"When you're black and white there's no use hiding in a field of colours," his umber eyes so solemn, "Anthony T. Hincks."
But when Cillian looked at Oliver, he couldn't help but disagree, because to Cillian, Oliver was all the colours o...
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I HAD LETTING SOMEONE IN always been this easy? Cillian didn't remember it being so.
He swirled a glass of wine, watching as rings of ever smaller sizes descended downwards, like a snake coiling itself into the palm of his hand. He marvelled—or maybe it was a type of existential dread he felt—at how his wrist's slow gyrations, those seemingly insignificant movements, were translated into the serpent's rapid consumption of itself; exponential growth, or more precisely, decay, from man to his instrument. He wondered if the serpent had ever wished to escape time's eternal circle, to take its tail in its mouth for the last time and devour its flesh until nothing was left but dust and bone. Cillian stilled his hand and the wine streaked the sides of his glass with its sticky cheap crimson colour, retreating slowly to mingle again with a pressed corpse. Only ripples remained. If the dead really did persist, it was in a bottle of wine. Blood and wine. Yes, that sounded right. Death and sex. Functions, perfectly reciprocal.
His gaze landed on the flowers across from him. On rhododendrons full of God. Too often does man identify the crucial aspects of his life in retrospect. At the time, he is too absorbed in the paltry details of the moment, the emotions that capture him, to notice where they are leading. Despite knowing this, Cillian had always expected more. Four horsemen, or a plague, or rivers that run red. He'd expected trumpets and angels with lion-teeth and a hundred thousand eyes, or for the wheels of galgallin to descend upon him from the heavens with a deafening screech. It would have been a type of holy salvation compared to this.
He tried to think back to when it had all begun. Everything was causal in Cillian's view of the universe; everything rippled out from a singular event, leading to the proliferation of ever more events. The cornflowers, the cabinet, was it his hand on his, when he moved in with him? No, that was all useless. It was something more slight, even more benign than that. Had it begun when their pulses intertwined for the first time, when their bodies learnt the shape of each other's spines, memorised the topography of each other's skin? Perhaps it had begun weeks, months, years before with Cillian's birth, or even with Oliver's because he was older. Before flower shops, before people, before the concept of beginnings. Perhaps it simply began, and there was no way of derailing time's incessant perpetuation. He was going in circles now, like the ouroboros that eats itself.
If Cillian retraced his steps, every single one, painstakingly, would he be able to discern with the same warmth and clarity the sequence of points in time when you were still his?
