Title: What My Love, Sisyphus?

Author: Syberina5

Word Count: 2800ish: Complete

Fandom: Queer as Folk

Rating: PG-13

Summary: Sisyphus was kind of an ass. Like Brian. He was full of trickery, very inhospitable, and thought he was a god. Like Brian.

Warnings: Art, mythology, research.

Disclosure: I'm Federal Agent Jack Bauer and if I want to steal your shit I will. If you try to stop me you will regret it. Punk.

Author's Notes: An Artsy!Justin short and standalone in the Block of Wood 'Verse. Included are some links to some of the references in the literary history of Sisyphus.

There is so much religion in art. People worship it, sure, but what I mean is one of the main venues for art—amazing art for millennia—is in places of worship, with themes from that religion, stories, prophecies. The pyramids were religious, the Parthenon. Look at the David, an enormous statue that is a young boy about to fell an enormous man. As a work of art it's a miracle, as a piece of religion it is an inspiration. And if he weren't marble—and had a bigger dick—I'd totally fuck him.

In art school we studied color theory, studied art history and still-life drawing and sculpture.

We also studied world religion. You can't understand the magnificence of tempera Virgin Enthroned altarpieces without some background on what the symbolism is. It wasn't just old world Catholicism we studied, or the Greco-Roman panoply of gods and goddesses. We studied Buddhist, Hindi, Islamic, and folk religions in Africa, Asia, India, Europe and the Americas. It was amazing and there were so many stories and symbols that interwove and overlapped continents and cultures separated by hundreds of years and thousands of ocean miles.

And little things about them pricked my attention and set my mind whirling off in a direction I didn't necessarily want it to be in.

Like with Sisyphus [.org/wiki/Sisyphus].

Sisyphus was kind of an ass. Like Brian. He was full of trickery, very inhospitable, and thought he was a god. Like Brian.

That's where it all started, really.

Ok, that's not where it all started. It all started under a streetlamp late one night on Liberty Avenue blah blah fucking blabity blah.

That's where the Sisyphus bit started. It's a miniature obsession really. And like all my obsessions, it lead straight to Brian.

Only when it started I was trying to run away from him. So it was easy to call Brian and Sisyphus fucking assholes and move on.

At least it should have been.

I mean Sisyphus told his wife that his dying wish was that she leave his dead, naked body in the middle of the market place. So she did. But it was a fucking test, but she didn't know it was a fucking test. So he was dead and pissed off as hell and he tricked this twat goddess into letting him go back to earth so he could punish his apparently loyal wife. What a cunt, right?

So fuck Sisyphus and fuck Brian Fucking Kinney. Both assholes in the extreme.

Then we got these assignments. We had to do modern depictions of one of the characters we'd been studying and since I'd found myself drawing pictures of Brian pushing rocks up a hill I figured I could churn one out no problem.

Then my professor said we had to do research on the character and gave me a list of references to check into and said I had to find three more of my own. What a cunt, right?

I didn't want to do it. Something in me knew that I would only find more pieces of Brian in Sisyphus the Asshole and really I had enough pieces of Brian scattered around my life, my heart, my skin. Fuck. There were times I could still feel his hand in my hair or holding mine, him walking beside me. And I'd look up, smiling, wanting. He wouldn't be there. Nothing would. I'd be standing over the sink in the diner alone. Walking across campus with Ethan and one of his friends. I'd look down at the hand where I could feel him. I could feel his flesh against mine even as I looked at it hanging there, empty. Even as I wiggled the fingers the sensation remained like his hand was there. And my heart would warm and my eyes, which had been wide with disbelief, would drift shut so I could just feel it. Him standing beside me, his hand in my hair, in mine. The phantom limb.

Sometimes I'd stop abruptly and duck into a café or a side street like I was trying to lose a stalker, or run my hands through my hair to wipe that feeling away. And once I shoved my hand inside Ethan's, squeezed his so he would squeeze back, erase the feeling of Brian's skin. When it worked I felt lonely and when it didn't I felt trapped. Betrayed by my own fucking body. As if losing control of my hand wasn't bad enough, now it was going numb. Only not numb.

It was frustrating as shit. Like when you're constipated and you just can't poo. You want to, you really do, but you just can't fucking shit. When it built up inside I would vent all over pages of my sketchbook twisting Brian's features into a wrinkled grimace as he grunted and hauled his gargantuan-sized, granite balls up an infinite hill to nowhere.

But I had to do the project; the professor wasn't going to let me change it to something more innocuous to me like Anansi the Spider or Týr.

I went to the library with the list the professor gave me and a damn fine grudge against the project, my professor, Cunty Sisyphus, and God Kinney.

It was Ovid [.] who first changed my mind, got me interested in what other people saw in this über-jerk. Really, Sisyphus—bad ass, thinks he's hotter than Zeus, Sisyphus—taking a time out to sit on his little rock and be moved by plight and love of others? Pffft. You must be mistaking him for his not-so-evil twin Sissy-Fuss.

Because Brian would never do that.

Unless it were about Gus.

And then he'd pick up the bolder and hurl it at whoever made Gus' life suck.

Which only made me think of that look on Brian's face when he forgot anybody else was in the room and it was just him and his son, the look when he thought he was bad for Gus, that anybody, even Melanie, had to be better.

So I decided it was Ovid who was full of shit.

And then I was reading Camus [.] and I knew I was right to discount Ovid. And then I wasn't sure.

I was sure Brian had read Camus in the early days of constructing his Philosophy of Fucking—Fucking You, Fucking Off, Fucking Up In Style Since 1990 At Least. It just reeked Brian Fucking Kinney.

