Chapter Text
‘Day 426.
Today, summer lingered in Kensington Palace. When I woke up, the gardens were washed in a beautiful, soft light that made the leaves turn yellowish rather than brown as they tend to be at this time of the year. I went down by the park and took a walk amongst the trees. David was yapping happily; I was still looking at the leaves, could not detach my gaze from their fluttering colours. There was this special hue about them, I couldn’t quite place it – until it stabbed me in the heart.
They reminded me of your eyes.
This sentence would be beautiful if anything and everything didn’t remind me of you. If I didn’t think about your fluttering lashes, your crooked smile, your restless energy, your passionate kisses with every breath I take.’
In his emails, Henry always made sure to not let the pain slip through. At first, it was impossible. He remembered crying on day one, day four, day nineteen, day one hundred and seventy eight. Recalled the keyboard absorbing his tears without a word. Maybe the reason he liked typing so much laid in this material truth: the keys gave him the opportunity to express his feelings without ever turning them back to him. Writing words, not having them reflected back at him – at least, as long as he didn’t look at the screen.
Each email was a draft: words laid on a blank page, a recipient, a subject line, a purpose . Forming sentences letter by letter, watching them inflate with sense and heaviness, yet leaving his mind, at least for some time. Most of all, having the luxury to smash the undo key as many times as he needed.
‘The other day, I saw your face in a tabloid. For the thousandth time, I asked myself how you were doing. If you met someone. If they make you happy. ’
Undo, undo, undo. No matter if the email will never be sent, gathering imaginary dust with the hundred other ones in a dark corner of Henry’s email application. Once, during a weeping fit in the middle of a lonely night, he confessed to David that sometimes he wondered if that file full of painful emails wasn’t an exact reflection of his own fucked-up mind.
‘ Three days ago, you posted this photo on your Instagram. It popped on my feed as soon as I opened the application. You appeared right in front of my pupils and tore my heart apart all over again. Took your place in my mind – as if you ever left it.
You looked luminous and glorious, with that soft-looking jacket. I took a glimpse at the key that I knew was hidden in the folds of your shirt. One day that now seems so far away, you took my hand and put it on this key, right above your heart, and you whispered to me that I had made a place for myself alongside this relic of your past, forever engraved in your heart and soul.
Now more than ever, I’m wondering whether or not I am a relic of your past. Something you look back at sometimes, a little glimpse of pain in your eyes, fully knowing that you shouldn’t come back to it. For time may be an abstract concept but it rules the world no matter what; telling us to move on and forwards, and now I suppose I am like this home in Texas that has been long shut.’
Despite his utmost care and best intentions, Henry quickly realised that he failed at hiding the pain from his emails. Pretending that it didn’t exist every day in front of other people was already hard enough. The ugly truth, the one that he once reluctantly admitted to his sister was this: the pain never faded. It kept radiating in his entire body, lightning shooting through his nerves at every passing second while walking around these stupid castles, making appearances at charity events, cutting damn ribbons for yet more new meaningless causes.
Sometimes the ache would recede like the tide after a violent storm. Those were the times when he visited the hospital and laughed with the children, who were always so elated to see him though never as happy as he was to see them. Or a quiet night of reading with Bea in her cosy bedroom, Mr Wobbles sliding through their ankles and David sound asleep on the carpet. Sometimes the sharp laugh of Pez echoing through his ears as they watched some hilarious comedy show before trying to blend in with the crowd of West End to buy an ice cream before going back to Pez’s place.
Poets might say the ocean is unpredictable but Henry knew better: when the tide recedes, it always comes back. He was not new at this, not by any means. When he lost his father at the tender age of eighteen, he was patted on the back in a compassionate way. Half of those hands belonged to anonymous mouths whispering words of reassurance. ‘ The pain will fade after some time.’ He felt angry at this – even more so when those exact same words passed his brother’s lips only a few weeks after the funeral.
Bea understood better. The night of the two year anniversary of their father’s death, they found themselves crying in those gaudy armchairs located on the second floor’s western sitting room. Henry hated those armchairs. The flames were casting a luminous shine in Bea’s reddish hair, her face bathed in the same hot tears that Henry felt stinging his own cheeks. Suddenly, she stood and turned to Henry.
‘This is like a scar,’ she said bluntly, and started to undress.
Henry blinked several times, unsure of where she was going with this, but letting her take her trousers off and come sit on his own armchair’s edge.
