A/N: I wrote this little one-shot in celebration of finishing my portfolio for my grad school application! I kind of like to think that it is about the art of revealing yourself, the act of revelation, and how it is essential in knowing someone. Really, it probably is a pretentious piece of rubbish but it wouldn't leave me alone until i wrote it down. Oh, I went against cannon and made Blaine the same age. I also use parentheses and commas quite creatively and liberally. You have been warned. Let me know what you think. As always, thank you for reading.
Disclaimer: I am merely an out of work student attempting to get into grad school while paying student loans. I own nothing but if you could lend me some, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks!
When I was younger, is how he starts his story. It's how he starts all of his stories – when I was younger, I used to chase butterflies and dragonflies in the playground when all of the other boys were playing Cowboys and Indians or other imagined recreations of war. When I was younger, I taught my dad the proper way to have tea parties. Bowties straightened crisp. Pinkies held at stiff attention away from the creamy body of porcelain. These first few words, always uttered in a quiet reverence reserved for those memories that need to be shaped and spilled out into the air, are exhaled in a tender intonation that hovers somewhere between fondness and sad nostalgia (colored, sometimes, with a tinge of resentment or a pinch of happiness). He pauses after the first punctuation mark in order to weigh his words, cultivate the proper diction, and ruminate upon theme and substance (communication is certainly a trickster at the best of times) while his listener is left clinging to the thick air of what used to be caught in the suspense of what has not yet been revealed. Sometimes, when the next series of words do not come easily, he drags his top incisors across the sensitive skin of his bottom lip and starts over. Today is one of those days full of false starts and a voice he has to pitch slightly higher, louder in order to win dominance over the buzzing slush of tires displacing water and the whirr of the air conditioning working overtime to cool the intensity of the sun's rays as they jar their way through the windowed barrier. He pauses again when he feels the broad warmth of a hand pressing a steady pressure from his upper thigh down to his knee and back again; fingers dragging over the raised inner seam as they map their journey in the contours of his jeans. The touch isn't sexual (although those fingers know how to read and manipulate his body better than he does) but steadying grounding him to the sticky presence of leather warming to body heat and the vibrations of moving forward. He inhales dragging humid air through his nasal cavity until his lungs have expanded to full capacity before expelling the used atmosphere in a steady whoosh.
"When I was younger," he starts again for the third time, raspy voice reverberating against the roof and space of their little haven, "my best friend was my shadow."
Hazel eyes investigate his profile noting the tightness around his eyes, the furrow of his brow, the twitching of the muscles in his jaw as his molars grind together, and the way the corners of his mouth tip downwards in contemplation. The boy whom belongs to those eyes sighs – a near silent release of pent up energy – shifting eyes never leaving the planes of his face as he rekindles the calming slide of his hand over the length of his thigh with a gentle squeeze of understanding, of acceptance.
"My shadow would wrap around me in the grey-scale of the moon's light and whisper lullabies of the night sky as tiny celestial bodies are reflected and refracted off of the dust particles that swim loose and lovely before our eyes." He continues after miles have passed in the curves of the road and lines in the map.
Those words remain a ghost in the little car diffusing through the air and settling, filling the empty space around them in the way that revelations always seem to even when they are painted line by line in the stillness between breaths and words. The hand is still there, thumb gliding over the smooth, dense dome of his knee cap before drifting back again, tethering him to the present when it would be so much easier to fall backwards to a point in time where monsters lived in closets and kids left him out of their pretend worlds even before he knew what isolated and alone meant.
"We love you. You are perfect." His parents would murmur, a sleepy epilogue to his bedtime stories, breaths whispering over his forehead in faint goodnight kisses.
The long, lean arms of his shadow, devoid of any light, would wrap around his torso anchoring him against imaginary creatures and the loneliness of the night. He pauses again blinking against the brightness of the sun drenched scenery (it's the kind of startling clarity that only comes after a core soaking rain) blurring past the translucent glass and contemplating how the act of breathing fills the silence, weighty and staticky, with life.
"My dad held my left hand and my shadow held my right hand when they lowered my mother into the earth on a day like today when the sun was beaming and the ground was soaked in renewal." He starts once more, knuckles rigid and white against the black smoothness of the steering wheel.
