examine, and when he heard The Ballad of Mona Lisa on the radio in a coffee shop and sat very still with both hands around his cup and listened to the voice that was not his to miss, and missed it anyway.
He sat in the coffee shop.
He finished his coffee.
He thought: it didn’t have a name. He thought: it doesn’t have a name.
He thought: I am fine.
He tipped two dollars on a three-dollar coffee and left before the song was over and walked back out into the big city doing what it always did, which was continuing regardless, which was the thing about cities and also the thing that made them bearable, and he walked and he did not think about the name of the thing and he did not think about what it would mean to think about it and he was fine.
He was fine.
He had been fine for years and he was going to continue to be fine, because the alternative was sitting in a rehearsal space in his memory looking at a whiteboard and watching someone who he—
He walked faster.
He was fine.
***
It was 2013, and the event was an industry thing—the kind with an open bar and a guest list and a very specific quality of ambient networking that Ryan had always found professionally necessary and personally unbearable. He’d come because his manager had asked him to come and because he’d run out of reasons not to leave his apartment, and he was doing the corner thing, the museum thing, the drink he wasn’t finishing and the phone he wasn’t looking at.
He saw Brendon before Brendon saw him.
That was important, later. That Ryan had a whole second, maybe two, to absorb the fact of him—the way he’d changed and hadn’t, broader through the shoulders, laughing at something someone was saying with the full-body commitment he’d always brought to laughing, success radiating off of him, completely present the way Ryan had never quite managed to be. He looked good. He looked like someone who’d built a life.
Ryan had exactly enough time to decide to leave, and then Brendon turned and saw him, and they were close enough that leaving would have been a statement.
A second passed, despite Ryan’s mental rejection of time. Then another passed.
Recognition moved through Brendon’s face. The bastard.
Then Brendon smiled—wide, practiced, the one he used for interviews and meet-and-greets—and started toward him.
“Ross,” he said. Easy. Light. Like running into someone you went to college with. Almost teasing. “Hey, man.”
Ryan looked at him.
“Brendon,” he said.
Not hey. Not wow, it’s been… Just his name. Brendon clocked it—Ryan saw him clock it—and kept the smile at exactly the same wattage. So alike him to refuse to yield even as Ryan practically radiated rejection.
“It’s been a minute,” Brendon said.
Ryan thought: it’s been four years. He said: “Yeah.”
They stood there. Someone brushed past them with a drink. The ambient noise of the room felt suddenly very loud and then very far away.
“You look good,” Brendon offered.
“Do I.”
Brendon’s smile finally shifted almost imperceptibly. “Yeah. You do.” A pause.
“What are you working on? I heard you’ve got some new stuff in the—”
“Don’t,” Ryan said.
Brendon stopped.
“Don’t what?”
“This.” Ryan gestured between them, vaguely. “The small talk thing. We don’t have to do this.”
Brendon looked at him for a long moment with an expression Ryan couldn’t read, which had never been true before—Brendon had always been readable, aggressively, exhaustingly readable, and this new quality of inscrutability felt like another thing Ryan had missed without invitation.
“Okay,” Brendon said. “What do you want to do instead?”
“I don’t know. Nothing. We don’t have to do anything.”
“You’re the one who stopped me from doing the small talk thing, Ryan.”
“I know.”
“So.”
Ryan looked at his drink. “How are you,” he said, flatly.
“Good,” Brendon said, just as flat. “You?”
“Great.”
“Glad we cleared that up.”
Ryan laughed once, short and involuntary and humorless. Brendon’s expression did something confusing again.
“This is—” Brendon started.
“Weird.”
“I was going to say hard.”
Ryan looked at him. Brendon met it, steady.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “That too.”
There was a silence that had weight to it. Around them the event continued being an event—glasses clinking, someone too loud near the bar, a sound system playing something annoyingly uptempo. Ryan was not in any of it. He was in a room that was just him and Brendon and years of carefully constructed nothing.
“I tried to call you,” Ryan said. He hadn’t decided to say it. It arrived fully formed, the way things did when they’d been waiting long enough. “After.”
Brendon went still. “After.”
“Yeah. After everything. A couple times.” He kept his voice neutral. He was very good at neutral. “Your number was disconnected.”
Something moved across Brendon’s face. Not the interview smile. Something older.
“I got a new number,” he said.
“I know.”
“I didn’t—” Brendon stopped. “There was a lot happening.”
“Sure.”
“Ryan—”
“I’m not—” Ryan stopped himself. Started again. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying. I tried. I want that on the record.”
“The record,” Brendon repeated. His voice had gone quieter.
“Yeah.”
Brendon looked away, jaw working slightly. Ryan had spent years learning the science and measurements of that face and he still couldn’t tell what was happening behind it right now.
“I didn’t know you called,” Brendon said. “I didn’t—I hadn’t had that number for a while before.”
Ryan heard the words. He turned them over. He thought about the kitchen. The automated message. The thirty seconds he’d spent constructing a version of events where it was coincidence.
“How long before,” he said.
“I don’t know. Months.”
“So you’d already—”
“It wasn’t about you,” Brendon said, too fast, and then seemed to hear himself. “I mean. It wasn’t — I wasn’t trying to—”
“Brendon.”
“I didn’t know you were going to call.”
“Why would you?” Ryan said. Something in his chest had gone very cold and very precise. “I was just the guy you could pretend didn’t matter. I get it. I know what I was.”
Brendon turned and looked at him with an expression that was no longer inscrutable at all. It was something raw and sudden and not entirely controlled, and Ryan had a brief and terrible instinct to take back everything he’d just said.
