One More Time (With Feeling)

8

It's too cold and the snow is too heavy to go out and paint or wheatpaste, so you spend most of your time indoors, silkscreening and drinking coffee or hot chocolate and talking. You talk about everything, even things you've never said aloud before.

He tells you about his heroin addiction when he was seventeen. How he started smart but eventually got desperate and reused shared needles. He tells you about the way his heart dropped through his feet like a concrete block when he got his positive results back, and how his parents held him when he cried, being faced with his own mortality, even though he was a grown man and it was his own stupid decisions that led him there.

You tell him about your mom's suicide. About how she was never quite right, mentally, but you just thought she was a little weird, a little quirky. You didn't realize she was on anti-depressants and abusing painkillers until you found her note beside the empty bottles, that simply said, "I love you both. You'll do great things. I'm sorry I won't be there to see them." You were nineteen, your brother fifteen. He went to live in Wyoming with an aunt and uncle, and eventually moved on to that commune. You stayed in Chicago. That was the first time you moved into the house with your friends and the start of your jumping from place to place as you tried to find somewhere you could call home.

And you finally have, in Chayton. You didn't realize home could be a person as much as it could be a place. And now you have to start preparing to lose him, too.

You celebrate your two-year anniversary in Oak Park. Chayton brings his backpack, full of posters and brushes and stickers and paste, and you wear the green button-down shirt you borrowed from him and never gave back, a little loose in the shoulders. It brings out your eyes, he says.

But you don't come out to paint or paste. You come out for a coffee date at the new bakery that just opened up. It's nicer than what you're used to, the brick walls and the sounds of trains overhead and dim lighting. Here, they're made of shiny stainless steel and beautiful wrought iron and pretty, tiny confections lined up in perfect order, cupcakes and macarons and croissants.

"Two years," Chayton smiles.

"Two years."

You clink your cups together, porcelain on glass, and each take a sip from your coffees. You put your glass down and take his empty hand, pressing a kiss to his palm, then to his wrist. For a few moments, you hold him there, lips on skin. He curls his fingers in and drops his hand.

"I love you," he whispers. Ever since his T-cells dropped, he's gotten so much freer with his emotions, so much more open with his thoughts. He wears everything out on his sleeve for all the world to see, because he doesn't have much time left. One year counted down, so fast, much too fast. Potentially two more to go.

You smile. "I love you."

When you're done with your coffee and cupcakes, you head out to the wall where you pasted the alien posters that first night. They've been worn down by the weather, by the sun and the rain and the wind. The colors have faded and all of them are ripped. But most of them are still partially there, hanging from the brick wall, tattered and flapping in the breeze.

+++

It happens on a cold, snowy Sunday afternoon, the kind of dim, grey day that's perfect for staying inside with a cozy blanket and a mug of hot chocolate. The kind of day that could be beautiful, given the right circumstances. The garage is cold, but you're out there painting anyway when you get the call.

"I need you to come over. And Kyle, if he's free."

Chayton's voice is thick and gravelly. His words come out wheezing. He clears his throat with every other word, as if he can cough the sickness out.