The boy, not quite eighteen but willing to carry the weight of his stories in the lines on his face and the notches of his spine, shifts in the passenger seat, skin prickling to the hoarse sound of memories as he listens intently to the story falling from the mouth of the boy with cerulean eyes explaining how his mother's presence was reduced to the stickiness of residual tears and leaky words that tumble out of control from strangers' tense mouths and how his hand remained tucked into the sturdy gripe of his shadow's fist throughout the push and pull of people. That same hand tugged him forward through the elongated shadows that peep out of corners, across the squeaky floorboards, and into the stale air of his parent's, his father's, room where his mother's belongings still lay cold and unyielding. His shadow was there, shoulder brushing shoulder, as he watched the shifting sadness in the fissures of his father's face and the steady stream of haunted memories that leaked crystalline and breakable from the corners of his closed eyes and off of the curve of his jaw. It is the sharp, stuttering, strangled breath that is released into the white pillow case and the quick, gasping inhalation that chases them back into the choking quiet of his room. He falls asleep that night with his shadow tracing invisible patterns over the length of his back and his mother's favorite sweater clutched in his tiny hands.
"When I was younger, I used to cry during the scene in Peter Pan where Peter loses his shadow," he continues after he crawls out of the negative spaces in the curves of the hazel-eyed boy's body and back behind the wheel of the car watching long, nimble fingers cap the gas tank and pocket the receipt.
He would cling to his father, face buried in the junction where the shoulder met the neck, as misplaced despair welled liquid and ominous before crashing down the swells of his cheeks, continues the story in time with the acceleration of the car up the unfamiliar ramp until it is skimming across pavement joining those that are heading towards something that resembles the future.
"Your shadow is a part of you. It will never leave you." His father would whisper against the softness of his darkening hair (hair that would eventually match his mother's shade of chestnut) rocking him against the prospect of being left, abandoned once more.
Except those words are too close to those standard issued phrases muttered in the quiet of loss by a pressing sea of black that could not speak above a whisper: She is a part of you. She lives in your heart, in your memories. You can never lose her. So he takes to carrying a thimble with him, tucked securely into the front right pocket of his jeans, just in case they were separated. Reattachment was necessary, of course. The hand is no long pressing humid and heavy against his thigh; instead, fingers, calloused and strong, entangle with his, palms sliding, fitting together in flush familiarity, and thumb setting pace in a rough sweep over his knuckles. The tangled knot of life lines and fingerprints presses weighty and impenetrable into his thigh once more. On rainy days, he would hide in a fortress of blankets until his shadow would come out in the glow of lamp light and create extensive worlds in the contrast between the grinning warmth of the light and the darkness of the shadow miming caricatures on the walls. On sunny days, they would play an endless game of tag tumbling end over end down the gentle slope of a hill on the far side of the park before settling down into the earth and carefully interlinking the yellow-green steams of daisies. Those days always ended with a coronation tea, daisy crowns tipping precariously on their heads, as they watched his father sipping daintily from a tiny porcelain cup with a chip near the handle.
"During those tea parties, I never wondered what it was like to have a friend," he says, the light, airiness of his voice skitters through the loneliness that has become a constant roar vibrating with the tires and the change rattling unkempt in the cup holder.
His stare flicks away from the streaking white dashes and settles briefly on the boy sitting quietly, trying to absorb, to memorize every word that had been uttered into fruition in the small space between them, with shoulders twisting towards the driver side of the car. His thumb continues sweeping back and forth across knuckles learning every ridge and ditch that maps across that particular region of skin even as the words stutter to a stop around them.
The names don't start until middle school, begins the next chapter of the story in a slow slur that rasps at the edge of contemplation, but, at that age, the kids don't know what they are saying. It is a learned behavior. Imitation becomes morality at the sacrifice of ethical reasoning. Hatred is cultivated, not born. The hand incasing his tightens almost imperceptibly as he explains away their actions. The thumb sliding comfort into and under skin by way of rough rhythm tenses, stutters in its relentless pattern, tapping out its own discomfort briefly, before subsiding back into an afterthought. He wasn't angry at first. He cannot be angry at what he doesn't understand. Those words held no weight to pin him down even when he rushed home, feet clomping off mud just outside of the garage, to research what those names meant while his father's back was turned. Google search gives nothing except for definitions. So he climbs the stairs, toes dragging through the thick carpet, before relaxing cross-legged on the downy blue comforter, shadow quiet and spread out on the lumpy terrain of his bed, and ruminates upon the limited knowledge gained by a child restricted internet search. Eleven-year-olds should not have to contemplate how they fit into these boxes provided by imitated words. They should not have to learn themselves in the confines of those words. They should not have to learn how to be defined by those words. But that is what he does because he is only eleven. He doesn't know any better.
