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Justin loves Brian. He loves Brian so much that sometimes he thinks he might implode. It is like carrying around a time bomb inside of him—a heavy, deep weight. Other times, Justin thinks it’s a disease, an ulcer twisting like a tornado at the pit of his stomach. But most of the time, he can’t remember what not being in love with Brian feels like.
Justin has lost count all the times he almost blurts out “I love you” to Brian. Because sometimes Justin catches Brian looking at him in a way that said everything that was never voiced and other times when Brian would kiss him so gently that he thought he has felt a silent explosion instead.
All Justin wants to do is just say the words to get it over with. Once, he accidentally said it to Michael and Emmett at the diner. “I love Brian,” he had blurted out.
Michael had snickered and then continued eating. Emmett had looked at him desolately, like witnessing a Greek tragedy, and for a moment, Justin thought there was a tear at the corner of his eye.
The way Justin sees it, he had to say those words sooner or later, because he can no longer be responsible for carrying around that weight, like a secret, like it is taboo. It needs to be verbalized and to be freed into the universe. This immense thing, this infinity, this black hole—I love you—it has to exist somewhere else other than Justin’s consciousness. So Justin let it slip and hopes that it’s real still.
It is real.
Like all other feelings for Brian that Justin can no longer distinguish, Justin no longer knows when his schoolboy crush grew into a sprawling twister in the very pit of his heart. Justin loves Brian and it is an end onto itself. It has grown into something intrinsic, something completely of itself: whole.
Justin doesn’t understand the way he feels sometimes. Other times, he thinks his friends believe he’s deranged. Like Ted and Emmett and Melanie, who see Brian only as a selfish, heartless prick. Like Debbie, who worries that Brian is going to break his heart into a million little pieces. Or like Michael and Lindsay, who believe that Brian won’t be able to love him back, not like that. No one gets it.
Justin’s not sure he gets it sometimes. But Justin has come to understand that being with Brian is like constantly living on the edge of catastrophe. At any given moment, Brian might push him off a cliff. Each of us is a mini-disaster. The man is absolutely infuriating. Yet, Justin would wake up in the morning to Brian’s bed hair and horrible moods, drinking coffee by the pot, and he would suddenly think what a devastating, beautiful mess Brian is.
There are many things that Justin will never understand. Like women and the stock market and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. But Justin understands art. So, Justin comes to associate Brian with a JMW Turner painting—like looking into a storm and being overwhelmed by the sublime.
Brian possesses this ferocity that Justin could only compare to Turner’s violent treatment of paint on the canvas. Snow Storm: Steamboat off a Harbour's Mouth. 1842. Oil on Canvas. Tate Gallery, London. Everything is rougher around the edges, bolder, louder, because all the paint is overlaid on the canvas rather than mixed on the palette: superimposing thick layers of color, toning them down, and then returning to them to produce a solid crisp light surrounded with nothingness. The texture is dynamic, always moving and shifting. Looking at a Turner is like falling into a storm, like being caught up in Brian—untamable.
Those are things Justin does understand. Justin knows that life didn’t begin until the night he met Brian. He tries to remember what life was like before blue neon lights, and all he recalls is white noise, punctuated by occasional splashes of color. Something had been missing, didn't make sense inside himself. His childhood stretches behind him: shapeless, indistinguishable. It seems everything had faded into a calm formless reflection across tranquil waters.
The quiet is deceiving. Justin’s so much more than that—more than his father’s perfect suburban house, its perfectly manicured lawns and musical door chimes; more than country club luncheons and private schools and SAT scores. Everyone in the family had gone to Dartmouth, Justin. He doesn’t fit into that cookie-cutter life. He wants so much more than that.
Justin lives for the storm. He revels in the storm; he breathes in the intensity and learns to live with its unrelenting momentum. Like how Brian has inspired him with his ferocity. I never would have come out back then, if it wasn’t for you. Brian pushed him to become the man he is today.
It’s the storm that he believes in. Tell me that your heart doesn’t race for a hurricane or a burning building.
Despite what other people choose to believe, Justin has faith. They fit, the two of them. Because Justin is the eye of the hurricane: the calm center of the maelstrom.
