A Testimony to the Continuation of my Pitiful Existence

Fire Escape

The multi-story carpark was a big, hulking thing of thick concrete, with wrinkles of black tar hiding the cracks that revealed its age. The entrance to the fire escape was the only drop of colour, an angry red with white letters and a green exit sign above it. Inside, it was a different story. The walls were spongey with a centimetre of layered paint, each coat of uniform grey attempting in vain to cover the insistent undercurrent of rebellion in the form of graffiti scrawls and street art. At the top landing, there was a single window and a harsh fluorescent tube that was activated by night.
The best time to be there was in the space between a sunset and darkness, where dull greens and hues of blue brought the place to a standstill, time stretching just a little so that the moment could be observed, but never quite captured. There was no noticeable instant of perfection until after it passed and the tone was pitched deeper into the night, leaving a subtle feeling of grief in its wake. The point between them was a balance of two opposites, a contrast depicted in colours so peaceful they almost had an aroma of green apple and lavender.
Cam and I discovered it whilst looking for a place to smoke in secret. We hadn't noticed the escape, so we took the elevator which shrieked and jolted the five floors up. The entire building felt cancerous, and it seemed to eat away at its surroundings, rather than shrink into the background. The rooftop parking was open to the weather, and it stood frighteningly tall over the low buildings on the outskirts of Melbourne. Regardless of its concrete presence amidst the brick offices and cafes, at the edge it allowed us the treasure of seeing a vivid orange and pastel pink sun melting into the horizon, and the world felt flatter and less defined as we let ourselves be lulled into its lingering warmth.
The carpark, used to the ignorance or hatred of others, decided to reveal to us the door into the fire escape, which was slightly ajar. The words FIRE ESCAPE in bold white against red drew us in, and Cam pushed the door open to reveal a skinny, grungy landing that was coated in graffiti, as if the tar scarred surface of the carpark had been rolled up and condensed into a staircase that was more black paint than grey. On the far wall, a cartoon figure scowled over his shoulder at us, and an unreadable scrawl was beneath him in silver and yellow.
We were so aware of our surroundings then, on that first adventure into it, and it developed our cut-out friendship into something that was both between us, and around us. It wasn't an inside joke, nor a secret, but something androgynous like the light that slowly sank the room into an ocean, a shared sense of something ethereal that neither of us talked about, but both of us understood.
A functioning thing was below us, an air conditioning fan that rattled to protest its continued life, and further from that was the elevator that didn't want to heave itself up and down the floors, and around the carpark were the square buildings who had caps pulled low over their eyes and then there were houses and a city and thousands of things that existed and lived, oblivious to the seclusion of Cam and I.
"Camera?" he asked, and I nodded.
I'd been taking shots all day, aiming most of them at Cam. At random, I would call his name and press the shutter as he turned, trying to capture the instant between him facing me, and him realising I was taking a photo. Sometimes I'd get the Cam that really looked like him, but most of the time it was merely a scowl, but if I was honest, those were pretty too.
My backpack fell from my shoulders and I kneeled down to pull my DSLR from my bag. Cam crouched low beside a yellowed Gatorade bong, and pulled his hood up over his eyes.
Prior to then, there was little more than a friendship between us, struck during the drama club at school. We had been the two new kids, so we grew close only out of self-preservation, but there was more to it than that. We kept talking because I was the photographer getting a taste of something almost impossible to photograph, and he was the broken-home teenager who needed a few hours of city exploration and a laugh rather than a party.
We started a joke of complimenting one another, and it developed from humour into stubborn continuation, neither of us wanting to finish it, and finally into seriousness, which was conveyed only through abrupt and frightening eye contact and a hyperawareness of each other's existence.
He showed me a photo of myself on the camera.
"Look at that model pose."
"Nice."
"You actually look pretty damn hot."
What was there to do but kiss? Intimacy was not something I was used to, much less here, in one of the rawest parts of the city, and I felt both exhilarated and sick, and I could tell by the way he looked at me that he did too.
The next weekend, we bought food and wandered the streets like lost dogs, but I got the sense that both of us were subtly trying to steer the other towards the carpark. We stayed there waiting for the sun to set, never once looking the other in the eye, and our bodies and hands resting in just the wrong places.
He didn't want to tell his parents, and neither did I. What we were doing was not labelled, nor even recognised, because this was not something others would understand. We passed each other in the hallways at school like anybody else would, with a nod and perhaps a smile, and in the club we would laugh and joke, but not seclude ourselves away like a couple.
The fire escape understood how we could only be connected when we were there, so it threw up a new canvas of artworks each week to please us, and we began to spend our time studying the walls and whatever we were, rather than photography and city's alleyways.
"This one asks for nudes. How original."
"Who doesn't want nudes in their inbox, though?"
There began to be no separation between us whilst lying against the wall, and we loved to watch the room grow moodier from the night's invasion. We lay against one another, having finally found our comfort, and our words slipped together like a monologue, or maybe a poem, something that didn't rhyme or quite make sense, but didn't have to. It was like a sensation, an infinite amount of words could be used and still not capture it, and I knew it was hopeless to try with a camera.
We drew our names on a freshly painted wall, and Cam asked me to photograph it.
"Why?"
"I just want some evidence."
And so we positioned ourselves on either side of it, the protecting mesh on the window casting us in a grid of colours.

A few months in, Cam's parents discovered the photo of us. It was not much, just two boys sitting, but its underlying tones seemed lewd and raucous, our eyes having finally been able to meet, and new worlds explored. I do not know how they reacted, nor what they did to Cam, but all I received from him was an apology text of sorts over the holiday break, and he never came back for the next term.
And when I went to visit the fire escape at our usual time, he was nowhere to be found, but I felt some change within me, something hardening and possibly becoming a little less raw. The wall was already painted over, and it seemed the fire escape had forgotten us, the only thing to witness our secret first hand. I took out my camera, and photographed the exact spot where we sat, weekend after weekend, exploring what we meant to the world, and it would remind me never to let myself be erased again, for fear of forgetting who I was too. A moment after I clicked the shutter, the sun dipped down to touch the horizon, and I sat to watch the sunset one last time.