Work Text:
Elle est retrouvée.
Quoi ? – L’Eternité.
C’est la mer allée
Avec le soleil.
-Rimbaud, “L’Eternité”
One of David’s earlierst and most comforting memories is of the time he learned how to swim.
His grandfather had taught him, over the summer.
Holding his back with one hand and slowly letting it go again.
David remembers his limbs falling into nothingness, he remembers the panic his body felt and then again the stableness when his grandfather catched him again.
“You have to move your arms and your legs now,” he had told him, standing over him, stable and safe, an ancient bronze statue standing still in the water, “Don’t be afraid, stay calm now.”
And David had looked at him with big eyes, how could one possibly stay calm when one was thrown into the void? He had thought, scared out of his skin.
But he had nodded, not wanting to disappoint his grandfather, wanting to be strong and brave like him, still and quiet like him. Trusting him.
So his grandfather had let him go again and David had put all of himself into moving his arms and legs, he had trashed about as if his life depended on it, which it kind of felt like it did, and, suddenly, there.
“You are swimming!” His grandfather had laughed, “There you go!”
And David had felt a lightness in his body he had never felt before, as if he were flying, as if he were a strange bird moving in the blue reflection of the sky.
He swam and swam, laughing, getting saltwater into his throat, spitting it out and laughing again.
He had looked up and seen his grandfather’s proud eyes, the sun behind him blinding and warm, a bigger replica of the affection he felt expanding in his own little chest.
*
Every summer, for two weeks, his parents used to drop him off at his grandfather’s house at the seaside to get some time alone.
The North Sea was grey and cold, but it was the sea, wild and beautiful.
And David loved it.
He loved the wind that made his clothes flatter like wings, he loved the seashells and the rounded glass pieces that he used to collect and put into his room like a little art installation: in the morning the light entered through his window, it shone on them and the room got filled by rainbows.
He loved sitting in front of the little wooden house, a cabin really, watching his grandfather carve little fairy-tale figures out of wood, his hands slow but experienced.
He loved listening to his stories about his many adventures on sea.
“You won’t believe me, but I’ll tell you anyway,” he used to say, his mouth smiling a little, his voice quiet and deep, “Sixty years ago, as the rest of the country went into war, your grandfather was at sea, fighting against big and scary sea monsters and listening to the sirens’ songs.”
His mouth smiled, but his weather stricken face looked solemn, as if he was telling David an important secret.
“Have you ever seen a sea serpent, child? They are bigger than this house and their breath stinks worse than your father’s cooking.”
And David had believed every word of his stories and David had giggled at his jokes and listened anxiously to his misfortunes.
“Thankfully, our little Marie is quicker than the winds and we flew away from it, just as it was about to close its big, big fangs unto us.”
He sat next to him on the beach, as his grandfather talked and looked over the wide, grey sea, and he had drawn scaly monsters and beautiful half-fish women and a man made of bronze travelling on a little winged boat.
And afterwards, as the water calmed down and his grandfather’s voice stilled, he loved jumping into the waves holding his grandfather’s hand and swimming with him as wide into the sea as they were allowed to.
“Don’t you go any further or you will end up in Norway,” his grandfather used to shout, as David became better and quicker than him, “And you really don’t want that, there’s giant trolls there that will eat you up in a gulp!”
He loved when the days were clear and the wind was right and his grandfather put his yellow fisherman hat on and told him, “Come, today we’re getting on the boat.”
The boat, Marie, named after his dead grandmother, was little, the red and white paint was falling off, the sails were patched up, there was barely enough room for two grown people, if they were standing at different ends. But David was still a child and a small one too, so he fit perfectly next to his grandfather.
They spent hours and hours on the sea, sometimes doing day trips to the small islands near them and picnicking there.
Sometimes just staying on the boat and watching the water, or the sky, or the two mixing together with the sunset.