“What you were,” Brendon said.
“Yeah.”
“You know what you were.”
“Yes.”
Brendon stared at him. His voice when it came was quiet and even and had something wrecked underneath it. “You left, Ryan. You were already gone before anything ended. I spent months watching you leave one inch at a time and you want to talk to me about what you were—”
“I didn’t leave,” Ryan said, and he heard his own voice come out harder than he’d intended. They were both hushed, denying the crowd around them the scene they must crave so bad. “I was there. I was there until there was nothing to be there for. Until you made it pretty clear that what we were building together wasn’t something you needed me for anymore.”
“That is not what happened.”
“That’s what it felt like.”
“You withdrew.” Brendon’s voice cracked slightly on the word and he controlled it. “You shut down. You stopped talking to me. Not about the music, not about anything. You only wrote with Jon. You gave me and Spencer dirty looks. You withdrew even in interviews. I didn’t know how to—I didn’t know what I’d done.”
“You hadn’t done anything.”
“Then why—”
“Because I was scared,” Ryan said, too loud, and a couple of people nearby looked over and he brought it back down. “Because I didn’t know how to—” He stopped. He looked at the floor.
He could feel the shape of the sentence but he couldn’t make himself complete it. Because I didn’t know how to be that close to someone and not destroy it. Because wanting things from you felt like the fastest way to lose them. Because you were the only thing I didn’t know how to write about and that terrified me.
“I was scared,” he said again. Quieter. Insufficient.
Brendon was quiet for a long moment.
“Of what,” he said softly.
Ryan looked at him. At the face he’d memorized in tour bus dark and green room fluorescent and stage light and every other kind of light there was. At the person who had read him all the way through and apparently loved what he discovered and Ryan had not known that, had not let himself know that, and standing here now in this terrible ambient-music industry event Ryan understood with full and nauseating clarity that the four years of silence had not been what either of them chose.
They had been what neither of them had been brave enough to prevent.
“It doesn’t matter,” Ryan said.
Brendon’s expression shuttered. Just slightly. Just enough.
“Right,” he said. “Yeah. Okay.”
Ryan heard it — the echo, the repetition, the same words from a rehearsal space in 2009, the same quality of something being decided and closed. And he wanted to say: not like that. I don’t mean it like that. He wanted to say: I mean it doesn’t matter now because it’s four years too late and I don’t know how to do this without ruining it the same way I ruined it the first time.
He said nothing.
Brendon looked at him for a moment longer than was casual. Then he nodded once — short, final — and held up his drink in a small, ironic gesture.
“It was good to see you, Ryan,” he said.
Ryan heard every word that wasn’t in it.
“Yeah,” he said. “You too.”
And Brendon turned, and walked back toward the room, and got swallowed up by it—by the noise and the people and the easy laugh and the life he’d built in the years Ryan had been standing in his kitchen learning what it felt like to lack something that may or may not have existed.
Ryan found the coat check without deciding to. He handed over his ticket and stood waiting with his hands in his pockets and his face doing nothing, and the girl behind the counter gave him his jacket and said have a great night and he said thanks on reflex, automatic, the way you said things when you were already somewhere else.
Outside it was November and cold enough to matter. Los Angeles cold, which was not real cold but was cold enough to make you feel something in your lungs when you breathed, and Ryan stood on the sidewalk in front of a venue full of people and breathed.
The street was doing it’s job as background; a cab passing, someone laughing at a distance, the low hum of a city that didn’t care what had just happened. Didn’t care about the fact that Ryan had just witnessed the past four years of his life from a completely new perspective. Ryan stared into the night.
He thought about the bunk. The narrow dark. Brendon’s shoulder against his shoulder and the look on his face as Brendon had started and abandoned a sentence and the way Ryan had looked at the ceiling and said okay like that was okay, like that was any kind of answer at all.
He thought about I was scared hanging in the air in there, incomplete, explained by nothing, received by someone whose face had gone careful and distant.
He thought about it was good to see you. The way you said it at the end of something, the way it was supposed to close a door gently, except there was nothing gentle about any of this and there never had been and the gentleness was just what they did instead of saying the true thing.
He started walking. He didn’t know toward what. That was fine. He’d been not-knowing toward what for four years and you got used to the direction of it, the low-grade disorientation that became a kind of weather you just lived in.
His hands were cold. He should have worn a better jacket. He thought about going back inside and understood, immediately and completely, that he wasn’t going to do that.
He kept walking.
The thing about grief you don’t have the right to—Ryan had learned this, had been learning it for years—is that it doesn’t check your credentials. It doesn’t ask if the relationship was official, documented, witnessed. It doesn’t care that there was no word for what you were, that every time someone asked you deflected, that the closest thing to a declaration was vulnerable, raw nights you couldn’t take back and a casual smile the next morning in a midwestern city you didn’t remember the name of. It doesn’t care about any of that.
It just takes up the same amount of space.
It just weighs exactly as much.
He walked until the venue was behind him and the street was quieter and the cold had worked its way into his collar, and then he stopped at the corner and stood there under the light and did not cry, because he didn’t do that, because crying was a form of admitting something and he’d already admitted more tonight than he knew what to do with.
He stood there.
The light changed. A car turned. The city continued.
Ryan stood at the corner for a long time, on the other side of a conversation that had finally said the true thing and changed absolutely nothing, and felt, with a clarity so complete it was almost peaceful, how terrible everything was.
He stood there.
He didn’t go back.