BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 48

THURSDAY
12 JUNE, 1997
DORIAN

               Phone in hand, I stare at the keypad. My fingers are tangled in the cord. I returned to my room ten minutes ago, but I have yet to persuade my body to make the call.

Playing my compositions (both of which were for you; Ille me servat, Ego illum servo) saturated me with love and I'm not sure if I'm supposed to offer it to him. We agreed to be friends. I never knew how to tell the difference between friend and lover (not that I ever tried until now, it hasn't ever mattered until now, I never had to detangle one love from the other until now) and I don't want to disrespect our agreement.

I also agreed I'd phone him.

Glancing at the friendship bracelet I tied back around my wrist for reassurance, I muster the courage to dial and sit on the bed, fidgeting with the stretched-out cord as I wait. When he finally answers, it's with a muffled "yeah?" His morning voice is rough and my eyes roll into my head. 

'Did I wake you?'

Isaiah hums to affirm. 'That's alright,' he says before I can apologise. 'It's nice being woken up by someone else phoning me than my muma asking for money.'

Guilt is immediate. I feel as though I've read one of his poems without permission; he would not have said that if he was fully awake, it's a moment of vulnerability I had no consent to witness.

'What time is it?'

'Just past eleven.'

'Then it's definitely alright you woke me.' Isaiah laughs and I clamp my hand over my mouth to cover the involuntary noise that leaves my throat.

It doesn't work.

'You good, cuz?' He curses under his breath. 'Did it go bad?'

With my mouth clamped shut, I shake my head, only to remember he can't see me and I have to risk using my voice. 'No. It went really well actually.'

'I knew it would.'

I snatch my pillow from behind me and press it over my groin as if it'll suffocate my erection. Isaiah's accent is stronger than when I last saw him, somehow heavily Jamaican and Suffolk at once, and it only turns me on more.

'So what's the plan now? You gonna move to Paris and play your music on the Eiffel Tower or suttin?'

My arousal floods out as stress sets in.

'I don't know... Maybe.'

If I was honest, I'd admit I have absolutely no desire to go to Paris, or Vienna, or Sydney, or anywhere else. If I was a little more honest, I'd say I'm completely doomed because all I have left of school is the graduation ceremony and I have no clue where I'm going.

Where am I supposed to go where I won't feel like an alien? There's always something that excludes me from the rest. My fishbowl has no emergency exit.

'I think I might be autistic.'

I blurt it out without thinking and my mind desperately stitches methods to backpedal. I've spent six months reading about it but I didn't intend to tell him. Standing up, I pace the room, but I can't say anything before Isaiah does.

'Yeah. Okay.'

His reaction is so unfazed, it confuses me enough to forget backtracking. 'That's all you're going to say?'

'What would you like me to say?'

'I don't know. "What are talking about? That's insane! You're horrid at maths. You're twenty-four, someone would have told you by now." Something along those lines.'

He chuckles. 'As devoted as I am to pleasing you, I ain't never saying nun of that.'

He's mocking me. Tears blur my vision. This is what I want.

I never want to go a day without hearing his voice, and though it's a thought I often had when we were in school, something is different. I love him now, not to fill an absence, but by making space.

I have finally shrunk my fear enough to make room for love and discovered that they are not antitheses. On the contrary, fear is necessary in love. It's standing up against fear that makes love strong. You make me want to be brave.

Our love is so vast I don't believe it's possible to come from the two of us alone — it must come from G-d too. Regardless of what people say, I know our love comes from G-d too. I don't consider Isaiah my soulmate (I could survive without him — I have survived without him and the world didn't end, the sun didn't change direction, shrink, or grow, the moon didn't explode, the oceans didn't retreat), but I think we have HaShem's blessing to choose this love.

G-d left the world incomplete so we could join Her in creation, and love is the most fulfilling thing to nurture because it's out of love that everything else is conceived. Every time we create something, we ourselves are born anew. That's the beauty of Earthly life.

I'd never trap you into the passive role of a muse. Everything I've composed has come from you, all I've ever done has come from our love. You're not a vague background inspiration — you're the subject, the object, the audience, and most importantly the creator. Life without you is life without creation, which is the death of the soul.

Loving you is my favourite thing to do. The world to come is uncertain but my fate in this one is gentle.

I strum a string on my guitar as I pass it. Isaiah must hear it through the phone because he says, 'Can I ask about the guitar?'

Despite the mellow buzz of his voice, my defences switch on. 'What's there to ask?'

Isaiah rounds the bite in my tone the way he does a rude stranger who has decided to glare at him in the street as if he has personally caused the doom of this nation (the way I never can): with almost bored apathy. 'Just... why guitar? You ain't never play guitar at school.'

'I wanted an instrument in my room. I hate electric keyboards and I can't afford or fit a piano in here. I saw the guitar in a charity shop for only fifty pounds. I wanted to learn something new. It's easy to engross myself in learning a new instrument, it was a good way of getting my mind off things. It was an impulse buy.'

I grimace. Must I always answer simple questions in such a cluttered way?

Since I've already made a fool of myself, I add, (for good measure, almost as if evidence of my self-awareness, that I am contemptuous of myself too), 'And my mum always hated the guitar; she says it's for poor people.'

Isaiah hums: the things we do to spite our mothers.

'You playing the guitar,' he purrs. 'And you wearing jeans. Now you just gotta learn to line dance and folk might believe you're from the country.'

He laughs again. I don't.

Isaiah was always home in the country in a way I never thought I would be. I'm afraid of insects, I hate getting rocks in my shoes, and I find grass itchy — nor am I capable of the intimate small talk that seems to come so naturally to everyone else, but the more time I spend in cities, the more obvious it becomes that I'm much less afraid of all of those things than I am of traffic and asking the stranger beside me on the bus to make way when I'm sitting by the window and my stop is before theirs.

I'm much less afraid of all of those things than I am of the death of my soul.

Notes 

Just wanted to quickly say that realistically, were Dorian to get diagnosed in the 90s, he would be diagnosed with Aspergers. But Hans Asperger was a Nazi and the diagnosis was the division between autistic people who got killed or euthanised and autistic people who were allowed to exist during the Holocaust so we are just not gonna use that term, especially since Dorian is Jewish. Frankly, don't care about historical accuracy in this aspect. He's autistic.