*
They sat with their feet dangling off the boat, his grandfather smoked his pipe with one hand and held the other arm around his shoulders. David snuggled closer into his grandfather’s jumper that smelled of salt and tobacco.
“I want to be like you when I grow up,” he had told him and his grandfather had smiled.
“We can get you your own boat, when you get older, little one, if you want.”
And David had shaken his head, “No, I want to fight monsters, too, and hear the sirens sing and I want to tell stories. I want to tell so many stories!” He had sat up and looked at his granfather’s face, “And I want a long beard, like yours.”
His grandfather had laughed out loud, the sound like rumbling thunder. “You will have your own adventures and you will tell everybody about them, but, dear one, you will never grow a beard.”
David had scowled, “But I want one!”
His grandfather had looked at him with tenderness in his dark eyes and had ruffled his salt-sticky hair, “Girls don’t grow beards. But you can do all the other things!”
David had felt an uncomfortable urge to cry. “But...”
His grandfather noticed his wet eyes and worriedly put his pipe away, enveloping him in a hug. “Shh, shh. Why does a beard matter so much? Girls have beautiful long hair and wear wonderful dresses, isn’t that nice, too?”
David shook his head against his grandfather’s shoulder, “I don’t want long hair! I don’t like dresses! I just want to be like you.”
His grandfather had patted his shoulder a bit helplessly, “Well, well, there will surely be some way to find you a beard, then.”
*
And indeed, the first morning of the next year, the year David turned ten, as David was just finishing drinking his hot chocolate, his grandfather presented him a gift; a fake beard that you could hook around your ears, probably from a carnival shop.
David only took it off to get into the water.
*
Today David wonders what his grandfather must have thought when his little niece was so happy to get a fake beard. He must have thought that wasn’t completely normal, he must have thought him a strange creature, must he not?
But it doesn’t matter, because, as much as David remembers, he hadn’t seemed to care.
He had looked incredibly happy as David had smiled and hugged him as a thank you, though.
He had even jokingly called him lad for the rest of the week, flicking the black beard and ruffling his hair.
And David had grinned up to him, feeling like something he couldn’t name yet finally fit.
*
When his parents came to pick him up, in the evening, and he was sent to bed, he heard them arguing with his grandfather and calling him “irresponsible”.
In the morning, when they were expected to drive home again, David couldn’t possibly manage to find the beard again.
His parents were impatient to get into the car and his grandfather finally stopped him looking everywhere by hugging him tightly and telling him, a little sadly, while stroking his hair away from his forehead, that it must have been those pixies, lad, they play the meanest tricks on good people.
That year David had started to doubt his stories.
But think, losing something is still much better than waking up covered in strange bites or with your feet out the window, heh? And that has all happened to me, and it wasn’t pleasant!
That year David had started to doubt his stories, but he smiled a little anyway.
*
As they drove back home, his parents grumbled about his grandfather slowly losing it completely and being a “bad influence” on him.
He pretended to sleep and not to hear them.
“And why did he call her lad? Something is starting to get seriously wrong with your father. I’m not sure if we should send her there again.”
He knew now that his parents must have thrown the beard away.
He felt the rattling of the car go through his bones and imagined it was the North Sea’s wild waves.
*
The next year they stay home, just like the next, and the next. His parents stop talking about his grandfather.
David spends his summers alone at one of the city’s pools, counting how many seconds he can stay with his head unterwater.
Every year he can hold his breath a little longer.
With twelve, his chest starts to grow. He spends hours before his mirror studying his body, crossing his arms over his chest, wondering if, if he presses hard and long enough, it will go back to how it was before.
It doesn’t. David hates it.
A few months before he turns thirteen, he gets his period.
He panics and cries when he first sees the blood. He spends an hour sitting on the toilet, praying to all the gods he can remember the name of that it was something else, anything else, even an illness, even something bad.
When he tells his mother, she hugs him, “Now you are a woman.” She whispers proudly into his ear, and he feels like throwing up.
