The Soap with the Fish Inside

(Play “Positively 4th Street” while reading. Trust me.)

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We used to play Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 on the college level like it meant something.
Grinding rails outside lecture halls, landing tricks we named like prayers—impossible, stupid, ours.
Security guards yelling from the speakers like tired gods.
We laughed like we were untouchable.
Like we weren’t already halfway to letting each other down.

Then it was Smash Bros Melee.
Fox mains and that last stock drama, edge-guarding each other with the kind of precision that only best friends or future enemies possess.
Every game a fight we didn’t have the words for yet.
We didn’t say I love you—we just tried to win.

The pool in the backyard.
Sun-warmed, above ground, rimmed with that thin line of childhood grime we didn’t bother to scrub.
We’d swim until we couldn’t feel our fingers, then dry off upstairs in the garage—unfinished second floor, no AC, just heat and drywall and our bodies still wet, steaming like ghosts.
We told each other everything up there.
And none of it held.

There was a hamster.
Didn’t last long.
We buried it beneath a pine tree and didn’t talk about it again.
That was the first funeral we gave without tears.

Their bathroom had that Softsoap bottle with a fake orange fish inside—
suspended in blue gel like it was swimming but going nowhere.
Every time I washed my hands I thought, maybe if I used enough, I’d set it free.
But the soap ran out before the lie did.

Their dad didn’t drink beer.
He drank vodka.
Clear, cold, poured into Gatorade bottles and coffee mugs, like the disguise mattered.
He wasn’t violent.
Just absent, even when he was in the room.
Told stories that trailed off, stared too long at nothing.
He looked up to my dad—
who never drank, never smoked.
Only vice was a large McDonald’s Coke, same time every day, like ritual.
Like grounding.
Like saying: I know who I am.

When his dad said, “We need to talk,”
I knew.
Didn’t need the words.
Didn’t need the long pause or the forced smile.
They were moving.
And everything we swore would last
didn’t.

We still hung out a little after.
Once. Maybe twice.
Then nothing.
That’s how boys break up—
in silence, through distance, without explanation.
The kind of ghosting you only notice years later,
when the hurt finally grows teeth.

We saw The Simpsons Movie in theaters.
Threw popcorn at the screen like we were throwing it at time itself.
We were elves on a Thanksgiving float once,
standing next to a drunk Santa who called the mayor a “real sack of shit” under his breath.
We laughed like it would save us.
It didn’t.

They all became what they said they wouldn’t.
Khakis.
iPhones.
Vacation photos in matching shirts.
The same dull loops their parents traced,
just with better lighting and more debt.

The worst part?
Not that they changed.
That they pretended they hadn’t.
That they still comment “miss you bro” like we didn’t share blood on trampoline nets and secrets in drywall dust.
That they still send invites to weddings like we’re not standing on opposite sides of a life we built together and then abandoned.

There’s a special kind of betrayal in becoming the thing you once swore to burn down.
I don’t hate them.
But I don’t let them off the hook either.

“You say I let you down / You know it’s not like that…”

You hear it, don’t you?
That Dylan sneer.
That poison smile.
He didn’t scream.
He remembered.
He watched the fall, slow and smug and earned.

That’s how this feels.
Like I saw them clearly.
And walked away anyway.