‘After dad passed away, I gained and lost weight in a flash. You remember, right? Grandma wanted to kill me because I couldn’t fit in my dresses anymore. She would pinch my love handles whenever I was in her reach, but as soon as I started to lose weight, she got into the habit of making snarky comments about being able to see my ribs.’
Henry repressed the sudden urge to envelop his sister in a hug. From his own experience, he knew that receiving physical affection while laboriously talking about one’s physical struggles could be overwhelming.
‘So…’ Bea continued after taking a long breath, finally locking her eyes on Henry’s, ‘I got stretch marks, obviously.’
She ran her finger up the length of her thigh, and despite the paleness of her complexion, he could see them: white trails shooting through her skin, marbling it in sinuous and unexpected ways.
‘For me, they were the physical reminder of my mourning, of my pain. Of his absence. Angry red at first, erupting like boiling volcanos, deforming my body, reflecting the ugliness inside. Going pale little by little as time passed. Integrating into my skin, blending in. Just like my pain did, Henry. Effusive at first. Foreign and agonising. Scorching hot. And then … becoming part of me. White noise in the background, sometimes still choking me but never hard enough that I think I will die too.’
Her voice broke at the end, a whisper between tears, but her eyes stayed steady and intent. A strand of hair tickled her nose; she didn’t react when he slowly brought his hand to her face to put it behind her left ear.
‘There was never any ugliness inside, Bea.’
Winters came and left, and in the quietness of enclosed rooms, Bea and Henry forged a safe place to take care of their mutual scars. In a way, his sister was right. He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when, but one day he found himself thinking about his father and smiling. Cherishing his memory rather than hurting because of his absence. Things got even better when his mother started to come back to them, slowly but surely.
‘ I know I should not look at you like I still do, Alex. Like every image that I see of you is a new way of discovering you. Like I’m gonna be able to note every single detail: the shine of your lips, the lines of your neck, the delicateness of your fingers, the length of your eyelashes, the tilt of your eyebrows. As if staring at it would help me decipher what is happening inside that beautiful head of yours. Sometimes I convince myself that if I look long enough, I’ll remember the feeling of letting my fingers gliding on your smooth skin, of burying my nose in the crook of your neck, of being on the receiving hand of your authentic, soft smile. Of kissing those red lips that haunt my dreams and follow me in the daylight.’
Alex left a scar that never closed, never faded, never hurt less. It had been a year, two months, and four days.
One year, two months, and four days of thinking about him every day.
One year, two months, and four days of looking out for signs of him, anywhere – on the TV, in the news, in the tabloids, on social media, and, more desperately and delusionally, in his DMs, in his correspondence, in his voicemail. So far, the only place where Henry had found Alex was in his mind, invading every corner like a persistent ivy, climbing his fortified walls like he had been doing since the first day they met.
One year, two months, and four days of trying to convince himself that it was better this way, that this was the best outcome possible. Of crying in the crook of Bea’s neck or in Pez’s couch or in David’s hair and trying to pretend it didn’t happen. Chin up, eye-bags covered with concealer, back straight, smiling for the family, for the camera, for the entire world.
One year, two months, and four days of living with an open wound and replaying that exact same scene in his head.
‘ I think I’ve read all the poems about heartbreak by now. I could spell out the names of all the most desperate lovers of the past five centuries, as well as their stories. You know I’ve always had a thing for words, right? They usually help me make sense of my own world while enabling me to escape to other, more blissful, realities.
But when I was with you, trying to run away from my life felt less important. I was too busy being excited for the next moment when I could see you. The drag of your lips trailing down my chest felt so possible, so palpable. All these words I had been learning since I was a kid made so much sense to me as I was able to use them to please you and praise you. It was like all I was destined to do was to cherish you, use my tongue to make you smile and ascend to the stars.
As months passed, the sound of your voice intimately whispering against my skin dimmed, little by little, until it vanished totally. When I realised that I couldn’t replay it in my mind, I broke down. For a moment, I thought that this break up would kill me. I lost myself. All I wanted was to go to sleep and never wake up. Hopefully trapped in a dream where you and I were still together, entangled in the sheets of your bed, your limbs climbing mine like sturdy ivy.
Words saved me; yet they pain me. Did you ever realise that you only need one letter to go from ‘lovely’ to ‘lonely’?’
Even if sensations tend to fade, there was something that fixed itself to Henry’s memory and stayed there. Just like this stress pimple coming back on his chin every week or so, stubborn both in its regularity and aggressiveness. If he was being honest, he would rather deal with all the stress pimples in the world than this particular thought, coming back to him almost every time he laid his eyes on the First Son of the United States.