*
Somehow, it is difficult to make friends. He looks at the girls and sits with them at lunch, in the classrooms, in the changing rooms and he always feels like an outsider.
He considers them all nice and fun, but he always feels like something is missing, like there is something he is supposed to understand, but just doesn’t get.
They start to wear make up and bras and they talk about how they wish they finally got their period and they sigh, wistfully saying how much they’d like bigger breasts.
David always thinks, I’ll give you mine, you can take it all. I don’t want it I don’t want it I don’t want it.
He hates makeup, he tries to put it on, once, seeing how everyone seems to do it, but he looks at himself in the mirror and everything feels wrong and ridiculous. He scrubs it all away until his face looks red and raw.
As the other girls chat about boys and help each other into their clothes and compare seizes of bras, David feels incredibly awkward.
He changes in a corner, as quickly as possible, trying to hide his sports bra, trying not to look at the girls as they change, feeling guilty because he likes looking at the soft curves of their backs, at how the muscles of their shoulders move when they tie up their hair.
*
He draws a self potrait, full of rage, he draws his feminine body, accentuating all the parts he hates, and he pushes the pencil deeper and deeper into the paper, until it breaks through.
Only then he notices he is crying.
Frustrated, he scrawls over it until it is all black, then he rips the paper in two.
*
He goes to the hairdresser alone with the money he saved up over the last years’ Christmases and birthdays and asks her to cut his hair as short as his money allows it.
He gets home with something that’s almost a buzzcut.
His parents shout and look at him disappointed, like they don’t recognize him anymore.
He looks at himself in the mirror and, for the first time in a long time, he recognizes himself.
He smiles.
*
Three days after he turns thirteen, he starts noticing a girl and, incredibly, she notices him back. He dares looking her in the eyes and she smiles.
They meet each other after school, in the shadows of the science laboratory building. She passes her fingers through his hair and says, “I’ve never seen a girl with such short hair.”
He shudders and breathes out, “I’m not sure I am.”
“What?”
“A girl.”
She looks at him with curiosity in her eyes, “What are you then?”
David kisses her.
*
He spends entire days laying on his bed and feeling bad, feeling guilty, feeling strange.
It’s as if his own skin is wrong and it itches and he wants to crawl out of it and leave it behind.
He doesn’t want to have a body and surely not this one, it is too heavy and it has too many wrong curves for him. It is made for someone else.
In all his drawings there are monsters and there are waves and gods made of wood and there is a person, their gender is not clear, whose body becomes smoke.
When he goes outside, when he sits in the metro, when he gets to school, when he plays volleyball, he wishes that nobody would look at him.
He wishes he could disappear, not have a physical form.
He hates his body and all its bulges and offerings. It feels like its dragging him down. He is ashamed of it.
He has stopped going to the pool, too. He can’t bear the thought of wearing a swimsuit or a bikini. The thought of showing his body so freely.
He misses the water. He wonders if he has ever felt like himself in this life.
*
With fourteen it gets so bad that he has to close his eyes shut when he gets into the shower. It gets so bad that every time he gets a look at himself in a shop window, he feels nauseous and he feels like running home and hiding away from the world.
If it were possible, he’d hide away from his own body.
He hates the sound of his voice, too, so he tries to speak as little as possible. He gets very quiet and people slowly stop talking to him. Life gets very lonely.
He looks at girls and thinks, they are beautiful, but they are not me.
He looks at boys, at their tall bodies, their long legs, their wide shoulders, and he thinks, I wish that were me.
He hates himself.
In the night, alone with his laptop, he starts googling.
Finally, he finds out that there exist other people that feel like him. He even finds a name that describes what he is. Transgender. It sort of feels like his brain can finally calm down, like it has found an answer.
It feels like coming up for air.
