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At some point, the streetlights ahead had blurred into one indeterminable mass. Yellow fluorescent lights collided with the bleak night sky, dusted with clouds that blocked the moon’s glare. Stan didn’t care – Stan kept trekking. The fingers on his right hand grasped dizzily at the neck of a bottle, though the contents inside were unknown to him. He wasn’t entirely sure where he was headed. In the cold of the night, his tongue trailed along his lips, savoring the warmth from the alcohol that had been left over from one of his many swigs.
Drunk escapades weren’t a new thing from him, much as his sober self would be ashamed of them. He used to look in the mirror when he’d get home, the deep and disgustingly heavy bags under his eyes sobering him up in a quick moment, enough to where he’d have his wits about him and crawl to bed. Nowadays he passed out in somebody’s yard when his legs couldn’t take him any further. Then, he would wake to the sound of cars, the sound of people much more stable than him getting on with their stable lives and their stable jobs. Head pounding, he would stand, swaying on unsteady feet, and then he would walk home with his eyes closed.
Frowning, he looked up to the lights above him. A dust of snow pelted down from the heavens above, but the flakes were so sparse that they melted in the glow of the lamps. It was so dark. It was dark and it was cold, so for a moment, Stan imagined that he was doing something real with himself – he imagined he was an astronaut in the sky, floating so far above the earth and South Park and everybody else, and that the lights were stars in his dominion. The snowflakes were the ashes of Earth. He was the only one left.
He continued to float. He wandered past Venus and headed to Mercury, stumbling on the black expanse of the road. The stars in the background got hazier and hazier as he approached until eventually he couldn’t see them at all. And then he looked back – and he saw what once was his home, what once was the blood that flooded his capillaries and kept him alive – and he saw that it was all gone. Was there anything left for him here? He didn’t think so. He tried to focus his eyes on each individual snowflake, each piece of ash, and found that it was an impossible task. So he turned once more and kept going.
When he arrived at the sun, he had a moment of sudden consciousness, and he realized where he was. He blinked up at the towering, ugly green house in front of him. And, really, it was ugly. Stan couldn’t remember who had painted it – whether it was Sheila or Gerald or… well, probably not him, since it had been that way since they were kids. All he knew is that whoever it was, they deserved to be shamed. In the midst of his drunken mind, he briefly pictured him, and he felt those familiar feelings that he always felt when he thought of him. Why couldn’t he just leave Stan alone? He had his other friends, he had everything he wanted, and yet he spent his time haunting Stan’s brain. What a cruel punishment – what a harrowing existence.
He was busy flipping off the room he knew was his when the front door unexpectedly cracked open, and a hesitant face poked through, without his characteristic green hat – the one he’d had since elementary, and seemed to never take off.
“Stan?” Kyle asked carefully into the dark. Stan startled, stumbling onto the snow, his bottle slipping out of his hand and careening to the nearby sidewalk, where it shattered on impact. Stan watched sadly as the last drops of his composure sunk into the concrete.
“What the… what the fuck do you want, Kyle?” Stan slurred, scowling at him.
It was then that Kyle stepped out of his house, looking unsure. He was in nothing but shorts and a worn pajama shirt, and he didn’t even have shoes on. He closed the door carefully behind him. “Dude, you’re at my house,” he shot back, taking a step closer. “Are you still… drinking?”
Stan laughed, a bit bitterly, at that. “What’s it look like, Sherlock? Or… no, you would be that ginger assistant… fuck, what’s his name? Watson?”
“Watson wasn’t ginger,” Kyle said. “What are you doing here?”
“Just decided to pay my dear best friend a visit.” Stan tried to get up, but he couldn’t get a good foothold in the snow. “If I can even call you that.”
Kyle’s gaze hardened. Stan knew he was in for it now. “Don’t start with that shit, dude. You did this to yourself.”
“I did this?” Stan chuckled. “Yeah, because this was all my fault. God, you’re just like you’ve always been. You still can’t take responsibility.” Finally, he stood. But Kyle was always taller than him, so it didn’t help him much in the way of intimidation. “You’re a goddamned piece of shit, Kyle. You always have been and you always will be.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Stan,” Kyle said, turning around – probably intending to disappear, like he always did. “Maybe that’ll make up for how Wendy doesn’t talk to you anymore.”
A fire ignited within Stan, very suddenly, so quickly it spooked him. It burned away the last pieces of his dignity. “You did this! You fucking made me this way!” He knew that he was being irrational, but he didn’t care. He had nothing to lose. “You left me. You left me and you didn’t come back. We were best friends , Kyle. We were supposed to stick together!”
Kyle paused at the door. “We were kids, man. We were just kids.” He then shifted, turning to glance at his former best friend. “And you changed. You were different. All of us were. Especially… especially when you moved away.”
The blaze was extinguished instantly. Stan tried to swallow down a lump that clung to the front of his throat, but it wouldn’t go away. He felt the sting of tears prick at his eyes, and for a moment in his intoxicated mind, he knew that it was his own fault. He knew that he did this to himself. But he never wanted the truth to come out of Kyle’s mouth. He wished, naively, that Kyle would just take his insults and not fire back – but Kyle wasn’t like that. Perhaps the days of Cartman should have taught him that. It was one of the things Stan loved about Kyle.
