On that Sunday morning in April, I really didn't expect to meet someone like Sherlock. The pavement beneath the cracked stone stairs was not sanded well and I was already wobbly on my feet at the time. I was somewhere else in my thoughts, probably fifty miles away in London where I really wanted to be. I had music in my headphones, to create a shield between my fragile mind and the world around me. John Lennon and his gang informed me that all I needed was love. Pfft, I thought. The only thing I needed was a cup of blackberry tea and fresh baked scones at the cafe. The cafe was only twenty three meters away from me, which normally wouldn't be a problem, but today the road was practically an ice skating rink. I was an expert at balancing in my Converse, and I'm not one to brag, but I'm something like Leonardo da Vinci when it comes to the noble art of "Balancing In Converse". But someone disturbed this genius in progress just as I began to make my way down the stairs. An almost emaciated male came twisting down the stone stairs and knocked himself right into me. In a lump of bones, scarves and leg warmers we slid down the slippery ice road. A rusty lamppost outside the town's Tesco managed to stop us from going any further. The boy gave me an angry look. I had destroyed his pirouettes.
"I'm sorry.", I said while I tried to figure out who the red scarf belonged to. I didn't know why I said sorry back then; it just felt like I had destroyed some sort of work in progress. His right foot was stuck in the shoulder strap of my bag and my mp3 was crushed underneath me.
"I'm sorry as well." he said with a quick smile. He had dimples deep enough to commit genocide for. I smiled back at him. I raised myself from the ground only to fall down again-
"Oops!" I exclaimed instinctively.
"Oops." he mimicked.
Then I realized that I probably had sprained my leg given the painful throb now emanating from what felt like the very core of the bone. The boy seemed to reach the same conclusion as he observed the leg in question. We realized facts together. Together. It would soon become an ordinary word for me and Sherlock.
"Are you able to stand up?" he asked.
"What? Right now or in general?" I asked with a light chuckle that I hoped masked the pain I was in. He didn't even bother to answer, instead he simply helped me up. We argued a long time over how he even managed to do that with his bony arms. With love's light wings did I o'er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out, and what love can do that dares love attempt.Even though I had skipped that half of my English course, I knew it was Shakespeare and that it was that declaration of love that had run through my head. You see, I rushed through this story because I'm just too impatient about getting it down on paper. Maybe it was because the thoughts in my head were nagging me to be written down, maybe that's why things went the way they did...
The door closed behind us with a click. Two more clicks and the lights were lit. His house was empty and quiet.
"How's your leg doing?" he asked.
I informed him that it was still throbbing but that I was sure nothing was broken. He nodded in understanding and then proceeded to take his jacket off. I looked up at him and I realized with mild shock that he was a ballet dancer. He had black tights and black legwarmers that made the muscles in his legs look strikingly beautiful. I paused for a moment to thank a god I wasn't even sure existed for creating such a sight.
"What's your name?" I asked as I limped around in the hall, waiting for him to be finished taking off his shoes.
"Sherlock." he answered.
"How old are you?" I asked mostly out of curiosity, but partly just to hear his deep baritone once more.
"20." he replied.
Some quick mental calculation revealed he was 2 years younger than me. It didn't show.
"What's your name then?" he asked.
"John."
The younger man nodded at me and smiled faintly.
We met outside out side the Tesco, slipped together into a lamppost, through the town and through love. It went downhill. There was a pile of mattresses that were rarely used in a closet with the city's smallest windows. It was there I felt his ribs bump against my chest for the first time. The sun didn't even shine through the window. But perhaps it was the sun that made his protruding ribs less prominent. I was never afraid of cutting myself on him. Absolutely not. But sometimes I was so afraid that I would break him into two when we made Love. Love was spelled with a large 'l' in our lexicon. He was always able to make me laugh, Sherlock. He was always sarcastic and sly about things and I guess it rubbed off on me. Even if our town was small for us both, we tried to do the best about the situation. Both Sherlock and I were humans that better fit into bigger cities where you could melt in and be drowned in anonymity. He was the town's only male ballet dancer and I was the only Converse wearing boy, and together we were the town's only homosexuals.
"This town is full of old ladies and tragedy." Sherlock mumbled one day. "And people who do not understand that cobblestones urban light sucks all life out of them, slowly but surely suffocating those of Tesco's broken neon sign. I feel sorry for them."
"Are you sure that we aren't one of them?" I asked. Sherlock looked up at me from his place on my lap, and I could barely discern his ebony curls against my dark skinny jeans.
