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It is days where Per keeps to himself the most that Øystein’s mind wanders into the territories of anxiety. He has not seen him for a full twenty-four hours — it is hardly the longest they’ve gone without seeing, let alone speaking to each other; not anymore.
It is days like this where the urge to call his mother and have her words fix everything overwhelms him. As he faces more and more things that could be solved with any inkling of adult know-how, things like money and solitude and the cold, he finds himself wanting to return to when the worst part of his day was waking up before the ass-crack of dawn to sit in school all day. Even then, he knows, he did at least worry about Jørn — he worried if his mom would kill herself, or if he might get the idea because his life sort of sucked and Øystein’s sort of didn’t.
Still, all the tragedies he fantasized about were infrequent, and they were thought of with the innate knowledge kids have that those things simply don’t happen to the good guys of the story. Of course, not after the story starts; anyone who can read knows that all heroes need a tragic backstory to be decent. And a child does not know that he will one day be the same age his mother is, without all the smarts his mother has to boot, and so he thinks his story is already safely begun.
Truthfully, Øystein doesn’t know when his story begins. Anymore, it feels like it will be soon, which is a worrying notion.
Retrospecting on his life, now, brings him less wistful memories than it does the acute sense of something once-too-often missed; ignored. He thinks of his letters to Per on moving to Norway and how they simplified something so complex — maybe if he had prepared him better, they would never have come to this malignant wall between them and the rest of their lives. Maybe if he had told him Swedish and Norwegian are actually very different, logistically speaking, and that he would struggle for well over a year to understand the signs around town; if he had told him that Jan was hard to like, and that Jørn would make him skittish because he’s just too friendly; if he had told him that he would overwhelm him with presences he didn’t know very quickly, ones who didn’t speak Swedish and barely spoke English the same as he did, so be ready to take that social anxiety for a real test-run ; if he had told him it was cold, and they would be poor.
In his hubris, he thought it was as simple as getting on a train and meeting new people, new people who Per would find likable one way or another and would get on with eventually. That Swedish and Norwegian were very similar, although he couldn’t watch movies in Swedish without subtitles and forget about any of the other linguistic kin Norwegian was supposed to have. The only complexity that arose was how he’d decorate his new room all over again, what he’d leave at home or bring with him — at least on that front, things were simple, although the size of the bag he brought with him should have told Øystein that the ease on the surface only needed skimming to reveal the truth.
He had admired Per’s willingness to go where life took him, then, thought it was spontaneous and exciting of him. Now, he realizes it was a less than mellow rejection of any importance to life or responsibility. Per didn’t — doesn’t — see the purpose of having possessions that belonged to him. After all, he doesn’t really exist. He hasn’t for a long time, not to himself — he died as a kid, and now he haunts another place. That much is simple, if he were asked about it. Ghosts travel all the time, and ghosts react to the living, and ghosts do all the things which Per allows himself to do without self-reprecussion. Øystein wanders if Per’s ghost will travel with him.
Øystein thinks of their first argument. He wasn’t happy that Per spent all day by himself sometimes. It was desperately needful, in his few-years-matured opinion, and Per had told him so. He told him that loneliness was just as needful, in less eloquent words. Selfish was one he had used. Fucking was another, predecessor of selfish. There may have been an asshole in there, too, but most of the details aren’t worth much.
The only ones which are were in the look on his face: brows tightening and then loosening into the lax, empty expression they always had on those days where he kept to his lonesome. His eyes are glassy and he seems to be somewhere else, but nowhere else at the same time. It was the way his grandma’s eyes looked at her open-casket, he would one day recognize with a hearty helping of sourness. Øystein thinks now that there is something to that now near-constant expression which could — if only he knew what exactly it was — tell him something.
Something he needs to know. Something he’s always needed to know.
Whenever his room is too silent — or too loud, for that matter, music blaring loud enough from his rickety old speakers to cover up a murder scene — Øystein feels the dread that is becoming commonplace.
He dreads, again, that he has missed something very important. That Per has looked when he wasn’t paying attention; that he’s plead for help like a hostage of some sort, and Øystein hadn’t understood the code word. Most of these dreadings render Øystein a forgetful, ignorant hero. But a shitty one is a hero nonetheless, one who should have saved the prince and yet didn’t know he was meant to, couldn’t unsheath his sword in time. He’s sure that Per views him more as the crack in a castle wall overgrown in ivy, or maybe one of the critters that climbs it looking for foreign larvae to feed off of.
He has referred to him as parasitic.
Øystein isn’t sure which of them would qualify for that job more, but he knows which of them enjoyed being the host the longest.