FOLIE A DEUX

I wrote this in March 2013, a particularly hard month for me. I’d just been given TheNakedConvos column, The Alchemist, and it mattered to have a place where I could openly grieve. I feel I can revisit it now, with more mature eyes. I hope it means something to you as it did to me then.

We were idealistic, you and I.

I was disillusioned by the ones I had loved and lost. Girls were the enemy, with their pouts and their artificial curls sewn so tight, it pulled at their skulls and made them mean. They had hurt me, lashing out like rabid house cats, each more vicious than the last. It didn’t matter how good I tried to be to them or how hard I had loved them.

The false tear when they told me it was over; explained us away as a ‘phase’, how quickly they found others to replace me. It had happened so many times that the shock had blunted into a dullness that didn’t hurt as much anymore. I’d learnt to stop looking, giving myself up to fate and organic meetings. Our paths had crossed a few times and you were nice to me, but I was too used to niceties and I wasn’t interested in boys. Then I stumbled on that picture of you, the grimy monochrome one where your head was framed by the car window and the grin that raised your cheeks lit up you up from within. I coveted you, more than I had ever wanted anything so forbidden before. I had friends who were your friends and they told me about you. The whispers flew; you were hard to like, aloof, pretentious, thought yourself better than everyone else. I was scared, I’ll admit. But I tried anyway.

It turned out, all I needed to do was say hi.

You were tired of being misunderstood, of being judged before you were even met. You were done with being vilified for giving everyone what they wanted and being the person they had scripted you to be. You had given up on finding someone with an open mind so when your phone beeped and I was there, willing to look past all I had heard and assumed, it made you smile for the first time in a long while. You shared your dreams with me and made them mine. I promised to make them true and you believed me.

We took the van and fueled it with the money you had saved to buy one of yours. It wasn’t much, and you didn’t mind that the car we were riding in was ‘borrowed’. To you it was a pumpkin chariot, and you made me promise we would leave it behind before the clock struck twelve.

We waited for the quiet of night, pushed the car down the street and out into the open road, our tennis shoes slapping against the concrete as we ran towards freedom. It was such a thrill and we jumped when car headlights flicked on and flashed at us accusingly, staying tense and smiling woodenly through the side window wound halfway down. We heaved in relief when we saw it was only tired, moody mothers coming back from a hen night who stared back at us through the other car’s windshield. We’d packed our things in small knapsacks that tumbled across the threadbare backseat as I swerved across the painted yellow lines on the highway, squealing as the tires keened beneath us. The night air was hot and our clothes clung to our unwashed skin and we laughed because we didn’t know the true cost of tires or premature emancipation.

#

The gas station bathroom reeked. It reeked so badly our eyes watered as I stood guard and watched for the attendant while you stripped to your underwear and waited for water from the yellowed sink to fill your cupped hands. You poured it onto the small towel I used to wipe the grime off your back. I wiped in silence, deliberately avoiding the angry rash that was spreading down your back to your buttocks or the inflamed skin that peeked out from the top of your briefs.

“Is it bad?” You asked. You must have seen me involuntarily shudder.

“No, not really.” I lied.

“I know, It’s already clearing up and it doesn’t hurt as much anymore.” You lied back.

“If only we could afford antibiotics or a proper hotel room, you wouldn’t have to suffer through this.”

The sentence hung in the air, and the silence that followed it was filled with the shame of all our mistakes, and the realization that under the neon lights and the percussion of high heels against pavement, the world here wasn’t all that different from the world we thought we had escaped.

The pain must have been terrible but you never complained. You didn’t bother with your calves, even though the drops from the towel splashed the yellowed water that stank of piss onto your shins. You were skittish about bodily fluids, especially when they belonged to other people. Or at least, you used to be. I didn’t show my disgust, I prided myself in disregarding these things like a man would. I looked at us through the mirror, brown skin filmed over with dirt, hair in tangles, nothing like the carefree boy and the butch girl who’d stolen a car and run off to the big city.

You had promised me everything would be better here, you’d promised so many things. You turned suddenly and kissed me. On the lips. It was a chaste kiss, unexpected, your lower lip between mine, a sigh passed between. I opened my eyes but the moment had passed and you had turned away. You gingerly pulled your shirt down and tried not to wince where it touched your welts, It took all that I was to swallow down my very immediate urge to cry.