"Yes, I'm sure." he answered.
He never gave any reason as to why. I would have liked to ask him, I still want to, how he could be so sure that we were different. It was not long ago I had drunk melancholy out of tea cups at the city's only cafe, not long ago I was far too drunk and had fallen home in Smalltown during the middle of the night listening to the sounds of broken dreams and illusions under my shoe soles. The whole time me and Sherlock had been together, I assumed that he had all the answers. And now I know, if I had DNA-analyzed the curly straws of hair he left on my pillow, after we had examined how hot warm skin could be underneath a blanket, I would have only found despair. It is so easy to convince himself that the mysterious sounds that managed to escape through the crack under the bathroom door were just the toilet malfunctioning, flushing on its own. I blame myself now, afterward. When his ribs left deeper and deeper marks on my skin, what did I think? Occasionally I let Sherlock do the thinking part for the both of us, like that time when he asked what I was going to do with my life.
"I don't know, what do you think?" I answered him and his green eyes had burnt the outermost layer of my soul to ashes.
"Are you really going to leave your life in the hands of others?" he has asked me while gripping my arm a little too hard. "John, you must have dreams, otherwise you will be destroyed. Don't you understand that?"
I had thought he was being melodramatic, as dramatic as the dances he danced, but now I understand that he was serious. That I needed to have something to burn for, as he burned for his ballet. But it was a subtle distinction between a healthy fire and an all consuming flame, burn too much, burn too fast and the light will soon go out. Like a supernova in the sky. One of those stars first expands and swallows everything around it only to shrink and then fade away. As the sun will do to us, here on earth one day. As Sherlock did with me since the first time we had met.
"But I have nothing to dream about. I have you and you are reality. Why dream then?" I had objected. It was in the end of May and we laid in the grass opposite to the Tesco. Sherlock looked in my eyes and dug into me as if he were looking for something inside of me.
"John..." he had begun, but he stopped his words just as quickly as he had started.
"I can't be your dream. You have to find something that you want to do."
"But I don't know what I want to be... Does buying a pair of zebra striped Converse count?" I whispered.
Sherlock had laughed at that, his laugh that was like music to my ears, and I let my sunwarm hands play over his stomach. Every rib was like piano keys beneath my fingers, but I stared right into the sun and let myself be blinded.
I wore zebra striped Converse to his funeral; although in the public eye it probably was not seen as appropriate. I guess I just wanted to show him that I wanted to fullfil my dreams now, that I planned to continue to do so. Sherlock was buried in the town cemetery, where he had always lived. The coffin seemed to be so impossibly heavy for holding his small ballet dancer frame. I ignored the fact that he had been so thin, that I had been able to twine my headphone cords around his torso. I had ignored it and come up with excuses. You know, like a housewife does when her husband comes home and smells like Chanel No. 5, though she does not use it, and when she finds red lipstick on his collar. Sherlock's lover was named Anorexia Nervosa, and miss Anorexia was a vengeful, all consuming, bitch. She didn't want to leave my beloved alone, not even when he had decided that it was me that he wanted. She continued to contact him. Everytime he looked at himself in the mirrors, she was there and tempted him to make love with her, again and again. I was so self-centered that I never heard how she whispered to him in the night. It was night now, and behind me, I left the lamp post that both halted and begun mine, and Sherlock's way a few months ago. My mp3 had not worked since, and now I refused to listen to music at all. In an effort to try to materialize my lacking for him, I scribbled Shakespeare-inspired words on the post's speckled metal surface:
Here begins a doomed love of the road to ruin, a pair of lovers as cold stars differ
I wished I could hate the world, I still do, I wished that I could hate a God that I never had believed in, because he took a balletboys life on a thundersick raindrop day in July. But I had never been able to bring forth a hate like that. People always said that they knew their deceased lover would have prefered if they went on with their lives, forgot them. But I don't believe that Sherlock would have wanted that, I believe that Sherlock really wanted to be remembered and dwelled on, at least for a while, otherwise he wouldn't have made such deep wounds in a non-dreaming boys heart. But I want Sherlock to know that I have dreams now, and that Sherlock isn't my dream anymore, but a memory, a dream that was lost a long time ago. Sherlock dreamt too hard, and Sherlock burned up too fast. He said he suffered for his art, but somewhere, the art had become and excuse for suicidal episodes and of self-starvation…when supernovas have gone out, they become black holes. But not Sherlock. No, Sherlock makes pirouettes in the sky.