“I’M THE SHORTEST person here. Including the girls.”

“I don’t think…I’m not sure that’s…well, even if it’s true, who cares?”

“I do. It’s hard to meet people. There are so many people. This place is huge.”

“It’s not that huge.”

“Mark, don’t tell me that a school with fifty thousand students isn’t huge.”

(Pause.)

“Sorry. You’re right. It is kinda huge.”

“Thank you.”

(Then, a sneeze. Not from me. Or Mark. But from my roommate Ed. Sleeping about four feet from where Mark and I are lying in my twin bed. Except we are not children anymore. I am a freshman in college. And I am having an incredibly hard time.)

“Bless you, Ed.”

(A muffled “Thank you” emerges from underneath Ed’s covers. He is nice enough to not be bothered by Mark’s frequent overnight visits during this time. He is also nice enough to simply turn his back on us and not point out how utterly strange it is that two grown brothers are sleeping in one twin bed.)

“Jay, if you want to just ditch it all and come home I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”

“I do want to come home.”

“Are you sure?”

(Pause.)

“No.”

“Well, you have a month left of this semester. You can…ride it out and see how you feel after that?”

“Probably a good idea. I just…”

(Pause.)

(I take my time here. I don’t have the words for it. But it doesn’t matter. This is the not the first time this conversation has happened. And Mark doesn’t need the words to understand what I’m feeling. How I want to be grown-up enough to stand on my own. But how I also miss our tight-knit family and sense of security. How the thought of coming home feels beautiful but also like a failure. So instead I simply cry for a little bit into Mark’s armpit. This moment does two things. First, it makes Ed even more uncomfortable. Second, it actually makes Mark feel good. That he can provide some care and comfort for me, the person who has been doing that very thing for him, pretty much nonstop, since he was born.)

Three months earlier, in the fall of 1991, I had left our home in Metairie to attend the University of Texas at Austin on a full scholarship. I was smart, responsible, and genuinely excited. I thought I’d be fine.

But within the first few weeks, my well-being became a major concern for my family. I began calling home more and more. I struggled with making friends and finding my way on such a huge college campus. While our mother wanted to comfort me, she couldn’t bear to hear her son suffering, so she quickly became of little use on the phone. Our dad was a rock. He was full of smart, confidence-boosting advice for his first-born son. He did everything right. Yet in the long run, our dad’s confidence and ability to see so clearly what the solutions were to my problems only made me feel worse for not being able to enact those solutions. I simply could not take myself out of the spiraling depression in which I found myself. When I spoke with our mom, I was aware that my suffering made her suffer twice as badly. Talking to Dad made me acutely aware that I was not as confident and well equipped to face the world as he was.

So I started asking for Mark when I called home…the nacho-eating, skater-banged, Iron Maiden–listening, prepubescent ball of confused hormones. And there was something in the reckless confidence of Mark’s youth that was exactly what I needed.

And this is where the first big turn in our relationship came. As the long-distance phone bill skyrocketed, so did our closeness. And so did Mark’s ability to make me laugh, loosen up, and remind me of that childlike confidence with which I had led Mark for so many years.

So, at age fourteen, Mark began taking cheap Southwest flights by himself on weekends to visit me in Austin. There, we would go see live music. Hang out in coffee shops and meet weird early-nineties Austin people. Take in every indie film that came through town. Mark would do keg stands at my friends’ parties, and I would recklessly join in. We were a bit of a circus act of sorts that people wanted to get to know. My confidence started to rebuild itself and my social life started to grow. We met new people and did all kinds of new things (like smoke weed together for the first time) and began to dream about our futures together the way we did when we were little kids. It was a grand reconnection of the Duplass Brothers as we were before I left for college, but now Mark was ever so slightly in the lead, taking care of me for the first time. It was a dynamic that formed rather quickly but stuck for many years to come.

Perhaps the most important thing this period taught us was how wonderfully complex and shape-shifting relationships can be. Until that point we were certain that, because our relationship began a certain way, it would follow that dynamic forever. Instead we were forced to reexamine what it meant to be truly intimate with someone. That sometimes we would be required to be different things to each other. That we’d have to remain open to what the other one needed, allow him the space to change, and learn how to grow with him to accommodate those changes.

In short, we accidentally started learning way back in the early nineties how to become the husbands, fathers, and partners we ultimately wanted to be.