About S, well, I love him and all I wish for him is happiness. If I could make it so that he will always feel loved and cared for, for the rest of his life, then I would do that in a heartbeat. I've never felt so much love for someone not directly blood-related to me, and everytime I see him it's as if these feelings only deepen, although I've known him for over seven years now.
And these days, getting to breathe in the smell of his shampoo, to embrace him—well, these are the things that keep me from ending it, as it crosses my mind every time I walk across the highway overpass. Sometimes I just want to stand in the middle and watch the cars go by under me. To the left, I see the white headlights of oncoming cars, and to the right, I see the red rearlights of cars receding from view, a toy schematic of the redshift and blueshift demonstrated by the stars of our universe. But I won't do it. Rest assured I won't do it.
He's so important to me. I want to spend the rest of my life with him. (As I write this admission, my eyes momentarily warm with tears.) I almost wish my feelings for him weren't so intense, still; it's almost enough to make me wish, even for a split second, that we had never met.
After working inefficiently at a short writing assignment I decided to go to the campus gardens. There, I reread a chapter of the book we had been assigned to read for one of my classes, The Rings of Saturn, which I've mentioned before in a previous entry. I read a sentence about ducks as I heard the ducks across the lake quack. This correspondence soothed me, but I still felt, on the deepest level, to be absolutely shattered and destroyed, for no single definite reason, a feeling which was unmoved even when I was sitting on another bench by the lake, this time with S.
He put his head on my shoulder. I put my arm around his shoulder. Bees would not stop alighting on his hair. I stared at the branches hanging above us and at the unceasing movement of the ripples on the surface of the lake. From time to time the sun broke through the clouds, rendering the air golden.
As we approach, inexorably, the end of the semester together, I think about our inevitable parting of ways, and my heart is put through a wringer. If possible, I sink deeper into that feeling of being destroyed, shattered, a total bombed-out grey & sterile wasteland.
It seems that I can't experience happiness with S without its dark twin, a sort of premature grief.
Saturday well after sunset, he texted me. I was late in responding; I had been in the shower. I said sorry; he did not respond. He wrote, it's cold out. I checked the weather, it said twenty degrees. Why would he lie to me, I thought. My hair dripped onto my sweater.
Until then I never understood parents, whose concern for their children's safety sometimes seamlessly transitions into an overwhelming rage. It is like walking on a Möbius strip all the way around to find your orientation suddenly reversed, though locally it is impossible to tell when and how your worriedness becomes frustration, or vice-versa.
I suppose I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that emotions aren't discrete absolutes, which is just one example out of my many childish failings. What [the fuck] are you doing here,
I elided the cuss word, I was breathless with relief, all my anger disappeared. And I'm not saying it went somewhere else only to eventually return—I'm saying it was annihilated, just gone, as if I'd never felt it.
The funny thing is that it really did become cold. But for a while we sat in the dark, shivering. I could not tell whether he was crying or shivering or both. There were a couple square centimetres of warmth where our arms and legs were pressed together in the one chair; not enough, but I suppose neither of us wanted to move.
I'm going to say something that's going to be hard to hear.
Well, he was right about that. I'm so used to always choosing the easiest possible thing to say. And I never realised I was always going down the path of least resistance. I never realised how difficult it is to say anything of real consequence.
Maybe twenty yards away, a hapless freshman braced himself against a sapling and retched into the dirt. He coughed, and coughed, and coughed, but nothing came out.
For a crazy moment I wanted to take them both in my arms, bile and mucus and all, just to say:
EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT,
since these days, it's the only thing I can bear to believe in.