A Collection of Portraits

ραят ι: fяαgιℓιту

ραят ι: fяαgιℓιту

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"It's no tragedy, Freckles. Glass breaks so easily. No matter how careful you are."

Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

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These days it feels like my words (and my strength, and my composure, and my ability to string thoughts together coherently) just completely disappear when I'm around you. I open my mouth and there's only a void, so I try to forget about it. I keep putting it off til "later", and then I can't help getting angrier and angrier with myself as each uneventful day passes. I don't know if you really understand what it's like to be angry all the time without letting it show, to feel trapped and silenced by the fear of hurting everyone around you. Well, I can tell you: It's absolutely exhausting.

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The sun's reflection off the windshield of the Chevy was dancing, tracing a lingering ultraviolet squiggly line around Evan's entire field of vision, searing into his retinas. Despite the burn, he could still make Trevor Chase out in his rear-view mirror, his bare shoulders slumped in defeat, tired legs slowly dragging him back towards the little car. Sure, he was getting progressively smaller and smaller, but he was still there. Evan could still breathe.

A deep pothole suddenly shook the world around him, causing the tiny luminescent speck to dart up and out of his field of vision for a second, but he found it - found him - again easily enough with the levelling-out of the road.

It seemed physically impossible for Evan to release Trevor from his sight, especially after looking into his eyes not two minutes ago and being forced to acknowledge the hurt that he himself had caused. Because Evan was causing him pain, and that should've been reason enough to take a step back and consider leaving Trevor for his sake, but he just... couldn't, and he wasn't eager to consider the reason behind this unfounded determination.

So it was with extreme reluctance that Evan glanced at the road ahead for a millisecond - just to make sure that his name wasn't about to end up on tomorrow's front page along with the words "headlong", "tragic", and "toxicology report pending"- before quickly relocating the mirror.

He panicked for a moment; Trevor had disappeared... sort of. The little red car was still sitting motionless on the shoulder, and he was sure he could see the vague outline of a dark figure inside. This arrangement was sort of perfect in a way, because his face - the one part of him that Evan really didn't need to see right now - was completely unreadable behind its reflective glass shield.

This feeling of grounded calm, however, wasn't to last long. The highway began to gradually bend enough to warrant Evan's full attention on the dotted yellow line that separated him from potential disaster, and this time when he looked back he could only see the trees lining the pavement, menacing in their solidarity like so many vague, shadowy sentinels of the road.

He almost immediately collapsed into tears. Almost. It was as if his sanity was attached to Trevor and the tether had finally reached its snapping point. His breath hovered somewhere between his throat and his lungs, unable to either advance or retreat.

Trevor's words from a few moments ago gathered and built and rearranged themselves until it began to feel like they were assaulting Evan's memory, intensifying by the second. They swept through his mind like a rake passing through smooth, levelled sand, unsettling all other lingering thoughts as they passed...