Center of Gravity

We’re already who we are when we’re 13, we just spend the rest of our lives deciding what to keep.

At 13, I liked to jump fences and buy sunflower seeds from the bodega. I liked collecting notebooks, tech deck skateboards, and friends. Every morning during homeroom, the teacher had us write daily creative journal entries. I would always volunteer to read mine, but not until a few people had already gone; I was convinced that my writing was such a treat to behold that it was best saved for last. At home, my mom only bought me toys from the discount section. She knew I was guaranteed to break anything within a few hours as I tested the toys’ limits and applications – anything but their intended use. That’s how I approached life. I had a mix of curiosity and skepticism that compelled me to push limits and try everything. It’s not that I wanted to cause harm, but then again, I didn’t exactly have good intentions either. I just wanted to know what was real and what wasn’t.

At 13, Joey liked chocolate caramels and playing one video game at a time for months. He liked collecting beyblades, Yu-Gi-Yoh cards, and YouTube videos for his watch-later list. He wrote in an indecipherable chicken scratch and always got perfect marks on math tests, which I felt was only fair since he couldn’t write to save his life. Every day he had the same lunch: a Jersey Mike’s turkey on white (mike’s way) with kettle chips. He always gave me the half he didn’t eat while we waited for his mom to pick him up after school. Joey had huge doe eyes that peaked out from under a cartoonishly large afro; I thought to myself that they were that size because he was always watching everything. He was quiet – sometimes frustratingly so – and I sometimes wondered if he didn’t want to say anything, or if he just didn’t know how.

We were friends from the moment I bothered him at his desk. Joey and I liked to play Magic the Gathering, build Minecraft worlds, and share trivia about our favorite fantasy worlds with each other. I drew him pictures of video game characters, and he made sure I never left my backpack behind at the tables when lunch was over. Sometimes I would tell him my ideas. He would mostly just nod along, but I knew he was happy to listen. His friendship was rock-like in that it was steady and dependable, but also static – impenetrable for better and for worse.

Once, he breached my trust by telling my crush an embarrassing secret. I didn’t talk to him for a whole day after that – an eternity in middle school – but more to test him than out of anger. I wanted to see if he’d apologize. Instead, he just continued to follow me, his remorse like a shadow. He showed up at all the regular meeting spots: the gate at the front, the wall by the classroom, the lawn by the parking lot. I ignored him the whole time, but he didn’t bat an eye. I was surprised to feel guilt for icing him out, and the next day I couldn’t help but speak to him like normal. He never apologized, but I got the message.

As we got closer, we became gears in the machines of each other’s lives. He had a huge family – four siblings and a huge dog – and every time I came over for dinner, they showered me with unprecedented abundance and generosity. My gregarious nature fit them well: it felt like I was fielding the social chaos that threatened his peace, which I was more than happy to do for him. At school, he tagged along with whichever group of friends I felt like entertaining. He was like a satellite that I retreated to when I’d gotten my fix of drama. When I was alone with him, my mind was still.

