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Shoulders silently shaking, Kimi sat at the edge of his window ledge. Time seemed to slow as the young boy held his legs to his chest and his head to his knees. Each teardrop was a betrayal of his defiance, a piece of his pain that his traitorous body had failed to keep buried.
To everyone, he was the golden boy. The child they showed their children, told them to look up to. Told them to be like him. He was the embodiment, the epitome of their aspirations, of their hopes and dreams.
But he hated everything about himself.
The way he kept performing, even when there wasn’t an audience to watch.
The way that he looked.
The way his heart felt.
The tears fell thick and fast, like a twisted reflection of his mind, as he tried to make sense of the storm inside of his head. He was drowning, barely able to hold his head above the sea of thoughts as the currents tried to drag him under.
Why am I like this?
It was eating him alive. The way that his heart fluttered around him. He had never felt that around anyone else. It didn’t matter that everyone expected him to settle down with a nice girl when his heart wanted him.
He had tried in vain to make a list, to figure out why he felt this way. To help himself see that he was just in awe of his friend. That the overwhelming sense of affection and adoration could be explained away as the joy of having stability within this era of unstable landings and changing directions.
He was just in awe of his smile. His mahogany eyes. The way he tapped his fingers when he was nervous. His laugh, musical with the jarring lilt towards the end. The way his voice poured like thick honey over toast, warm and comforting, cutting through the fog.
The list didn’t help.
It only seemed to confirm his fears.
He was falling in love with his best friend. The one who was always there for him. For that time he fell off the second floor. For that time he tried to climb the oak in the school yard. He was there for every bad decision, every good moment, like a rock in a rushing river.
He had spent nights crouched at the edge of his bed, eyes raw from sobbing, holding his cross between his trembling fingers and whispering, begging, crying, for something, someone to help him. The metal lay heavy across his chest, from what used to feel like a protective talisman to a shackle preventing him from obtaining what he wanted most. It was being held right outside of his reach, like a log floating into his drift, where he could reach out his fingertips and brush it, but floating away before he could grab it.
His entire life, sitting beside the wooden pews on the seats which were too tall for a kid, and too short for an adult, he had been told that those who liked their own gender were wrong, the enemy. They were to be observed and pitied, but not to be shown empathy for.
His entire life, he had listened, and taken those words to heart, parroting them like a shield, not understanding the weight of the condemnation that he was regurgitating.
All of that had changed when he had met the boy, the one with the long brown hair with the dark brown eyes. He had stumbled into school as a young, naive, ignorant little boy.
From that moment on, there was yet to be a moment when they hadn’t been present in each other’s lives. From Ollie gracing the Antonellis’ roof to check on Kimi after he had broken down after the disaster of his chemistry assessment, to when they had snuck out and driven to the beach to go stargazing after a particularly disastrous argument with Ollie’s parents.
———
Kimi had jumped from the roof-tiles into one of their perfectly-manicured bushes. The sound of the impact was akin to one of the birds that frequented their yard, and yet, he had still felt the dread in his bones. Not one to wait for possibilities, he had ran around the corner, sprinting across the familiar streets to where Ollie was waiting in the driver’s seat of his car.
They had sat together on the hood of his vermillion Chevrolet Cavalier, Ollie’s head laid in Kimi’s lap, enjoying the peace and silence as the whipping salty air had stung their eyes. Only when Ollie had felt the tears soaking through his jeans, had he asked Ollie what he and his parents had been yelling about earlier. During the drive, he had mumbled something about them being unfair, or something along those lines as he had tried to keep the tears from his voice.
Now, with nothing else to focus on, the tension he was carrying was palpable. In the soft moonlight, Kimi could see the lines that they had carved through his face, as he swung his legs onto the hood.
“Please listen to me.”
Ollie had looked devastated to a degree which Kimi had thought was only possible in sonnets. A stubborn tear clung to his jaw as he stared at Kimi’s concerned face.
“Do you think…it’s wrong to be gay?”
