When Little Boys Fall in Love

*A Meditation on Growing Up* ## I. [Age 6] — First Light Your fingernails, chewed down to pink, sort bottle caps by rust and shine. I offer you my father's Pepsi crown— you pocket it without a blink. ## II. [Age 7] — The Promise Under sheets stretched between two chairs, your breath carries grape bubble gum. You whisper secrets through the cotton dark: "Blood brothers don't abandon theirs." ## III. [Age 8] — First Mercy Gravel embedded in my palm, you suck the stones out with your mouth. Salt-copper taste, the sting of care— your spit becomes my healing balm. ## IV. [Age 9] — The Communion You bite the apple, pass it back, your tooth-marks still warm on the skin. I press my mouth where yours has been— first taste of want, first taste of lack. ## V. [Age 10] — The Fracture "He throws things when the bottle's empty," you say, picking at fence paint scars. Your voice cracks like the rust beneath— I count the silences: one, twenty. ## VI. [Age 11] — The Shift Two knocks: your father's coming home. Three knocks: the coast is clear to play. But when they corner me at school, you watch but turn your eyes away. ## VII. [Age 12] — The Breaking Your mother combs your hair with spit, pressed for Sunday's hush and glare. "They say boys like us shouldn't—" Your eyes go dark. Mine catch the flare. ## VIII. [Age 13] — The Aftermath I walk past your house each morning, count the days since your goodbye. Forty-seven steps to where you used to wait for me, yawning. The moving truck comes on a Thursday. Your mother waves from the front door. I find a note tucked in our tree: "Some friendships aren't worth fighting for." ## Coda — Twenty Years Later Sometimes I wake to phantom knocking— two, three, then silence where four should have been your "all clear." The boy who loved your crooked smile, the way you'd hum off-key in church, how you'd bite your lip when thinking, still searches every crowded room for eyes that looked at him—and knew. I keep a bottle cap in my wallet, rusted Pepsi crown, still gleaming. Sometimes I hold it to the light and hear the echo of your dreaming. Some hungers keep the taste of what they break in.