#

Drafts of wind rustled the grass and whispered threats of a storm as we huddled inside the van. The parking lot was empty save for us and each solitary gust whooshed around with a grandness that would have awed us if the cold inside the van wasn’t far more powerful than the one outside it. You had made me hold on to the van, even though it had fallen into disrepair, its paint flaky and faded and engine senile; sputtering and spitting out black oily smoke when we drove around looking for a safe spot to spend the night. It was the chariot, all that was left of home.

We were in everything we owned. You had three pairs of vests and a plaid shirt buttoned up to the collar, I was in two tees and ratty jacket. I never thought I’d miss the warm caress of a floor length dress and the frailty it gave me. I’d grown to hate having to be the tough one, the pretend man.

We were huddled in the back of the van, my arms tightly around your torso as the cold taunted us. We couldn’t afford a hotel room anymore, or a bed or clothes. We’d taken every expensive thing we owned to the goodwill store and exchanged them for whatever cash we could get and traded what we couldn’t sell for what we wore. Our knapsacks were empty.

“Anything for one more day here”, you’d said.

#

I have fallen in love with this city, just like you had said I would. I could understand why you never wanted to leave. There was so much wonder here, so much to be seen and experienced. People laughed louder here, the clothes more colorful, the dreams bigger and hope lived on every massive billboard, it lurked in every Technicolor commercial.

“This could be you,” they promised.

You were the eternal optimist, almost religious in how you sought out the selfish good in everything. Your eyes used to skim over the emaciated buskers on every street corner, and you’d turn up the car radio and look away from the beggars that swarmed the passenger window when we stopped at red lights, their saucer eyes bloodshot with desperation.

“That will never be us. My voice will give us the world.” You’d laugh and say when I brought it up after. “We just need some more time.”

Today your voice brought us only enough money to buy a miser’s dinner, even though you were easily the best busker on the street. It was surprisingly easy to pretend I didn’t feel your chest heaving as you sobbed silently. I didn’t know what to say, how to whisper the lies that we hadn’t lost our way. You have always been the one who wove the words and now you’re silent and our ruse is gone.

#

There is something comforting about the peals of the mass bell, even though the modernity of digital clocks and alarms have rendered it obsolete.

The manual effort of pulling down levers that strike the bell’s gong says someone is watching out for you. That absolution is given freely somewhere out there.

I’m here early, it’s a new habit. It gives me time to collect my thoughts and remind myself that not everything is my fault. Especially not your forced incarceration at Mercy House. I remembered that morning well, when I disentangled myself from your arms and nudged you to get up but you lay there, your eyes trained on the bare chassis of the van, unfocused and unseeing. I thought you were having a bad day so I let you be. But the day turned to two and two ballooned into four and before I could grasp what was wrong, your belly had caved in from hunger that you couldn’t be bothered to sate. You cried a lot, and nothing I did would make you any better. I prayed. I cried. I grew angry and slapped you around a few times.

“You’re a fucking man!” I had screamed at you. “Fucking act like one!”

But the cloud that obscured you only grew. There was nowhere else to run to, so I did the only sane thing. I turned the ignition to our sputtering chariot and took us home.

The first time I came to this cathedral, feeling alien with my crew cut in a cocktail dress, I squirmed in my pew at every word the priest said. I had seen the posters of you and I, pinned to the bulletin board, a plea for us to come home scribbled under the portraits of us, smiling out of photocopied posters.

The prodigal had returned home, and every time prayers of thanksgiving were said, guilt bore down on me. We had returned, but not whole. I’d had left a part of you back there, busking for change but never having quite enough for the fare back. You hate me for it. You curse at me when I come to see you. The doctor lets me come only because you don’t show any emotion to anyone else. Its ironic that they think I could be key to a breakthrough with you. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps I should have waited. But a dream so heavy that it broke your back is no dream at all. You have gone beyond anything else, so all I can do is pray.

I made a lot of mistakes.

You made a lot of mistakes.

We made a lot of mistakes.

We grew up, we changed.