Kimi had sat there, wordlessly as he pondered the statement. Every single thing he had ever learned had said ‘yes,’ every single time he had learned about it, he had always been told it was immoral. It was wrong.
And yet, he couldn’t come to a single conclusion why that could’ve been.
What is wrong with loving who you love?
He had thought through this exact scenario countless times. Why was it wrong to not feel the same way as everyone else? What about it had made it immoral? Why should a text be allowed to dictate the lives of those living today?
And yet, he couldn’t seem to allow himself to consider that possibility. Again, he reached for the safe answer, the one branded into him throughout his upbringing.
And yet, gazing into the eyes of another terrified, young boy, he couldn’t fathom hurting him anymore than he was obviously feeling at the time. Saying it aloud would have been like admitting it was true.
So, rather than open the pandora’s box of “what ifs”, he did the obvious thing, and wrapped him up in his arms.
———
It hadn’t been an epiphany. Kimi had never thought about the fact that he had never
viewed the opposite gender as anything more than friends. When his peers were talking about the girls in their class, he hadn’t seen the appeal.
He never had.
It had hurt, to watch Ollie celebrate himself, while he himself was unable to. It was a weird feeling, the envy that he felt, when he saw the way that Ollie had been able to be true to himself, as while Ollie had started to flourish, he was tearing his mind apart from the inside. While Ollie had kept his pride like a shield, Kimi had held it close to his heart like a secret. Logically, he should have felt overjoyed seeing his kindred spirit in the best state that he’d been in for months, yet, he had felt a swooping feeling in his stomach when he realised that he would never be able to live this life.
Trying to keep quiet was slowly killing himself, like leaving a wound to fester. There was no reprieve, just the weight of a realisation weighing him down.
And through it all, Kimi had continued smiling. Continued performing. Even when it hurt to smile and it hurt to pretend everything was fine, he played the part of the golden boy yet again, the light of the halo he had been crowned with hiding the mess that he truly was.
The only person who still seemed to care about Kimi was the one person he couldn’t care about. He was the light of his life, and the bane of his existence. He had been there for Kimi, a constant force among the rush of adolescence.
And yet, he was the one that he needed most, at his most raw and carnal level.
And yet, he was bound by centuries of ideology which he couldn’t seem to rid himself of.
He stared at his hands. In the moonlight, his nails shone with the soft lavender that he insisted on painting on.
“You’ll look cute,” A smile which could have melted the coldest of ice, paired with a throwaway comment, was sent his way, as his eyes sparkled with the excitement and joy of a little kid allowed to use the fine china. The heat of his palm seemed to warm Kimi to his very being, melting his inhibitions as he had gently brushed on layers of the delicate mauve.
Now, those nails were a reminder of what he could never have, as he played with the cold metal rosary that lay squarely over his heart.
Kimi hated it so much.
It was a gilded cage, and yet, even as the door was open, he was reluctant to leave it. It had always been a part of him, and he couldn’t bring himself to abandon something that had carried himself through some of the hardest parts of his life.
However, he still wondered whether it was all worth it, to be trapped, to live with the pressure of something that was fully out of his control.
He looked up at the moon shining above, its pale light highlighting the teardrops of the sky sitting on the pale blades of grass.
Kimi wondered if it too yearned to be the sun, for the allure of being admired as itself, not having to hide behind the clouds, to be so bright that criticisms seemed to dissipate. If it too, yearned for the sun, the possibility of meeting in the same world being held tantalizingly in reach, yet snatched away the moment it had come close enough to feel. If it had felt as tortured as he did, separated forever by a single sky, the compatriots unable to escape the push and pull of the cycles of the universe.
Forever to chase, never to meet.
Forever to yearn, never to have.
Forever engaging in the same routine, of vainly reaching for something that would never be allowed to happen.
He wondered if there would ever be a time where he could live as himself, live as the sun, live without regrets, live without restriction, live without worries.
He wondered if he’d ever leave the cage.
Maybe in another lifetime