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The atmosphere in the barn was oppressive, summer storm on the cusp of breaking, air swollen, laden and heavy, cloying, liquid electricity dancing around them like something alive, like beings onto themselves, shadows stencilled across the dilapidated, derelict walls; murky-pale afternoon sun penetrating through the cracks, casting them in mild relief, something slight, easily dismissed, missed, by eyes not accustomed to look for it.
But he spent his whole life achingly aware of nameless things, of inexpressible desires, of silences so loud they leave you deaf and blind and dumb, leave you empty, vacant.
So, he sees them, all around, here, at what might as well be the end of the world.
The air is pulsing, pulsating in synch with the drumming of his heart – meteoric, hummingbird-like, throbbing, strobe light -bright flashes through the blood.
He feels so alive he might burst from it, might die right here, right now.
There is burning ozone in his nostrils, a metallic heat trailing down his throat, open and bleeding as it is, ravaged by thirty years of swallowing want and need raw, going down as easy as nails or shards of glass.
He’s been living in the rib cage of a dead god since he was fifteen years old. Made a home in his skeletal prison, in his excarnated, de-fleshed bones; bleached and hallow and hollowed out. Buried in, burrowed in, almost parasitic, intent on taking to the point of total unification, total annihilation.
Mutually assured destruction. Beautiful and all-consuming, and finally within reach of his desperate, grasping hands.
There is freedom in offering yourself up for judgment, knowing you will be found wanting. Throat bare, porcelain-white, pure like the driven snow; inviting violation.
A terrible familiarity in the act of surrendering, of letting go.
Voices; outside, reaching him as if from a vast and terrible distance - discordant, growing ever fainter, withering away like whispers on the wind - from another world entirely.
A world he no longer belonged to, never had, not really,
Sees the scene outside like a fading photograph already, discoloured, ravaged by time, marred by phosphorous streaks and frayed at the edges, or torn and crumbled, discarded, forgotten, something you’d find in an attic of a house long abandoned, years from now, sense of melancholy clinging to every sentinel guarding a moment long past, irretrievably lost.
All the fragmentary orphanhood of the world transposed onto this singular insufficient medium, monument to the frail and fickle transience of the infinite, of endings.
Spectres dancing over the abyss of time, at the end of everything, a dance macabre - plainly to see for everyone but themselves. Something close to extinction, resplendent and shinning, like burnished copper caught in the sun.
Luminous one last time.
Sky washed-out, encroaching twilight dimming the world in increments, stars like sprinkled dust over the horizon, barely visible. Sun on the cusp of vanishing, golden hour gone long ago, evening redness settling over a future never come to pass.
Grass trampled, bruised from the festivities, the dancing, the merriment of the guests; a farcical pantomime of the happiest day of his life.
Actors in a play, all of them, every step and gesture and inflection rehearsed to perfection, performed expertly by everyone, hitting their marks wonderfully, easily, each and every time. Secure in the knowledge that they learned their lines, knew them by heart, could feign this careless joy, this airy abandon in their sleep.
All except him.
He was tripping through his own wedding like an unprepared understudy, the day stifling and heavy, ugly, all around, blanketing him in a sense of unreality, a primal wrongness permeating everything, leaving him unsteady and off-kilter, like an ill-fitting suit hastily altered, holes clumsily patched over, seams crooked and showing, shoddy and obvious and a little pathetic.
There was a petulance to the proceedings, a child play-acting at being in love or happy or alive or any number of things he’s never felt in all his life except when entrapped in his brother’s crushing, inexorable orbit.
He knew he would be leaving all of this behind the second he saw Ruben clad all in black, like death personified, drive up that narrow path, knew it longer and farther back than words could say, knew it when the mere idea of him sat heavier - more solid with a gravity and pull all its own - than the tangible reality of the world around him, no matter where he was or how far he ran.
Knew it when he walked down the aisle and couldn’t tear his eyes away from him, every fraction of a second not caught in his gaze a victory wrest from the depths of his heart, knew it when his newly minted husband faded into the background unnoticed, immaterial and negligible, eclipsed entirely by the shadow Ruben cast.