*
He talks to other people online, makes friends there. He discovers dysphoria. He discovers that there’s more than two genders. He opens a patreon and starts selling his art. One of his online friends sends him one of their old binders.
He thinks about male names.
He thinks about all the stories his grandfather told him.
He thinks about one of his favourite heroes, about fighting against a giant with nothing but your wits and a wooden sling launching a small stone.
David.
His binder arrives, thankfully he’s the only one home when the postman drops it off.
He puts it on and passes a hand over his flat chest, feeling tears grow in his eyes.
He throws himself at the mirror, he looks at his body and he has to laugh out loud. It’s perfect.
David, David, David, he says to his reflection, like a mantra, like a spell.
*
It’s the last week of November when David decides he wants to come out to his parents.
It’s also the last week of November when the news reaches them that his grandfather has died.
How strange is it then, that just as David has found himself, he seems to lose such an other important part of what makes him the person he is?
He thinks about his grandfather sitting alone on the beach before the wide grey sea, carving his own little gods and heroes, monsters and marvels, out of wood.
Who had he told his stories to, these last few years? Had he been very lonely? Can the sea wind cure you of loneliness? Can it blow it away, like it does with the sand or the clouds? Or does it make it just more obvious, unbearably obvious, how alone you are?
Does it whisper its own stories or does it just rattle through your house, coldly killing all the warmth a single body can hold?
David wonders all this as he stands at the funeral.
He watches his grandfather’s body be put into the cold black earth and he thinks, but he wanted to be cremated, his ashes strewn into the wind over the sea.
There aren’t many people present, after his wife’s death his grandfather had lost many of his friends and spent most of his time at the cabin, alone with the wind and the sea and a nephew he called lad just because he had noticed that it made him happy.
David looks around and sees pale faces, uncomfortable looking bodies, black clothes.
The snow begins to fall, slowly and silently. He thinks, why did we not fucking cremate him.
*
The drive back home is silent, David feels empty, as if his emotions were still sitting before the cabin, waiting for his grandfather to come back from sea.
While this emptiness isn’t truly comfortable, it makes him braver. When they get home, he prepares his bags and he calls an online friend and he takes all the money he has made with his drawings. He feels like he needs to do this.
There’s anticipation in him, and fear and an unbearable desire to be accepted, to be loved.
He comes out to his parents.
His parents tell him he is not their child.
He takes all his bags and doesn’t look back.
*
The first night after he runs away from home, he sleeps on the beach.
David sits alone on the wet sand, his bags strewn around him, he hugs his knees, hiding in his coat. The only sounds he hears are the waves dying on the coast, the wind whispering secrets he isn’t sure he wants to know.
The sky is enormous and lonely, dark clouds hide the stars.
How can death be everywhere and still hurt so much? How is it possible that everyone feels grief in their lives and still we haven’t found a cure for it? Why does nobody do anything about our fragile human condition?
Why do we accept death like this?
David hides his head between his knees.
He thinks about his grandfather, his strong hands, his dark skin, the crow legs next to his eyes, his pipe, his boat, all that made him what he was, is it all gone?
Is it all dead?
He thinks about an old man laying in his bed, feeling death standing next to it, knowing he must take one last step, into the big unknown, the big nothingness that awaits us all.
He thinks about a stiff body being carried into the earth, being covered with darkness.
He knows his grandfather will miss the water, wherever he is now.
Is there a sea in the world of the dead?
Or is it just a plain desert of silence and oblivion? A dry land where ghosts walk without remembering their names?
He feels like someone has punched him in the chest.
The air is too cold, he shudders and pulls his scarf closer around his neck. Above him, the moon escapes from the clouds, the moonlight shines down with something that reminds David of tenderness.
It is an eerie atmosphere, to be alone with the sea, the wind and the moon.
David thinks if a siren would appear between the waves and call his name, he would gladly climb into the water and never come back again.
He lets himself cry in the silence.
Slowly, he falls asleep, curled up on himself.
