The real world skins you alive.
It's a hazard of growing up in rural Suffolk... or possibly, it's a hazard of growing up. Either way, the Dorian Andrade and Isaiah Matalon who run into each other at a party in Oxford have become equally disenchanted...
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BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN
The real world skins them alive.
It's a hazard of growing up in rural Suffolk... or possibly, it's a hazard of growing up. Either way, the Dorian Andrade and Isaiah Matalon who run into each other at a party in Oxford have become equally disenchanted imitations of the boys who used to spend summers eating stolen apples on the riverbank.
Dorian has retreated so far into his shell that the existence of life outside his routine is mythos. Call him a solipsist, but what proof is there, really, that anything outside his mind is real? He has no object permenance. Maybe he just has no friends. If the building lights on fire, he'll stay in his room for fear of social interaction.
Isaiah, on the other hand, has strayed so far out he doesn't know where the rest of him is. He placed his sense of self in his kitchen's miscellaneous drawer for safe-keeping, except when he goes back for it, it's nowhere to be found. Well, what can you do? If Dorian is a solipsist, Isaiah is an intentionally misconstrued simplification of epicureanism donned to avoid thinking.
This is all to say: it didn't go according to plan.
They had a plan, had it since they were kids. They'd study hard, be the best in their year to ensure admission to study composition and literature at Oxford respectively, and the moment they dotted the final full-stop of their last A-level, they'd "get out". They'd leave Halsett for good and never look back.
Six years later, neither has stepped foot into their childhood town and both are about to finish their master's at Oxford. The only difference is, they've done so separately. Maybe that's the reason — or maybe it's because the concept is naïve — but running away turned out not to solve a single problem, and now, they don't even have each other to make life an easier pill to swallow.
It'll take a miracle for them to ever speak again. Dorian, because he's always felt his brain disconnected from his mouth and six years of isolation have hardly aided the condition. Isaiah, because he'll sooner cut his tongue out than spare Dorian a word.
The apples they used to share rot in the ground two hundred kilometres away.
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