L'Appel du Vide (Nocebo Effect P3)

your son calls me daddy too

I'm such a fucking idiot. I am such a fucking idiot. Why did I have to drag Dallon into the mess that is my family situation? Why did Kara have to overreact to the slight mention of a crash? Why did I have to be so anxious in the first place? After all of this familial acerbity, Dallon didn't speak for the rest of the plane ride, only burrowed himself in his sketches and in his pencils and in his erasers that he wishes he could erase his life with, building it up with graphite passion and then knocking it over like a loaned set of play blocks because you can't keep what you create forever.

Dallon didn't need any of this, and neither did I. We could've worked through my anxiety of soaring through the air and spent the rest of the flight talking about whatever it is that has infected our mind at the present moment, and it would've been just splendid. I could forget about my phobia and my parents and my worry for how Dallon will respond to his arrival in Bordeaux, but Kara just had to interject with the elucidation of a point I purposely made subtle so as to not draw attention to my lost cause of a personality.

It's not like I can go back now, because no human has invented a time machine yet, and of course if they did, it would be absolutely terrifying with the frenzy of this freshly enlightened population, but even so, I wish I could rent it out privately if it ever did exist, as I wasted the dreary flight on being silenced by the umbrage of my little sister.

The entire flight is over, and we're at the terminal at the moment, recently having heaved our suitcases off of the assembly line for personal items, and all that's left to do is find Dallon's parents, whom he said would be waiting for us by the luggage drop off with a sign that broadcasts his name.

I've never met the folks before, and I'm absolutely fearful of doing so. This would be different if Dallon were aware that I'm his boyfriend — because after he returned we basically just set back the clock towards friendship for now — as I would no doubt be forced to endure the long-winded speech about how I should be kind to him and afterwards the malicious stares intended to be discreet but are far from it, but ever since he materialized in my life again, we haven't been so intimate as to label ourselves as an item.

I know that there's some sort of love hiding in the corners of our minds, and really I never stopped loving Dallon, but the question is if Dallon stopped loving me. With an amnesic mind it's easy to do that. I feel something within our battered hearts, something that can't be ignored yet something that is strangely amorphous like it's meant to be shielded. However, I have no idea how to name that love, so I'm waiting for the perfect opportunity when it is all made clear to me what the hell this is.

Dallon's fears of what we share have been somaticized into a fragment of a person, into a well of amnesia, damaging him beyond compare, and when the damaged people are falling, they imagine that they are flying, except the chains binding them to the floor have weakened their wings, and the hearts accepting that fate are shutting down. They can only be free when their body is absorbed into the pavement, when their parting smile hides the fact that this demise is what they desired all along, and they've finally won the perverse game of life. Dallon has forever known this strange abyss, and I fret for his welcoming back into his childhood home, because his parents are utterly unaware that he's bathing in melanoid venom, and in his perception it should stay that way.

And that's why when he greets his parents at the luggage drop off, a smile is the salient expression upon his angelic face usually coated by latent desperation, and it's a peculiar sort of veneer, with a sensation of annoyance whipping me for no reason other than stubborn mental illness, because this isn't him, and he's wallowing in a lie to protect those who never gave a single shit about him, but he's an integrous person, so it just makes this all the more frustrating, as there's nothing else he could possibly do.