along the road

reprise | 2016 | age 17

                   I'm at birthday girl's house again, and I can already feel the past bleeding into the present.

              She's grinning as she opens the gate, and I slide into the space created for me, for us. That girl with the laugh—that ear-piercing laugh—giggle beside me, and as we surge down your lengthy driveway, our feet adjusting to the sloped terrain, bricks jutting out near the corners, I can already feel him.

                      I've never told her this—never told anyone, not even him, especially not him—but I have failed and failed at wrapping my mind on how my friends could still talk to him, speak of him, praise him, as if he wasn't a boy—a child at heart—who devastated me. Who grabbed my roots and pulled them from the soil that I'd saluted, the ground that gave birth to me, the earth that dug its hues into my skin, the world that painted a layer of armour over the loving brown. Whenever they spoke of you (and I acted like I wasn't hearing those four letters, those two syllables, slip from their lips like wet soap from their hands), an anger was birthed within me, one that screamed, WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE SCREAMING REELING DEALING FEELING?

             When I see your face, it softens. Every fucking part of me turns to liquid gold, seeping into the naked bricks, trickling down the driveway until I reach you.

                    "Hey," you say. Simply. Casually. As if blood doesn't cake the battlefield of our love, as if broken bones aren't littered across the dying green, as if your fingertips hadn't once met mine.

             I smile. I slap my hand against yours. I nearly break, in a good way.

       "Hi." I whisper. Some part of me wonders if you hear it; the past rumbling between the letters, the hope nestled deep within my voice, wrapped in the colour of your eyes, hidden by those calloused hands. I wonder if you hear what I'm truly trying to say: Can we find a place to sit and dream again?

                I raise my head to find your eyes on me. That small, swift smile sends a flutter through my heart, and I feel that other organ whispering against the marrow of my bones. Yes. Yes we can.

                I think I hear the world laugh; genuinely, joyfully, for the blind man and the blooming boy have found each other once more.

☀

                          I'm sitting on your lap; you're breathing beneath me. Our hands our intertwined, rough and soft, the valley floor and the clouds above, the silk that coats the crinkled skin of men and women who hold thousands of days they have lived in.

                   We're dancing, spinning around, your laugh catapulting across the air, our arms fumbling against the new presence of each other—my skin on your skin, my fingers burnt and wiry beside the endless white of yours, that blackened edge of your thumb sweeping across my vision until, somewhere in the blur, somewhere in the music, I find you. 

                         We're on the couch again, at some point; you, watching soccer, your voice quaking the insides of my body, shaking the dust of my ribs, wiping away the ash that had stained my throat, and me, staring into the distance and thinking of you.

                 It's strange, isn't it? You're right there—under me, around me, above me, within me—and you're already beginning to cross my mind as if you're in your own room, crouched beneath the sheets, head buried in your heads as you scream and scream and beg to vanish (to slip away, to dissipate) again.

                      At least, that's what I did.

                 "You're always going to mean a lot to me." I hear your voice, roaring in my mind before I realize that it's actually you; that you're breathing into my neck, that you're speaking quietly, that you're looking at me.

                        I arch my neck as far as I can and simply stare.

                            "Because you are." He whispers. "I don't know what we are, but I know that I'm never going to forget you."

               Time slows. My breath halts. The drum of my heart shivers into a slow beat, beat, beat.

                               I wanted to say something important, then. Words that I could only ever seem to birth with ink staining my fingertips, my fingertips staining the pages, the pages bleeding for me, my voice cracking as it did. Maybe my words could have changed something. Some part of me is sure that this is the universe—those big hands with space and time ticking and tocking within mountainous palms—saying that, sometimes, words aren't enough.

              I sigh, contentedly, and I smile into him.

                   Then, I disappear—far less violently, much less tragically. I simply stand up to pour myself a glass of water. I find birthday girl and gush, extremely, to no end, about him—about everything inside of me falling to place, about another kind of peace washing over me whenever I caught his gaze in the crowd of the tent, or in the quiet of the living room.

              She smiles, too.

                   "Certain people are meant to be together." She says, softly. I almost burst into laughter, and joyful tears.

            Her mother begins to lead us into the tent, a plate of brownies in her wrinkled hands, her nails glimmering in the flickering light.

                   We sing that old birthday song, the one that stays on the lips too long, the one that always sounds the same—full of memories and hopes and dreams and a life that is stitched wonderfully at the seams. That song is not the introduction to devastation. That song is not a whisper in the dead of night, questioning the noise outside. That song is not you, brushing your hand against my softness and having me freeze at your touch.

                               You kiss her; hungrily, unnervingly, drunkenly. It's not birthday girl—tonight, her boyfriend has reddened her lips enough to last a lifetime—but it's a woman just as fiery, just as fierce, just as ferociously kind. That's what she tells me; I was drunk, I'm sorry. I wipe her tears, hand her a glass of water, and remind her that she doesn't control him. I don't control him. Nobody does.

                  And as I drink wine and forget about you, you drink the memory of her and forget about me.

☀

Another situation.

What I want you to know is that this night felt so, so much like the first time. I can't even begin to explain it; there was this lightness, this peace, this certainty singing inside of me. It felt so right. My body and my mind and my heart were in-sync, everything moved at a loving pace, and everything made sense. And when he kissed that girl (my friend), I could not breathe. Because, once again, darkness bled into my dream and a lack of truth was my downfall.

I want you to know that, sometimes, things feel so, so right. Especially in the moment. Especially under those conditions. If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be this: "he isn't what you want him to be, and that is okay."

That would've saved me a lot of pain. But, we live and we learn.

Thank you for reading this. I love you.

—jay.