"I absorbed those words, – gay, queer, fag, fairy – their laughter, while chasing fireflies, shadow darting in and out of my chaotic path, with my father's mantra (you are perfect, there is nothing wrong with you, I love you) whispering in the back of my mind." He tells the boy who doesn't flinch at his words and gazes at him with wide, unblinking, gold-rimmed eyes.
Those words, the laughter, middle school, changed him yet his shadow remained all arms and legs, body pliant, yielding to the change in surface and the length of day. In middle school, he wishes that he could switch places with his shadow. He wishes that he was the one born in darkness but sees light in everything instead of the blackness that surrounds him.
He grows into his body at the same time he learns to live within the status-quo and their perceived margins of perspective. Elbows knock into door frames, feet trip over gained length, hips ache as they play catch up with his limbs. Paint is scrapped off of his locker as notebook paper signs are pressed sticky to his back in passing.
"Growing up is messy," he says, laughter bubbling out of place but not unwelcomed. The sharpness of it pings a little too loud and a little too watery through the car. "And I didn't accomplish it very gracefully."
The laugh that echoes his is lower, a ragged sound that evaporates almost instantaneously in the thick air. The silence crashes around them even before the remnants of choked laughter has faded out in its entirety. It hurts – this static nature of silence with its ability to press, constrict, leaving you gasping, light-headed hiding from a tsunami of fear. Hiding always hiding. He has lived in silence too long. Silence breeds misery. Silence corrupts. Silence did not keep him safe. His shadow was always silent.
"When I was younger," He refrains once more in the face of silence, "I came out to my dad, with my shadow stretched out along the floor in a one dimensional imitation of myself. I was a sophomore and the words had long since escalated into something more, always something more, leaving hand shaped bruises in their wake."
There is a shudder in the air. The tension of the past snapping into the present as the road blurs and he can see his father's face wavering in the breeze bending trees from left to right.
A slight smile raises the left side of his father's mouth as he stills on the stairs and whispers, "I know. I have always known."
And with that, he understands his father's mantra: You are perfect. There is nothing wrong with you. I love you. Those are words his shadow never whispered to him. There is a tug, soft but adamant, on his hand that is still enfolded in the tangle of fingers. Both hands rise, twists slightly, until dry, chapped lips press insistently to the back of his knuckles and, only then, does the thumb stop its journey across the backs of his knuckles. There is a calming sort of serenity that follows the end of a revelation. Both boys allow themselves to wade through the aftershocks of memories as they ripple around them reverberating off of the cool metal frame of the car. They will dissipate over time but will never entirely disappear. They wouldn't want them to. When the story ends, their hands disentangle and still upon steering wheels and in laps, respectively. Hazel-eyes flecked through with green and rimmed in gold slide away from the lithe silhouette of the boy with cerulean eyes and flick over the smudging landscape as it zooms past.
"When I was younger," he starts, voice coarse with remembering, as his finger trails down the cool glass of the window. He doesn't always start this way. His stories usually expand upon explanations. There was a Sadie Hawkins dance at my school. . . . My dad and I spent a whole summer refurbishing a '59 Chevy – He thought it would make me straight. But this time, he isn't explaining away actions. This time it is his story that needs to be expelled out into the mechanically cool air brushing over them in waves.
"When I was younger, I used to curl up in the space between notes and turn my back upon the world," is how he begins his story facing away from the driver side and staring out into the world that could be so cruel. The boy driving unclasps his hand from the steering wheel and presses into the tense length of thigh hidden beneath denim.
This will not be the last time the boys will stammer their stories into the quietness. No, they will repeat them when the night buzzes hazy suspending their words in the neon glow or during lazy mornings with their chilled fingers wrapping around steaming mugs as the hurt curls up and away from them in the rising steam. They will repeat their stories until they know each other's as well as their own and then store them away in the crevices of their hearts that had once held aching loneliness. Only then will they stop talking about shadows and the silences between notes. Instead, they will think of grand adventures and the moon's lullabies so that their words can slay the demons of their future (gleaming eyes and clinging hands) when they whisper them in good night kisses over darkening downy hair and flushed skin.