What Tyler Said
The past doesn’t always come back to hurt you. Sometimes it comes back to return something it borrowed.
Tyler || Closure || Growth || Truth
Tyler found me in the library on a Tuesday, which was a Tuesday I had arrived early and was alone at the back table before Jamie. He stood at the edge of the table with the expression he’d had in the hallway — the awareness, the complexity — and said: “Can I sit?” I gestured at the chair. He sat. He had not, since the hallway, made any significant approach. We had passed in corridors. I had been aware of him the way you were aware of something at the edge of your peripheral vision — present, registered, not yet engaged. He folded his hands on the table and looked at them, which was something I understood as the posture of someone who had prepared for a conversation and was finding the preparation insufficient. “I owe you an apology,” he said. I waited. “For eighth grade. For the — for how it ended.” He looked up. “I was scared,” he said. “I didn’t handle it. I just — disappeared. And I know that wasn’t fair.” I looked at him. He had grown into his face in the years since eighth grade — he looked like someone who had been doing work on himself, the way people looked when they were actively rather than passively going through something. “I know,” I said. “I was scared too.” “But I was the one who moved,” he said. “Which made it look like a choice.” “It was a choice,” I said, not unkindly. “Mine too. I let the silence happen.” He nodded. “I’ve been — I’ve been working on some things,” he said. “About who I am. About what I was afraid of then.” He said this carefully, not disclosing more than he was ready to disclose, which I understood precisely. “I’m not asking for anything,” he said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. That it wasn’t you. That I was handling something I didn’t have the tools for yet.” I looked at him. At the face that had been significant at fourteen and that was now just another person’s face, with its own history and its own complexity. I thought about what carrying the silence of eighth grade had cost both of us. “Thank you,” I said. “For saying it.” He nodded. He stood. “I heard your live wire round,” he said, unexpectedly. “I was in the back. Callahan let me observe.” He paused. “It was really good.” “Thank you,” I said. He left. Jamie arrived four minutes later and set their coffee down and looked at the chair Tyler had been sitting in, which still held some quality of the conversation. “Was that Tyler Chase?” they said. “Yes,” I said. “Okay?” “Yes,” I said. “Actually yes.” Jamie sat. Opened their notebook. “Good,” they said. We started practice. I argued the resolution with something lighter in my chest than I’d had before — the specific lightness of a piece of old weight being set down. The argument was better for it. Everything was better for it. The river, running a little freer.