Knew it age fifteen scared and a little awed, standing in the hallway in front of their room, carpet old and worn, scratching his unclad feet, trying not to breath, not to exist, to suspend this moment between heartbeats into infinity, to let it stretch on and on and on.
Having caught a glimpse of the boy beneath the man, not offered willingly, not yet, but a revelation all the same.
Seeing this impenetrable boy-man all loose-limbed and light, so heartbreakingly unguarded and bare. A fragility so singular and fleeting and blinding it almost hurt to look at, like a star going super nova.
It cracked something open in him, something tender and coiling, something he would never recover from.
Knew it days later, same carpet, same room, dust dancing in the rectangles of light cast by the early morning sun, painting irreverent shapes onto his brother’s skin, rendering him softer - things he shouldn’t notice, not when he could still his hands like a brand all over his chest, feels his breath fanning his heated face, was still lost in the blue of his eyes – eyes that had looked back at him with something he couldn’t name, or wasn’t brave enough to, not in that moment, maybe not ever.
It left him feeling unmoored, bereft.
His whole world, transmuted from one breath to the next.
It cost him almost nothing to walk through that door, to let Ruben shut it firmly, let him entomb them both.
He was hyper-aware of everything; the dark, damp earth underfoot, the worms squirming in the soil; the unvoiced truths of years like a yoke, a vice, around his shoulders, his neck; compressing the air, gravity dense and unforgiving - he walks like something already dead.
The stink and rot and decay of things left untended, sickly-sweet and festering; the gracelessness, the indignity of stepping into your grave of your own volition, of welcoming its cold and sweeping embrace, of feeling only relief.
Torrential, cascading relief - taking a breath for the first time in years, tasting crystalline air; sharp, cutting, all brine and salt. The sea.
Purifying, like being cleaved in two; leaving all the rotten, deadened parts of yourself behind. Carrion to feed to the inexhaustible, boundless waves.
Brutalisation of the self as the final form of freedom.
He had been waiting for this all his life, longer maybe, something primordial and searing in his blood, in his very soul; in him before he was even born.
More essential, deeper still than the endless, ceaseless shame; more expansive and corroding. Made him weary of the world before he had ever known it, like he was missing half of what made him a whole person. A negation at the very centre of himself.
He thinks about that on the floor of the barn, feeling the dark, damp earth at the back of his neck, awareness dimming slowly, black bleeding into his vision, insidious and serpentine – creeping.
Strong hands on his face, over his mouth, last breath he would ever take dissipating in his lungs, looks at his brother, through his fading vision, there, on top of him, voice hoarse, eyes wild and leaking tears.
His own hands slick with his brother’s blood. A sick and senseless satisfaction in that, in knowing he had marked him too, in the end.
Looks at him, knowing it will be the last sight he is ever granted, last thing he will ever hear; his brother’s professions of love, voice almost bestial, animal-like.
His brother, to the last.
Thinks about almosts and ill-begotten gains, an existence of lies and half-truths and obfuscation, reaping this end for himself, for them both, all the wretched, blighted years, the barren wasteland they made their lives.
All meaningless. Nothing but a futile struggle. He fought so hard, for so long - can count the truly happy moments of his life on one hand, and all with Ruben, all of them.
Thinks about diverging lives and changing the past, about rewriting you own story; thinks about their childhood bedroom, the sun and the dust, the look in his eyes, thinks about kissing him there.
Thinks about hot summer nights, of furtive glances, of touches that lingered too long, too often, of the senselessness of holding back, of naming it survival when he should have called it death.
Thinks about excess, about hazy alcohol filled evenings, of not-confessions both pretended not to remember, not to have spoken aloud, thinks of courage and swallowing the only truth you have ever known, over and over.
Thinks about Uni, about that kitchen, about saying something, anything, doing the right thing, the wrong thing. About being strong enough to pry him from Alby, of making him look, making him see. Of kissing him there.
Thinks about the vanishing point where horizon and land meet; inseperate
He thinks and thinks and thinks as his world bleeds black.
Thinks about love, and then nothing at all.
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