Despite their mutual international obligations, they hadn’t met since the summer in Texas and the breakup. All Henry got of him was magazines’ coated paper and campaign videos where he was staged next to his mother; or Vogue interviews starring the ‘White House Trio’ trading jokes that must have been reviewed and approved even before the invite was sent. Even if he knew perfectly well that it happened that way, sometimes he still couldn’t believe that the last time he properly saw Alex was in the lake, standing before him with his bare chest glistening in the moonlight.
He had smiled simply while changing Henry’s life forever and ever. Alex Claremont-Diaz in all his splendour, unbelievably handsome with his damp curls and the defined lines of his shoulders, with his toothy grin and sparkling eyes. Slowly approaching Henry like the most delicious apparition, until his hands found their home in the dip of Henry’s waist, arousing a wave of shivers that rode across his back and crested at the nape of his neck.
And there it was: a drop of water, evidently coming from the lake where Alex had jumped moments before, travelling from the crown of his head to slide languidly to the weighted tip of a curl grazing his forehead, plunging a first time into the void only to be collected on those dark lashes that inhabited all of Henry’s fantasies, now pooling at the corner of his left eye, waiting to be released and to come back to its initial habitat on Alex’s next flutter of lashes.
Henry looked at the drop falling as Alex whispered his love confession.
He never saw it reach the water. Four hundred and twenty-six days later, he had gone through so many theories about what it could mean: did he miss it because his heart dropped in his chest faster than the water achieving its inevitable descent? Did the drop of water never returning to its natural habitat represented a cycle gone wrong, a rip in the fabric of the universe, in Henry’s life?
The next thing he knew, he was turning his back from Alex and vanishing into the darkness of the night.
‘ It’s late now, and night has settled here in London. My body is used to this – the days growing shorter as summer turns into fall. As darkness gains materiality, I find myself dreading the effects of long hours in the dark. It will be my second winter without you and I don’t know if I can bear it. I know the more days fade, the harder it is for me to look away from the dreadful questions invading in my mind.
Oh, Alex, I’ve tried to ask you this in some daydreams that I’ve had:
How much do you hate me for breaking your heart?
Do you ever think about me?
Did you already forget me?
… or are you still in love with me?
As a mirror left unattended, pane covered with dirty smudges, an old thing that one crosses without meaning to but has to be confronted to the sight of, my heart answers.
There are no words to convey how much I loathe myself for walking away from you,
You inhabit my mind, my soul, my breaths at every waking moment,
and then you follow me in my dreams,
Invaded every cell of my body and every pore of my skin long ago and never left.
And I must admit that I never got the courage to really try but
I will never stop loving you.
And yes, your words haunt me. You looked me in the eyes and told me you loved me, like the bravest hero from the legends, laying your heart bare, out in the open, for me to receive and take care of. What you couldn’t know is that I had given you my own heart long before. I just didn’t want to accept it, to put words to it, to let you know that you were taking care of it without even knowing it.
I couldn’t know that you giving me the rarest and purest gift would make me realise that I had made a terrible mistake. Alex, this world isn’t sweet to people like me. You and I are opposites: you are the sun, blazing with your fire, your ardour, your unapologetic thoughts and feelings; I am the moon, lonely, afar, most of the time only partially uncovered, and most of all only illuminated by the distant shine of your light.
Yet I had the presumptuousness to think I had the right to play with fire, fall in love with you while forbidding you to do the same. I know you, Alex. Those months spent becoming familiar with each one of your smiles, from the sassy one to the soft one, with every micro-expression of your face and every way your body language betrays you, haven’t been for nothing. Not only had getting to know you and falling in love with you made me the happiest man on Earth, but it also told me what you must have been thinking when I walked away from you.
My love, I wish I could tell you that I didn’t intend to break your heart. That you are the one I will think about for the rest of my days. That even if you think you paled and failed, none of this was your fault. I sometimes ask myself, do you look into the mirror to remind yourself you’re there?
My Alexander, you never, ever left. I am the one who fled.’
Somewhere in Kensington palace, a clock rang. Henry purposely did not check the time. He didn’t even know if he could, through the heaviness of his eyelids falling on his puffed eyes. After all this time, he thought he could think about Alex without crying. Then why did he find himself opening his computer to compose yet another helpless and pathetic email?
Before passing out from exhaustion, he managed to carefully slide the draft to his special file called Unsent Letters .
Through his haze, he failed to spot the moment he pressed the wrong button. He was already sleeping when he got the notification that the entire file was sent to its unique recipient.