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Sometimes all Wille can feel is a scream behind his teeth and the collar of his uniform shirt constricting further– further– further–
He feels nothing but pressure and he cannot, cannot let it show on his face. He rubs the skin on his chest and picks at his cuticles and nothing helps, nothing–
He told Erik that he wouldn't survive three years at Hillerska and here he is not even done with his first and Erik is gone, Simon won't look at him, and his mother– his mother–
He gets nothing. He gets messages left on his phone from staff. He gets a hello from his father, check-ins from Mailin. He gets nothing from his mother.
* * *
The lake.
The snowglobe.
The rifle.
* * *
The lake is first: it is always there at Hillerska.
When he rows on the lake his oars dip beneath the surface just enough to propel the boat along, and all he is is a cog in a machine, one of six other boys moving the boat, moving through–
Still waters and reeds and deep, dark– there are places on the lake where he could go, where no one would find him, not for hours or days or–
Or.
His lungs would scream and he'd choke on the water but it might be peaceful. It might let him rest. He could slip under the still surface and not be seen again until he floated to the surface, bloated and rotting and–
He gags, brings up nothing but bile. Erik had a closed casket funeral after the car crash; he'd have one, too, if he died in the lake. Maybe he'd be unrecognizable, blue and quiet with open eyes staring at the sky, all the acne scars on his cheeks pitted further in.
He swims in the lake. He wades out through the reeds. The mud sucks at his feet and he thinks about it, considers it, lets his knees start to buckle– pushes his arms forward and out, takes three strokes and buoys himself up. Floats idly on his back, staring at the clouds and the blue sky, stretches his arms out and arches his back just enough to stay level.
Wille breathes with his face above the water, and doesn't drown.
* * *
He goes to class. He reads too much into Karin Boye's story, thinks about how she killed herself afterwards. He eats dinner, he goes to rowing practice, he tries to sleep.
He sits in a room once a week with the school psychologist and doesn't say anything, even though he thinks sometimes maybe it would help. Maybe he'd listen, if Wille screamed.
Wille thinks he'd listen, that he'd sympathize and tell Wille that– that he's depressed (obviously) and anxious (has Wille ever not been)-- and that Wille is still the goddamn crown prince of Sweden. It doesn't matter if he's depressed. It doesn't matter if he's anxious. It doesn't matter that he can't talk to his mother or his father. It doesn't matter that he just wants to disappear into a crowd and come out the other side as someone no one in the country will recognize, someone who can make a choice even if it's a bad one because–
Because.
But he goes to class. He goes to rowing practice. He tries to sleep.
He makes no choices.
* * *
The snow globe is next: it had been Erik's, and it broke.
It broke with his stubbornness and his will to stay, to choose something for once, but in the end all it got him was another six months at Hillerska surrounded by people who love him (Simon, Felice, Erik's ghost).
It broke, and his future broke with it. There's nothing glamorous about being a spare, but it had let him think: he could be something beyond what he was born into. Nothing good, really, nothing exciting, but he could run a foundation or get really into– into something.
And now here at the end of his first year everyone's thinking about the future and what their careers might be– and yeah, everyone's parents have an idea of what that future will be, what kind of CEO or doctor or politician their kid is going to grow up to be, but no one's is like his. No one else is staring up at the blade of a very slow guillotine that will choke him before it beheads him.
It doesn't matter what he wants to be, so he's never thought about it. He joined rowing because of August. He thinks about joining choir because of Simon. There were things he used to do as a child– piano, riding– but they mattered less and less as he grew up because all he was ever going to be was a prince, second in line, cutting ribbons and maybe running some sort of charitable foundation.
There has never been a reason to choose anything in his entire life. So he hasn't even thought about it, because the one time he had tried (Simon), the one time he had wanted something for himself–
There are pieces of the snowglobe on his desk, sharp glass that he runs his finger over, and he thinks: I could do it.