At one point, he feels a hand on his shoulder.
As he blinks up, it seems to him that his grandfather is standing next to him, looking over the sea.
He takes a drag of his pipe, if there’s a god out there, he would be disappointed, David seems to hear him say. Somehow, he knows this is about his parents.
Then his grandfather looks at him and smiles a little, he gives him a pat on the shoulder, go on, now, lad.
He wakes up with the dawn, the sun glitters friendly on the water, some people are already jogging on the beach and throwing him curious looks.
He takes his bags, shakes the sand out of his shoes, and goes on.
*
His online friend lives in Berlin, which is perfect, he wants to move there anyway. Berlin is a city where everybody, no matter how strange, finds their place; there will surely be a place for him, too.
His friend greets him with affection, they give him their couch but they tell him they don’t have much to offer. The flat is small, there’s barely enough place for one person. David promises himself he will find his own place soon.
They take him to an LGBT+ centre, David meets other people like him, he feels understood, he feels like he belongs.
One girl in particular takes him under her wing, her name’s Laura, she’s four years older than him and her parents threw her out because she came out as a lesbian. She has dark hair and one of the kindest smiles David’s ever seen.
When she gets her own apartment, she asks him if he wants to move in with her.
He cries.
She ruffles his hair and calls him brother.
*
When they move in, Laura decides they need to have a movie marathon, as a sort of house inauguration. They watch all the Harry Potter movies in one setting.
It becomes one of their rituals: once a week, they lie on the floor, surrounded by pillows, they can’t afford a couch yet, and have a movie marathon.
All the movies by a single director in one single night. It’s exhausting. It’s extremely fun.
Week after week they go through Tarkovskji, Igmar Bergman, Fellini, Godard.
But also, Wes Anderson, Guillermo del Toro, Sofia Coppola, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch.
As they curl up, huddled together before Laura’s old laptop, David decides this is what he wants to do.
Bring people together by making films.
Tell stories, of monsters, of heroes, of ghosts, of grandfathers, of sisters.
Of boys who find their own bodies on the way.
*
Time dances on, careless of our little worries and losses. Time dances on and the sound of its feet makes us forget, sometimes it even makes us heal.
It makes us go on.
Slowly, David stops feeling like a chunk of his chest is buried under the earth, in a cemetery somewhere near Hamburg.
He feels like life might actually be possible for someone like him.
Like his wounds are closing up and he just needs to throw out his hands to land safely.
*
He gets back to school.
He explores Berlin and falls in love with it.
He keeps his old phone, because he knows his parents still have his number and a young, little part of him still hopes.
He gets a nose piercing. It makes him feel tough.
He learns about testoterone and about chest surgery.
He looks at boys, at men, and sometimes there’s doubts in his mind.
At school, he hears boys talk about girls like they’re objects, she’s a ten, have you seen her tits? Her ass? I’d do her, look at her, what her? No, she’s ugly as fuck.
He sees them look at pictures of naked girls on their phones, all huddled together and chuckling.
He wants to shake them and ask what’s wrong with them, he wants to punch them, to tell them they’re being sexist idiots. But he doesn’t say anything, he passes next to them and glares, wishing he were braver. Wishing they were different.
He sees a man touch a woman on the metro, she is petrified as his hand moves up on her leg. Finally, she seems to break out of it, she stands up, calls him an asshole and gets off at the next stop.
David sits and watches, just as petrified as she was.
When she gets off, the man winks at him, as if they were accomplices, as if David would condone what he did, as if they were the same.
David gives him the finger and gets off too, before the train starts again.
He wonders if this is what being a boy is like, if it is just violence and sexism.
He wonders about masculinity and if he wants it.
He wants a boy’s body, he wants a boy’s voice, he wants a boy’s name, he wants a boy’s pronouns.
He wants to be called lad.
But he doesn’t want to be that.
