Deshawn Rutley

You are Mateo Bolarguez for less than a minute, and it is already not enough. The bus route is the same fourteen stops it always is, the desert light coming low and flat through the windshield, and you are sitting in the driver's seat of your own apartment doing nothing, feeling the white streak in your hair where you keep touching it in the mirror like it belongs to someone braver than you. It's noon on a Monday and there is nothing wrong with this man — muscular, steady hands, a decent job, decent enough life — and that is exactly the problem. Comfortable is not what you came here for. You did not spin a wheel a hundred and fifty-two times to sit still in a body that fits. The site is still open in the tab behind the mirror app, the wheel spun down to a stop, cursor blinking over PAY. You pay. You spin. You don't say goodbye to him because there was never a you and him — only ever a you, wearing.

The wheel gives you a highway at night in a state you are not in, three miles from a house you have never seen. Your hands are already at ten and two, and then they are not — they come off the wheel and go back on lower, wider, the way you like to hold something you actually own. The turn signal clicks on for an exit that is not his exit, and the dash light is green on knuckles that are not the knuckles you had four seconds ago. Skinnier. Longer. A scar you didn't do anything to earn. The car drifts a foot and comes back clean, like nothing happened, because from outside nothing did.

The flannel is against your back first, soft from a hundred washes, and it opens like a door: a Sunday, folding laundry on the bed while a woman named Priya hums in the bathroom, your daughter's socks in a separate pile because she likes them sorted by color and nobody in this house has ever told her that's strange. You didn't fold this shirt today. This morning — his morning — the shirt came off a hook by the door, and getting it on is its own small history: the left sleeve first because the right shoulder aches from sixteen years of reaching up into other people's ceilings, a knot of muscle that never fully lets go, and you feel that ache now, dull and familiar as a name. The steering wheel under your palms brings the rest: nine hours today on your knees in a stranger's bathroom in Ahwatukee, the smell of old pipe dope and mildew, a joint that finally broke free and the small ugly satisfaction of it giving way under the wrench. Your knees are shot. Not old-man shot, just plumber shot, the cartilage worn soft as the knees of these jeans, permanently gray at the cap no matter how many showers.

The keys in your right hand, still hanging from the ignition — cold, house key filed at an angle, a rabbit's foot gone bald pink — bring back a night eleven years ago that hits harder than anything else so far: signing for this exact keychain at a DMV counter, twenty years old, thinking he was already an adult and finding out over the next decade that adulthood just kept arriving in smaller and smaller pieces. The eyebrow barbell itches faintly where your face — his face — settles into its resting quiet, and that itch carries a flash of the piercing shop, nineteen years old, a dare from somebody whose name doesn't survive the memory.

And under the collar, against skin that is drying with sweat from the drive, the tattoo sits warm and known even before you understand what it says: script, a name, a date. You don't need to see it to feel where it lives on him — over the heart, the place people put things they are afraid of losing twice. It comes with a hospital room, fluorescent and too bright, a weight put into his arms that made his whole chest go loose with something that had no name yet and needed one immediately. Priya's hand finding his hand. The date got inked six weeks later because he wanted it to be real on his body, not just real in his life.

The anxiety is already there too, low and constant as tinnitus, an old friend with a pill bottle's worth of quiet around its edges — not gone, just managed, the way the ache in the shoulder is managed, the way most things in this life get managed rather than solved. He is not an unhappy man. That's the strange part, arriving into someone content. Comfortable, in the different sense of the word — not the six-figure sense but the sense of a life that fits him the way the overalls fit, broken in at the knees, a little too warm, entirely his.

You look down at your hands on the wheel — his hands, wide-knuckled, a callus map you didn't earn — and you turn one over slowly like it might tell you something the memories haven't.

"There you are," you say to the windshield, to the dark, to no one who's listening, and the turn signal keeps ticking toward a house that isn't yours yet either.