Since the first time we hung out, we knew we wanted to play D&D. It wouldn’t have been out of our wheelhouse; we were accustomed to building worlds together. Unfortunately, we never had the resources (or admittedly, the agency or skill) to get a game started. Then, high school came, and we ended up in different schools. We hung out less and less. The suggestion of starting a D&D game was always there, but things kept happening. More than that, I noticed that Joey never reached out first. I was always the one planning hangouts, initiating projects, and asking questions. His silence hurt. I felt like I was just someone that passed through his life, coming and going while he just watched. I had this urge to be someone different, someone new, but Joey had his feet firmly planted on the ground. And so, I stopped trying. We graduated, we went to college, we drifted apart.

~~~

At 20, I liked to take naps at sundown so I could go to parties at midnight. I liked collecting preferences, bad habits, and toxic relationships. By some sick twist of fate, I was in a frat. That semester, I was in the process of switching my major for the second time in my third year of a four-year track; It felt trite to say that I was lost, so my false confidence was all the more believable when I told my parents I was staying another year to “figure it out”. I had such an intense need for my life to be a story: plot, characters, triumph, defeat. I bent myself into archetypes that didn’t fit, hoping one would stick. I was moving too fast to realize how much I hated myself.

Then, covid hit, and the world stopped. Suddenly, there were no parties, no crowds, no stories to tell. Just the creak of my futon, the dust on the windowsill, and the late fees of my own disappointment. Returning to my small town felt claustrophobic, but also safe. My day settled into a rhythm of small, quiet things: scanning items at Target, tracing my childhood streets, watching the sun rise in the backyard. It’s awful to say, but I was happy that the world was on pause. In college I wanted to be so many things at once, but at home, I didn’t need to be anything.

And in that stillness, I thought about Joey. In middle school, his presence was like gravity; he didn’t need to pull, he just kept me grounded. He had always been steady, unchanging in a way that – for someone like me – felt impossible. Maybe it was the quiet of those days that reminded me of him, the way he found peace without forcing himself into the center. When his text came, it didn’t surprise me. It felt natural, like picking up a story where we’d left off.

“Hey man, I know it’s been a while but my parents split up and I could really use a friend”

I dropped everything and came over right away.

The divorce shocked me. I couldn’t begin to understand what it meant to him. When I asked, he didn’t have the words. Then again, he never did. But I could feel it in the way he moved, fragile and uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure what would or wouldn’t fall apart. He calmly set up a room in his two new separate homes, and I watched his family split their happiness into neat little piles: Change parents on Sundays, alternate on holidays, the dogs stay at dad’s.

Through all this, we started regularly hanging out again as though nothing had changed. It wasn’t even necessarily because of the divorce; it’s more like we woke up from a dream where we weren’t friends and slipped back to business as usual. I thought there might be some kind of reckoning, a conversation about the years we spent apart. When I broached the topic, though, Joey just changed the subject. It perplexed me. I felt like I had abandoned him in those years, and I hated that it took his parent’s divorce for him to reach out. I wanted to apologize. But as we talked and laughed like we always had, I realized the truth: I hadn’t run away from home – or even from him. The only thing I’d been running from was myself. Nothing had really changed, he was still him, and he reminded me that I was still me. Us, just with adult problems. That’s when I had an idea.

It was an impossibly hot August day. We set up a foldout table in his attic room. The air conditioning wasn’t working; we were sweating through our shirts, but it was just as much because of our excitement as it was the heat. We had our water bottles, our dice, and our character sheets. Then, I began to narrate.

The first Dungeons and Dragons session we ran – a one-on-one experience built specially to learn the game – was The Dragon of Icespire Peak, courtesy of the D&D Essentials Kit. Joey played Nek’rosh, a brave and overzealous adventurer ready to change the world; I played his NPC friend Gregory, the cautious paladin hired to protect him on his quest. At first, I stumbled through the opening narration, but then – blink at you’ll miss it – the real world melted away like an illusion. We were there. The wind rustled through the leaves and the light shone through the icicles as we hiked up the mountainside, bathed in biting cold. We came to a clearing: pine trunks stripped bare, charred craters marking their length. We looked at each other to make sure it was really happening; we could hardly believe it. Then, he cast firebolt. As the dice spun onto the mat, a white-hot mote of flame erupted from his fingertips, streaking brilliantly through the snowy air. Joey’s eyes burned bright, and my heart leapt into my throat. It felt like the room shifted, like time itself stopped to watch us at that sweaty plastic table. Hit. The spell exploded against the target, embers scattering as the tree splintered and fell. I swear the world could hear us cheer. Nek’rosh didn’t cast that firebolt. We did, right there together in Icespire peak. We played for six more hours, the sun long set before we staggered back into reality, changed

That summer, we ran a session every week. There was something transformational about it, the way we ritualistically stepped into that world of our creation. It wasn’t escapism, though – in many ways it was far more real than the actual world we lived in. I had been Joey’s friend for almost a decade at that point, and yet through the game, we found ways to talk about things that we never even touched before. Coming out of the game sometimes felt embarrassing, like we had shown a little too much of ourselves. Other times, it felt like a secret, like we found something special that we had to protect.

For me, it was a way to channel my chaos; I realized that I didn’t need to take out my curiosity on myself or the people around me. If I had a story to tell, I could do it safely, with Joey by my side. He wasn’t just a character in the story either – just like before, he was the one who kept it grounded, giving my chaos a home. Eventually, summer turned to fall, and the “real” world shakily got back to its feet. I went back to campus; Joey finished his undergrad mostly online. This time, though, we kept in touch. There was an unspoken agreement that I would return to Icespire Peak for the rest of my life, and that he’d always be right there with me. He didn’t have to say it, but I got the message.

We’re already who we are when we’re thirteen, we just spend the rest of our lives deciding what to keep. Sometimes, we leave things behind, only to realize later just how important they were. I didn’t have learn how to GM; I remembered how, the same way I remembered how to be a person, how to be a friend. It’s been years since that first game, and I’ve gone on to tell hundreds of stories with different groups and different game systems. Joey’s been by my side through most of them, of course. Together we’ve sailed endless seas, fought towering giants, and built sprawling kingdoms. I could list a million reasons I love the game, but at its core – it’s that first firebolt we cast together. It shows you the story you’ve always been telling. It shows you the way home.