*
As many doubts as he has, he can’t stand the sound of his voice. He asks Laura if she would come with him to a gender clinic.
It takes years, but finally, at seventeen, David is on testoterone.
He passes, now, and it’s exhilarating.
When he is alone at home, he speaks his thoughts out loud, just to hear the sound of his voice, to marvel at how deep it gets.
But sometimes he feels guilty for his newfound male privilege.
When he’s together with Laura, people always talk to him when they need help, and when she wants to say something, they talk over her, ignoring her.
Once David himself did it.
Laura didn’t talk to him the rest of the day, until he finally noticed what he had done.
It had been a long time since he had felt that guilty.
He tries to be more careful, he doesn’t want to become what he fears.
He starts going to the gym, he builds muscles, he runs. His body looks more and more how he wants it to.
But he reminds himself to be kind, to be gentle, to be soft. He doesn’t want a masculinity that’s violent and sexist, he wants a masculinity that belongs to him.
A masculinity he can recognize himself in.
Like the one his grandfather always showed.
His grandfather who had called his boat not after one of the many mythological heroes whose names he all remembered, but after his over all beloved dead wife.
His grandfather who was always calm and stable. Still and brave.
Kind and gentle.
*
He hasn’t had much time to think about his sexuality.
He knows he likes girls, he enjoys kissing them, holding them. He likes listening to their voices, their laughs.
He has also had more than one crush on nonbinary people he met at the LGBT+ centre who made his head spin, his heart beat.
He has never allowed himself to think about boys, though.
But now that he passes, he catches himself looking at pretty boys standing before him in the queue and thinking, I wish that were me, but also, I wish I could kiss him.
It’s like, when he was still perceived as a girl, the thought of being with a boy made him feel nauseous. Now that people call him he, he feels like he wouldn’t mind being a boy’s boyfriend.
No, he wouldn’t mind it at all.
He doesn’t care too much about labelling himself in this sense, but he likes the word bisexual and the word queer. He oscillates between the two, embracing all the love he discovers he still holds in himself.
*
School isn’t good. People laugh at his back, they call him names, he starts to feel like an outsider, an alien, a vampire, again.
After school, he goes exploring abandoned places. It makes his brain calm down. He’s quick and agile, and he’s used to being silent. He buys himself a torch and keeps it always in his backpack.
His favourite place is an abandoned pool he found back in October.
When he gets there, the only sound he hears is that of his own footsteps. It’s not the North Sea, it’s not the blowing of the wind, but as he closes his eyes, he almost feels like he’s underwater.
He goes there often, sitting in a corner and drawing.
He doesn’t tell anybody about it, not even Laura.
*
School gets so bad that he can’t sleep at night.
He and Laura look for other schools in Berlin. After they find a promising one, they meet up with the headmaster, she assures them that David being trans won’t be a problem at her school.
So, that’s settled. David still feels nervous the night before he’s meant to start.
He is laying in bed, looking at the moonlight entering through his window.
He blinks, and suddenly his grandfather stands there, in his old jumper, with his pipe, just as he was alive.
Stay calm, he seems to say, just like the time he taught him how to swim. Don’t be afraid now.
Then he looks out of the window, nice place you have here, lad. Even without the sea.
The morning after, David puts his binder on, looks into his reflection, and tells himself, in his new deep voice, stay calm.
You can do this.
*
And incredibly, he can.
He keeps his head down, he wants to get through this last school year without any more great incidents. Then, he wants to go to film school.
Incredibly, he also makes friends. Leonie and Sara are nice and they welcome him warmly.
Leonie sends him certain looks sometimes and, sometimes, he even thinks about indulging her. She is pretty, with that long copper hair and that self assured smile. She is funny and sarcastic. But he has promised himself that this year will just be a treshold. He wants nobody to know he is trans.
He’ll just get in, get his diploma, and get out again.
*
His plans go down the metaphorical drain when his eyes meet those of the most beautiful and saddest looking boy he has ever seen.