Despite himself, Stan chuckled. Then he laughed. Over the course of about half a minute, it progressed into the kind of laughter that made him fall to the ground, clutching his sides, fighting for air. He finally understood.
Kyle was his sun.
That was why he was here, formulating strange space metaphors to distract himself from the fact that he was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with him. What a cruel punishment – what a harrowing existence. To have loved, then lost, but not stopped loving.
Hands grappled at his face, a bit awkwardly, but gently as possible given the circumstances. Calluses decorated the tips of Kyle’s fingers, and Stan leaned into his touch, huffing into his best friend’s palm. Because as much as they’d grown apart, Stan would always consider Kyle to be his best friend. He knew things about Stan that Stan didn’t even know about himself.
“You’re so s’upid, Kyle…” Stan mumbled into Kyle’s hand.
“Watch it,” Kyle interjected. Stan had his eyes closed, so he couldn’t see him, but he was sure Kyle was frowning. He could hear it in his voice.
“You’re gonna get out of here, dude… You’re gonna be something,” Stan continued, ignoring him. “And I’ll just be the idiot who couldn’t tell you.”
Kyle’s thumb brushed across Stan’s cheek. Stan wanted to perceive it as an intimate gesture, but Kyle was probably just wiping away a tear. When had he started crying?
“Tell me what?”
“That I love you.”
Kyle stiffened – Stan felt it through his hands.
“But you have everybody else. You’ve got… Kenny and Tolkien and Craig’s whole entourage… and I’ve got nobody,” Stan said. He realized he was probably starting to sound like a self-pitying dork, but he didn’t really care anymore. “You were always… my somebody.” He yawned into Kyle’s skin, suddenly tired. “And I love you, man.”
“Stan…” Kyle said uneasily. “You can’t – you can’t just… say things like that, dude.” Kyle’s hands retreated from his face, and Stan knew he had fucked up. Kyle didn’t know he was gay. Nobody did. A sobering wave crashed into Stan’s form, and he stopped himself from face planting into the snow to look up at Kyle.
For a moment, they just stared at each other, the reality of what this confession meant between the two of them sinking deeply into their beings. And they were being – and it was just them two, for the first time in a very long time. Stan vaguely registered somewhere that Kyle still wasn’t wearing shoes, and the snow had turned his pale feet a vibrant red.
“...Come on, dude. Let me get you in the house. You’ll freeze if I let you stay here.” Kyle took hold of him again, only to lift him up and keep him steady while he walked him into his house.
It’s a place that Stan hadn’t been inside in a long time – perhaps years – but it still felt familiar to him, as if it had never changed. But it had. No longer were baby toys for Ike strewn across the living room. The place was tidied, almost corporate – Stan no longer felt welcome, unease prickling at his skin.
Kyle’s room had changed, too, but it still had some familiar relics. The kite that he wore on his back when they used to play that stupid game in elementary school was still perched in the corner, and his Einstein poster still sat, framed, in its usual place. Other things adorned the wall, now: tapestries of bands Stan had never heard of, posters for television shows he’d never seen. Stan’s heart ached quietly – if he had stuck around, would he have been privy to them? Once, they had been inseparable, and now they were seniors in high school, and it was like they barely knew each other at all.
“Stay here,” Kyle told him, “and don’t touch anything.”
He disappeared down the hall, and Stan busied himself by refamiliarizing himself with Kyle’s bedroom. He materialized about a minute later, with two bottles of water in hand. He shut the door quietly, as if afraid to wake somebody.
“Catch,” he said, tossing Stan one of the bottles. “Drink up. It’ll make you feel better in the morning.”
Stan obliged, chugging the entire bottle in one big swig. Kyle sighed and handed him the other one, as if he knew he would do that. And that was just the thing – he probably did. Kyle could still predict him.
After a period of silence, with Stan swaying slightly where he sat, still intoxicated, Kyle asked, “Did you mean it?”
“Wuh?” Stan replied, intelligently.
“Did you mean what you said? That you love me?” Kyle’s eyes pierced through him, pinning him to the spot where he was next to him.
“Yeah,” Stan said. He wanted to leave it at that almost desperately, and Kyle seemed to catch on, as he turned away. “I missed you,” he continued quietly.
“I missed you too,” Kyle said, without much hesitation. “It’s funny. I’ve been waiting for so long to hear you say that. And now that you have, I don’t know how to feel about it.” He shuffled a bit, his legs kicking against his bed frame in a way that almost seemed nervous. “Would you have told me if you weren’t drunk?”
“Probably not,” Stan conceded.
“Alright,” Kyle said. “Then you can sleep here tonight. And I can pretend I never heard it.”
“Where will you sleep?” Stan asked.
“I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Aw, don’t do that, man. I’d feel bad hogging up your bed.”
Kyle stood, and then he ambled toward the door, turning one last time to look at Stan. “It’s okay. Just… try to stop drinking, alright? It’s doing screwy things to your head. Maybe then we can… I don’t know. Reconnect.”
Not waiting to hear Stan’s answer, he disappeared once more, and Stan heard footsteps going down the stairs.
Stan decided he didn’t like seeing Kyle leave. But he accepted his defeat, and he curled into Kyle’s bed, and cried himself to sleep.