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There’s a type of lonely that’s surrounded by people-forced into tables at lunchrooms, smiles that don’t quite reach eyes, cardigans and t-shirts that took too long to pick out, loud and cruel jokes that try to appease everyone, false confidence hanging by a string. A lonely that feels like a gaze on the back of your head and a whisper against teeth. The lonely that looks so much like happiness you can’t see it until it glides, whisper-soft but deadly sharp, across your thigh and breaks skin.
There’s another type of lonely, one that everyone knows, that’s completely apart from everyone-smoke swirling in the midday air just outside of thick metal doors, eyes that have only been expected to glare and thus have not learned to do anything else, dark jackets with collars that cover necks, knowing exactly what is expected of you and yet not giving them the satisfaction of doing it. A lonely that feels like cruel jokes spoken too loudly just behind you and the sting that comes to your eyes as a joint burns just a little too close to your face. The lonely that everyone knows manifests itself in pills stolen from a medicine cabinet and an army of white scars across a wrist.
Enter Jared Kleinman and Connor Murphy.
Sometimes, you can see a person and you can feel the lonely clinging to them. It sounds pitying, but it’s true; there’s something in their face that lights up at the first sign of another person that can dim so quickly once it remembers where it is. There’s a way you can see it more, when you can feel the weight of being alone clinging to your skin, like you’re drawn to each other.
Jared, with all of his trying-to-be-cool act, always saw Connor lurking in the shadows. They never talked, really, because there was no reason to-not when Jared allied himself with people who taunted Connor, not when Connor couldn’t open his mouth around Jared without his worst insults flying out. Until Jared just decided it-the forced laughs, the cruel jokes, being stared through at every turn-was unbearable, and skipped lunch in favor of prowling around for a secluded place to sit and eat.
He’d decided to check behind the gym, and his eyes met Connor’s just outside the heavy metal doors with a jolt before he recognized the rest of the scene. Connor, bent over a laptop, packaged lunch next to him, uncharacteristicly gentle in his position. Neither of them said anything, but Jared let the door fall shut behind him and leaned against the outer wall until he slid down all the way. Connor looked back at his laptop, not permitting Jared to sit there, but he didn’t kick Jared out, which seemed like a good sign.
That one lunch turned to two, and the two turned to a whole week, and the week turned into a month, and then before he knew it they were exchanging dry, sarcastic remarks at the beginning of the lunch period and then steadily through it. Somehow, lunch outside with Connor made him feel lighter, like Connor actually cared that he was there, cared that he existed at all. He wasn’t entirely sure that was true until Connor shoved Jared’s lunch aside and kissed him one day until neither of them remembered how to breathe and didn’t particularly care to remember. Then he pulled away and almost spooked himself to the point where he ran off right then, but Jared, preventing some darker alternate outcome for this version of them, grabbed his wrist, where his jacket sleeve had pushed up slightly, and ignored the raised lines in favor of pulling Connor back down towards him. For a moment, they were both at peace and violently awake, the world falling away so that the only thing they felt was the touch of the other, mouths colliding desperately and hungrily, eating up all of the fear and anxiousness and pain and loneliness they felt. It was all gone for those moments, moments where Jared mapped the feel of Connor in his brain. He committed every detail of it to memory-the taste of Connor’s lips, something sweet from lunch and something bitter and weed-like, the gentle curve of Connor’s wrist in his hand, the tickle of his hair falling against Jared’s forehead. He committed it all to memory, and replayed it at almost every waking moment, as though afraid he’d realize he’d imagined it and it hadn’t happened it if he didn’t. And Connor-well, Connor let himself live in that moment with nothing else on his mind, let the pressure of Jared’s lips and tongue drive away the heaviness pressing on his chest with a lighter and warmer feeling.
And from that moment on they’re not really dating; sure, there’s more making out than the average friendship between teenage boys, maybe, but there’s no label of boyfriends. No couples posts on Instagram or meeting families. No pet names and hand holding and date nights. Just those stolen moments that feel like they’re snatched right out from between the movement of the world around them. There’s something electric in having this just between them, especially when it feels like the rest of the world has already decided exactly who they are. There’s something revolutionary in foresaking every label and every stare and every whisper and pressing into each other in the shadows of their school, limbs intertwined, as everyone else continues to play this game.
But sometimes they yearn to just…be happy. Be boyfriends. Worry about what color ties to wear to the next dance so that they can match. They’re so far from picking out cute birthday gifts it feels almost laughable. They’re still lonely, so lonely, even though there’s the other to turn to, but neither are great at talking (or listening, for that matter). Loneliness can combat loneliness, but it can also feed off of loneliness. It can bounce off of itself, and create some kind of vortex where magnets are tearing at each other in the haste to reach each other.
It’s hard. Jared wishes it was easy to be there, and to be happy, and to forget all of his worries as Connor’s mouth is on his. And Connor wishes it was easy to feel like enough with Jared’s arm around his shoulders and the other smoothing his hair back from his face. They wish those moments were all they had to worry about. They wish they could live in that feeling, that feeling of adequacy and worthiness. That feeling of affection. That feeling of being seen. But there’s always an end time, a bell ringing. All good things must come to an end, but that seems especially cruel when there’s only one good thing to be seen.
And so they’re left in limbo, suspended in a stolen moment in time, with lips pressed to a cheek and curls pushed back from a face and arms and hands and legs tangled in each other. It’s a waiting game to see when the clock will strike 12, when the magic of the moment fades, when the vortex collapses under its own weight.