*
Matteo, he said his name was. Matteo with the eyelash and the joint and the wish to get away.
Matteo with the girlfriend.
David still whispers his name when he’s alone, tries out those foreign sounding syllabes. They taste bittersweet on his tongue.
He thinks about blue eyes and he remembers the sea.
*
David takes him to the abandoned pool.
“Technically, we are now underwater.” He says. Matteo grins at him, with his crooked teeth and his beautiful dimples.
“I bet I can hold my breath longer than you.” He says, and Matteo, not knowing that David spent entire summers of his life holding his breath, accepts the bet.
David steps closer and presses a kiss to his lips.
Matteo kisses him back.
David feels like he’s drowning.
*
David truly isn’t a man of his word; he had promised himself that nothing important would happen this year, and yet here he is, falling in love.
*
When Matteo and he spend time together, David feels like he can be himself without worrying, without holding back. Matteo seems to understand him, every part of him.
It’s scary how much he likes him.
*
David tells Matteo he’s trans.
*
He gets outed to the whole school.
*
Matteo reaches him underwater; he jumps into the ocean and drags him back up, just when David felt his lungs give in, just when he saw the light on the surface disappear.
*
Every day, David can’t quite believe how he got here: he’s filming his application for film school in Berlin, he lives in an apartment with a woman he can call his sister, he has a group of friends that are more than happy to help him when he needs help, and, amazingly, amazingly, he has the most soft-spoken and beautiful boy of the world as his boyfriend.
Someone like him can live this life, someone like him can have a place in this world.
*
The air is warm, it’s the end of August, the sky is orange and pink, and he and Matteo are sitting on the balcony of Matteo’s flat.
Matteo has his arms crossed on the railing, his chin on his arms. He’s holding a cigarette in one hand and he’s looking over the city with such a satisfied expression as if he himself had made it.
As if it were his artwork, a bit of grey here, blue there, green in that little patch over there, and, then, pink and orange all above it.
David sits next to him, his sketchbook on his knees, he looks at him with a smile and draws him.
He traces his long, bent back that he has trailed with kisses this morning, his pale neck, that blond mop of hair he loves passing his fingers through.
He traces Matteo’s body on the paper, every part of it that he loves, with light, quick lines, with incredible care.
Matteo turns his face towards him, with his half-lidded eyes and his crooked smile. David can’t help thinking that he looks a bit like a lazy cat streching its body out in the sun.
“Na, you artist? How is the drawing coming along?” He asks, mumbling.
David holds the drawing up and compares it with his subject, “Well, the muse did a great job looking pretty in the evening light, and I do think the drawing isn’t too bad either.”
Matteo snorts and strikes a pose, holding his face dramatically up to the last rays of the sun, “Yeah, your muse is quite good at this. You might even say... amazing.”
David shakes his head, puts the drawing back down and leans towards him, taking his face into his hands and turning it towards him, “Come here.” He says and presses a kiss to his mouth.
He feels Matteo’s slow smile on his lips.
“My muse is developing a bit of an ego, it seems.” He whispers to Matteo, as they break apart again and he slowly rubs their noses together.
Matteo steals another quick kiss, then, keeping his eyes closed, he puts his head on David’s shoulder, David puts his arms around him, and they sit there, looking over a pink and orange tinted Berlin.
David remembers other sunsets, so many years ago.
He remembers the smell of salt and the sound of the waves, the cries of the seagulls, his grandfather’s deep and quite voice.
All those stories.
“You know, this french poet, Arthur Rimbaud, once said that eternity is found when the sun and the sea meet and become one.” David says.
“You do know that Berlin isn’t a sea city, David?”
David pulls at Matteo’s hair.
Matteo giggles, “Do you know basic geography, David?”
“I hate you.”
Matteo grins up to him, with those sea-blue eyes, and David decides that one day he’ll take this boy to the North Sea.