He could draw a piece of glass down his wrists, let his warmth spill out into the cold of Hillerska, even find somewhere like one of the caves down below the school where he and Simon had hidden after that first party. Let himself go in a place where he'd been happy, even if it had been a temporary, fleeting, momentary joy. It was a joy that shook like his shoulders do now, like his hands do all the time.
He could take the glass out into the forest and lie down between the trees. He thinks about starting small, pressing a red line into the skin of his thighs where no one would see it, not unless he wanted them to. For three days he carries a sliver of glass in his coat pocket, wrapped in one of the napkins from breakfast, until it becomes so heavy that he puts it back on his desk. He finds pieces of glitter in that pocket for a week afterwards, and it clings to his fingers.
He would be even paler, after. Someone would find him– Mailin, probably, but maybe Felice or August or, god forbid, Simon. He could have an open funeral, if he died like this, with the glass. He can almost imagine his dead face, still and unable to make anyone really look.
Eventually, he throws the pieces of the snow globe away.
* * *
And then: the rifle.
If the barrel had been shorter he would have turned it on himself instead of aiming it square at August; anger and despair swirled together in his head and chest and he screamed, shot into the sky, left August trembling and weeping in a field.
And he left the gun.
And he left the gun.
And he–
* * *
[he thinks about saying, sometimes, to his therapist: i think i am going to kill myself. i don't know how i can stop it.
instead he bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes blood.]
* * *
He is trapped. There are walls around him that won't let him go; there is no path out.
No one looks at him and sees anything beyond the office, the job, the family. Simon tries and Felice tries and they are the only ones who Wille thinks would still be at his side if he was no one at all. But even they don't really know him because he barely knows himself.
[he is sixteen; he does not need to know himself yet. but he needs to know that there will be a wille who is an adult and a wille who loves– who loves midnight snacks and loud music and watching movies with his boyfriend. with his husband. wille-who-is-an-adult doesn't have all the pieces of himself figured out and he still fights with his mom sometimes but he lives in a normal house (maybe with Mailin watchful and still outside) and he goes grocery shopping and maybe even takes the bus sometimes. maybe wille-who-is-an-adult is learning spanish. maybe he has a dog. maybe wille-who-is-an-adult grows bushes in front of his windows but leaves the curtains open for the dawn light.]
* * *
And yet.
He clings to life with both hands, like he clings to Simon after the field and August and Sara and the gun.
He screams at his mother like he screams to himself, so that maybe, maybe she will finally see him instead of Erik's poorly-fitting shadow. There is something wrong with her and there must be something wrong with him, too, because she can't look at him and they can barely be in the same room with each other. He is her son and he is her only son, now, so why can't she– why can't she see him.
It's better with his dad, but barely, because his dad is there for his mom first, and his dad always looks at his mom first and never, never at Wille first.
Sometimes all Wille has to grab hold of is his anger (and is it any wonder that he fights, that he thought about the lake and the snowglobe and the rifle, that he sees his face, pale and small and drawn in the multitudinous mirrors of the palace and wishes that he could just disappear), and so it erupts out of him like bile and fire.
All he wants to scream is love me love me love me but even more he wants to scream see me.
But his mom only ever looks away.
* * *
He is trapped but he is always looking for an escape, and that's why. That's why he can swim in the lake and put the glass back on his desk and leave the rifle in the field and let Felice hug him and hope, hope that Simon will smile at him and say–
* * *
And when he can finally draw breath, after Hillerske and after August and after– after Simon says that he doesn't want the monarchy but he still wants Wille–
He leaves the lake behind at Hillerska. He tips the broken parts of the snowglobe into the trash. He leaves the rifle in the field with August.
After, he lets go, and he walks into the sun.
* * *
Of course it hurts when buds burst.
Otherwise why would spring hesitate?
Why would all our fervent longing
be bound in the frozen bitter haze?
The bud was the casing all winter.
What is this new thing, which consumes and bursts?
Of course it hurts when buds burst,
pain for that which grows
and for that which envelops.
Karin Boye, "Of Course it Hurts," trans. Jenny Nunn