Arslan

There's a thing that lives in the chest of men like me.

Not a wound exactly. Wounds have edges. This has none. It's hollow. It's the specific emptiness that gets passed from one set of hands to the next before anyone knows what they're holding. My father had it. His father before him. Men who didn't have words for what moved through them, so it moved through them and kept going. Into rooms. Into the people they were supposed to protect. Into me.

I received it young.

I didn't know I was receiving it. That's how it works. You don't get asked. You're simply the next open place and it settles into you the way cold settles into a house when no one's tended the heat. Quietly. Completely. Until you can't remember a time before it was there.

I tried to fill it with everything I could find.

Some of it numbed it for a while. Some of it made me feel, briefly, like a man who didn't have a hollow center. None of it held. It never holds. The hollow isn't a problem to be solved. I didn't understand that yet. I kept trying anyway, the way you keep trying when you don't know what else to do and the emptiness is loud enough to drown everything else out.

The hollow feasted.

That's the only word for it. It ate. It ate the years and the relationships and the version of me that might have been something different if the thing hadn't been placed in me before I had any say. It ate quietly, without malice, without intention. The way erosion eats. The way time eats. Not because it wanted to destroy me. Because eating is simply what it does.

I let it.

I sat down inside it. I stopped running from it and filling it and handing pieces of it to people who couldn't hold it either. I just. sat there. In the empty. In the feasting. In the specific ache of a man who's finally feeling the full weight of everything that was handed to him and everything it cost.

My hands were open.

Not reaching. Not grasping. Open. Palms up. Letting whatever needed to move through me move through me. Letting the fire that was the truest thing in me meet the hollow that'd been eating me alive, not to destroy it, not to fill it, but to be present inside it. To be the place where it finally, after all those men and all those years, got felt all the way through.

The cracks ran up my arms. Across my face. Along every seam where I'd held the most.

I didn't look away.

YA ALLAH.

Not a word. The sound that c
omes from below language when a man's got nothing left to perform and nothing left to protect and discovers that underneath all of it, underneath the hollow and the fire and the handed-down ache of a bloodline that didn't know how to stop, something remains. Something that was never the hollow's to take.

I saw Bryan. Grown. Living. His face carrying something I'd been terrified I'd never get to see.

I saw Kevin. The practice. Dennis. The life on the other side of this moment, which required this moment to exist.

The hollow had an ending.

I was it.

Kevin came and knelt in front of me.

He didn't try to fix the cracks. He didn't look away from them. He put his hand against my face the way you touch something you've needed to reach for a very long time, careful and certain at the same time.

Rest now, habibi.

Behind him, the boy stood in the warm light. Watching. Safe in a way I hadn't been safe. Safe in a way that'd cost exactly this.

I closed my eyes.

The hollow was still there. It didn't disappear. But it was empty now in a different way. Not feasting. Not aching. Just. quiet. The way a room goes quiet after something enormous has finished moving through it.

The fire in my hands went still.

I'd been the ending of something.

Kevin would be the beginning.

That was always the arrangement.

That was always enough.