Work Text:
He’s so pretty. That’s what sets it off.
The word feels reductive, a thing for storybooks and little girls and happily-ever-afters, but it’s the only one you have to use, the only one you’re brave enough for.
Pretty. The beginning of the spiral.
He rests like an angel in your mind, dipped in halo light, ethereal and lovely in every way he is not meant to be. Not to you.
He is running through the rain and his hair drips water onto his shoulders, he is standing under a streetlamp and the way it makes his eyes glint makes your stomach drop to your toes, he is watching a movie and laughing his cheeks red, he is brandishing a knife and scowling so hard his head must be aching with it, he is squinting at scribbled out math equations and leaning his head close to yours, he is staring out the window at the front of a classroom and you can’t tear your eyes away. It’s overwhelming, the way he consumes you. The way he is not supposed to.
You can almost feel the ghost of his hands around your shoulders, steady and soft and warm. Like a memory.
But you know it isn’t right, of course you do. You’ve always been smart.
For other people it’s different, for you it’s a rot inside of you to match the rot of your body. Maybe it’s all been divine punishment after all.
Your childhood was a thing of stained-glass windows and books of hymns and fingers wrapped in rosary beads. You were born in a confessional with your hands clasped in praise, you were raised in the gaps between pews.
You were told how to live the right way, the good way, by fancy men in fancy robes standing on tiled alters, men who never lived real lives. You were told that is nothing close to simple, that there are intricacies, and there are rules to be followed.
Don’t think that. Don’t do that. Don’t be that.
You are told that guilt is a piece of you that cannot truly be cut away. Sin is inherent, your life is just a means of rectifying mistakes you never really made.
Of course, now you have made them. You’re an abomination. You’re a soul strung up with a body. There’s nothing in the bible about that. Nothing good, anyway.
But you want to touch him, in a thousand gentle ways. And it doesn’t feel bad. Not like it’s meant to.
When he takes your hands all at once the shuddering weight of guilt subsides, and you can feel him, through the cold. You can feel him.
And there were ten months of nights when the world felt too wide, when you felt too small, and he pulled you away from the journal pages your hands were tirelessly tracing, and he made you dance with him in the flickering light. Just two boys in a dust-covered room, stepping around exposed wires and brushing fingertips and humming along to dull music sputtering out of a dying cellphone. Your life was in pieces. But he stayed.
He’s the best person you know. He’s the most oblivious boy in the whole world. He’s the closest friend you’ve ever had. And you want to hold his face in your hands and knot your fingers with his and kiss him until you’re both breathless, until you’re breathing again. You want to grab him by the shoulders and look him in his eyes and scream can’t you see what you’re doing to me!
Everything is ugly and cruel and rotting, but when it all winds down, and the stars sit quietly above, he is diving from a window just to hold you in his arms, and flowers curl up in your body where the blood used to be.
But it doesn’t matter. The guilt, the loathing, the agonizing. You’re never going to say a word. You’ll swallow yourself, just as you always do.
And if you did tell him? If you steadied the cowardly rattle in your hollowed-out chest, if you found the words and coughed them out?
He’d just reject you anyway.
No one really loves a dead thing. They just grieve it.