Now playing: YES IT IS - Leon Thomas

There was only one person in Oakland who could make Erik Stevens pause. His ride-or-die best friend, the one who knew his scars and still chose to stand by him.

You’d been that kid on the playground with scraped knees and a grin full of mischief who patched up a ten-year-old Erik’s busted lip with a water bottle and a scrap of tissue. The world taught him to fight with fists; you taught him to fight for something worth protecting. When he joined the Navy, he wrote you every night, letters soaked with longing and fear. And you answered, night after night, until he came home stronger on the outside but still raw beneath the uniform.

Which is why he finds himself at the bars and strip clubs every weekend in downtown, finding it easier to get white girl wasted and talk about his grievances with the next shitfaced individual who makes the mistake of sitting next to him.

Because talking to you about the things he thought about at night was out of the question. Too much time had passed. Too many things had changed between the time he’d enlisted to even consider verbalizing them to you.

It wouldn’t be fair. Begging you for reassurance that things are the same. Or that he’s changed and you’d still love him regardless. His ears are sensitive. All he wants to ask and hear is that it’s his. That you’re his. But he won’t.

Now, standing in the old warehouse-turned–community-center where he’d helped you build a youth program, he felt that old pull in his chest. The one that said no matter how many miles he’d marched or how many fights he’d won, you were still his anchor.

“How many basketballs you need still? I know for sure we got three in the supply closet. But two of em flat.” He watches you where you sit at a table in the open space, a pen and paper in front of you as you write down a checklist of things needed for the center before the summer program starts.