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Sitting on the rooftop with a cigarette between his lips, his feet dangling dangerously over the edge, Andrew looked at the inside of his arms, the wind blowing furiously with an approaching storm. He had left the armbands on the bedside table, where they usually belonged nowadays, and put on one of Neil's sweatshirts to hide the marks he had. His scars.
He stared at them now, thoughtful. First his left arm, which bore the most precise marks, where his dominant hand could make the deepest and most satisfying lacerations. Those were knives and switchblades and broken glasses. His eyes traced the paths that his fingers did not dare to make. Then his right arm. There, the cuts were shallow, savage. Desperate. Blades and nails and teeth. They represented suppressed screams, extinguished until there was no voice left to utter them. Andrew positioned both arms side by side, so as to compare them. On the left: authority, power, dominance. On the right: pain, fear, anger. The marks told him stories; stories never forgotten, often relived in nightmares. They weren't signs of overcoming, as people liked to preach with their psychological bullshit. For Andrew, they were tests, concrete evidence of how much his body could take before plummeting into an endless abyss. Proof of what happened when the abyss finally swallowed him whole and what he chose to do about it, how he himself became the abyss until he didn't know where one began and the other ended. One arm was the before, the other the after – although sometimes both have happened at the same time.
Taking a drag from his cigarette, Andrew apathetically reflected on how early on he had made this discovery. 7 years old, the first time. The cut was on his right wrist, the scar almost invisible, right on top of the veins visible through pale skin. This was a first cry for help, a childish hope that help would come. He snorted, mocking his own naivety at the time. Help never came. It didn't come at 8, 9, 10. It didn't come during the chokings, it didn't come during the dirty talks and cuss words, it didn't come with all the “pleases”. He remembers the constant thought that drummed at his brain: What if I ceased to exist? The answer was obvious and simple, and his 11-year-old brain was able to make it up effortlessly: You're a Doe. Doe's don't exist. Aaron was the one who interrupted his self-made map of cuts and bruises. Aaron was the one who reminded him of the beauty of an abyss; that it is made of rocks and mountains. Aaron, his anonymous doppelgänger, his existence attested by a real identity, carrying a first and a last name. And at the age of 13, Andrew discovered how dangerous an abyss can truly be when it decides to fight, and the cuts disappeared and he made himself go to the detention center.
The door leading to the roof opened, distracting him. There was only one other person who would follow him up there. Who, like him, would ignore the 'authorized personnel only' sign. Andrew felt Neil settle down next to him, without touching him. He wouldn't. Not when Andrew was like this, sitting so close to the edge that all it took was one sigh for his body to plummet without resistance to the floor.
Andrew finished his cigarette, making the most of the last puff of nicotine in his lungs. His arms were still bare, the scars standing out in the cloudy day’s light. Throwing the cigarette away, he took a piece of paper from his pocket and pressed it into Neil's hand. He kept his gaze on the horizon while Neil studied the image he had been given. Andrew knew what he would see: a boy, sitting on a couch, aged between 9 and 10. Blond hair, fair skin. Brown eyes. Ordinary clothes, a T-shirt and shorts. Bare feet, one of them in a cast, as well as one of his arms. A man and a woman sitting on either side of him. The man had an arm around his shoulders, the woman held his free hand. Neil, Andrew knew, would also see the depth of the boy's eyes, the fatigue. He would see the deep circles under his eyes, the emaciated, haggard-looking skin. He would see the bones protruding from the knee, the pronounced collarbone escaping through the collar of the T-shirt, the jutting cheekbones. He would see how the man's arm rested invasively on the boy, how his hand pressed down, pulling him slightly towards himself, and how the boy was averse to it. He would see how loose the woman's grip was, and the small space between her and the boy, which seemed to stretch for miles. What he wouldn't see were the nights of fear, and pain, and crying, and pleading. He wouldn't see the discomfort of hunger, the exhaustion. He wouldn't see the yearning to belong, and the escape that shortly followed. He would recognize the signs though, Andrew knew. His mind would fill in the holes in the story portraited in that piece of paper with words that Andrew himself had shared in one of their many heartfelt conversations.
Neil held out the photo, hand shaking a little. Instead of taking it, Andrew lit a cigarette. He put the lit end against the corner of the picture and watched the fire spread. Neil rested it on the floor before it burned out completely, while Andrew took a deep drag. He offered Neil the cigarette, and the two of them sat in silence for a few more minutes, sharing the same nicotine.
"Bee received this photo from Pig Higgins a few months ago and gave it to me yesterday. She said I should burn it. That the past belonged to the past, and something about renewal by fire or some therapeutic crap like that", said Andrew, breaking the heavy silence. Neil smiled, despite the circumstances, because he knew that Andrew recited Bee's words exactly as she had said them.
"Bee knows what she's talking about. Your words, not mine", Neil reiterated.
Andrew finally looked at him. Neil, still sweaty from his morning run, stared openly at him with a fiery expression, slightly worried. He lowered his burning eyes to Andrew's left hand, where a black tattoo circled his ring finger, the words “yes or no?” written in fancy letters. Andrew offered his right hand, palm up, with a permission long gained, and Neil intertwined their fingers in a comforting squeeze, his left ring finger marked with words identical to Andrew's own.
Neil never demanded an explanation, but he had earned the right to one a long time ago. Andrew took a deep breath, looking steadily at that tattoo, infinitely more significant than a little piece of metal, and started to speak, but was interrupted before he could even put a solid word through.
"You don't have to tell me anything. I understand."
Of course Neil understood. He had burned his mother's body until her ashes mixed with sand. Neil, whose childhood had also been haunted by violence, fear and pain, although from a different kind. Neil, his husband, who had spent countless sleepless nights with him, because of the nightly horrors that still haunted them both, that perhaps would never abandon them. Neil, genuine and real, always understood.
"Ice cream. Lots of ice cream. And sweets. Extremely high-calorie sweets with exorbitant amounts of sugar," Andrew determined, without emotion. "Me and you on the couch, a shitty horror movie, the cats annoying us. Got it?" he finished, knowing perfectly well that the choice was Neil's, who smiled at him affectionately and squeezed his hand, taking him along as he got up.
“Which flavor, Drew?”, asked Neil, matter-of-factly, walking them away from the edge as the first drops of rain began to fall.
Andrew struggled daily with his intrusive melancholy telling him how undeserving a person like him was of such authentic affection, and though he got better with time, some days were particularly bad. However, in those precious moments when Neil looked at him as if he were the sun to which Neil devotedly orbited, Andrew felt the most deserving human in the world, and the analogies about abysses completely went away, gone with the storm.