BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 13

TUESDAY
05 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               As I drop onto my back beside him, Isaiah buries his sweaty smile into his mattress. Harsh exhales tug along loose laughs through his sternum, a boyish exhilaration he attempts to hide before he realises how futile the attempt is. His eyes meet mine, unguarded, and for a second, I think we've travelled back six years, I think he's forgiven me. The menthol of VapoRub that lingers on his skin disguises his cigarette smell.

Then he rolls over, lands partially on my chest to pour his gaze into me, still breathing in a way that could be mistaken for laughter. 'Did some American teach you to do that?'

The weight returns to my chest with a vengeance.

I stay silent. I'm not going to tell him I didn't as much as hug anyone during my five years in America, that it's no hyperbole when I say I didn't go outside save for school, work, and the gym. That it was him, in my dreams, who taught me everything I know, who trained me into confidence, and my only chance to make any of it real is to return the gift to him, as if he has been real this whole time, as if he's been haunted by the same dreams I have.

Still breathless, Isaiah goes to climb off the bed.

I take his wrist. 'Don't.'

He stares at our hands with vacant eyes before he tugs himself free. 'Did you want pillow talk or sum?' When his eyes flick to me, they're anything but vacant. 'You reckon we have sex once and I back go reading you poetry and you play me your music and the last six years just ain't happen?'

My hand searches the space beside me for something to pull over my chest, less to hide and more to swaddle myself. The duvet is clumped at the foot of the bed, far out of my reach, and all there is for me to find is the sweat and lube-damp towel.

Just as I reach for it, Isaiah reels it into his lap.

'One night,' I mumble. 'You said, one night. Can't we do it properly?'

I've never known how to barter. I don't know when I breach the distance my leverage gets me to, stumble over the line of take it or leave it, and end up losing any wins I had once been offered.

Isaiah balls up one corner of the towel to wipe the come from his chest before it dries, both his and mine because after his own orgasm, he rolled my condom off and asked me to come on his chest too — I want them to mix. How can the same person peer at me from an armed fortress five minutes later?

His vitiligo is near identical on his face but on his arms, it has spread from his elbows to bleach the backs of his biceps all the way to his armpits and I ache. Here, painted on his skin, is a map of all the time I missed.

My gaze travels along the scars on his back I could trace from memory to the tattoo on the base of his spine — Salva me!

I was never intended to see it. The tattoo, if anything, is a testament he considered me dead. It's a memorial. When did he get it? A year ago? Five? How long ago did his grief arrive at acceptance, not of loss but of the conviction I would never come back?

I don't ask. Any answer will gut me.

'Okay.'

It takes a lingering second for me to realise Isaiah is looking at me and another to understand what he's talking about. When I do, relief floods me so aggressively I almost whimper.

'Let's shower then.'

I study each movement as he wraps a holed t-shirt over his locs and covers it with a shower cap. These are the things I need to imprint into memory to fuel my lucid daydreams. I'll be back to dreams tomorrow.