Camus thought that man was in an "absurd condition," that it was born out of the vain trust in divine faith, in meaning, in tomorrow and all that lesbian crap because all it does is drag us closer to death day by day. To deny the certainty of death—the ultimate enemy—is absurd and what man does everyday with shit like airbags and church and children and eating balanced meals. So wave goodbye to hope for the future because it doesn't exist, say hasta luego to the meaning of life because there isn't one and without them there are no rules, no set of values you have to adhere to. "What counts is not the best living but the most living." To accept this—the absurdity of life—has three consequences: revolt, freedom, and passion.

Brian's like the fucking poster child and Sisyphus is his more violent, death-defying, bloody, grasping, incestuous, women-fucking ancestor.

And wouldn't you know it, Sisyphus is Camus' little superhero of the absurd. His own personal version of Rage. He even says that when Sisyphus has just finished rolling the dumb rock up the hill—again, since he is doomed to never do anything else—and has a moment to pause to watch it roll down again that Sisyphus has a tragically conscious moment which can only be overcome with scorn. Indeed, "[t]here is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn."

Snort of disgust, right?

But here's where it got wonky for me: by recognizing the fucking absurdity of his life Sisyphus was finding contentment and "[o]ne must imagine Sisyphus happy."

It was total bullshit. Just like Ovid. Sisyphus wasn't happy. I mean Brian wasn't happy when he was telling you what shit life was, when he was beating himself up over letting Gus go, over what happened on prom night. He may have been surmounting it with scorn and accepting it but he wasn't happy. Was he?

Yeah, of course he was happy when he was getting off. He was happy when he was inside me. He was happy when any available square inch of our flesh was pressed together. Wasn't he?

But then I was with Ethan and I thought, fuck, I was wrong. Maybe he was happy, sickly, twistedly happy to hurt me when he told me how the world really worked. How our relationship, or the lack of it, really worked. He did it often enough and with enough scorn, maybe it did make him happy.

And I sit here, staring at the ancient piece I did of Brian cum Sisyphus standing at the top of a hill, sweaty and grimy from laboring, ankles straining against the chains that lead away—down to the foot of the hill where the bolder lies, waiting for him and his shoulder—a burning cigarette between his lips, his fingers hovering around it as his cheeks hollow for the first deep drag. Sisyphus on a Cigarette Break. I got an A.

But the image always nagged me, even as Brian and I got back together, moved on. It changed.

I started thinking about what the bolder was, what it was Sisyphus was trying to move, what he could never quite get away from. Here I was stuck. If there's one thing college teaches you other than how to take an exam hung-over, it's how to research.

I waded through Jungian theory, Freudian mind bends, and some Frenchman's crap but they weren't looking as Sisyphus the man, the character. They were looking at Sisyphus as a stand in for the human condition. Like Camus did.

And some of it helped because they seemed to be thinking about the fucking rock too. The Sisyphean task.

One doctor of god knows what called it the mythological embodiment of a mid-life crisis [.ch/3856305270_?osCsid=dee8d9e2837d8171a133897f8110625b], the realization that you have spent your life repeatedly performing an ultimately pointless task that you will continue to perform pointlessly until the day you die—like taking out the trash.

But it all got very…Oh, the humanity. And I didn't really give a shit about how it wove Brian into the overwhelming fabric of the collective subconscious of all mankind, the universal fear, death, and pointlessness of life drudgery and wah wah wah wah wah.

I guess you could say it just kind of stewed there, in my brain, without me paying it much attention. If you don't count the random doodles I did while I was on the phone with my mother or Daphne talking about the latest Brian based deluge of drama.

And then one day I watched Brian standing, fighting himself in that way he does. Fighting how much he loves me, his son, his family. And trying to look like the only reason he gives a fuck is because you're boring him with your tale of woe. I got it.

The Sisyphean plight. Brian's stone.

God, every inch of my insides seized. My lungs were suddenly an air free zone. And, if I wasn't very very fucking still, I was going to cry.

My Sisyphus, asshole or not, had been pushing the same giant rock up a hill all his life only to watch it pour back down just when he thought he was done. Only it wasn't stone—contrary to popular belief—it was a live, wet, beating heart.

His heart.

Brian's heart.

He couldn't get it far enough away from himself, from the people around him to make him impenetrable. He'd think he was almost there, near the top of the hill, but then something would happen. Somebody would come along and force him to use it, to need it, to feel. And the damn thing would slip, go careening carelessly down to the bottom where any awful thing could happen to it.

Where awful things did happen. Things like falling in love with me. Things like the bashing and Ethan and Gus. Michael and Vic and Debbie. Jack and Joanie.

After that I pulled out some of my old books, reread all the old bits of Sisyphus lore I'd stumbled across over the years. It just seemed to fit. Ok, no, Brian didn't bang his niece and steal her thrown, he doesn't murder tourists—even though he wants to—but Camus' tragic hero, an archetype for humanity, was the love of my life (I know, sue me for a Queen).

As time went by I saw him shoving that beautiful rock back up that fucking hill less and less. Sometimes I'd even think the chains must be gone, the fear that drove him to shoulder the boulder burden. They're not. He still does it but now he takes his cigarette breaks with me—mostly. We spread out in the grass at the foot of the hill, lean up against his other massive organ, and rest. Together.

God, I could use a cigarette.

Here I am, looking at it laying among other pieces I've done over the years of Sisyphus—as his Brian incarnation, as no one, as everyone; for a while I even just drew the rock—wondering if he'll ever really let me take on that load.

I think of our family, growing so much in so many ways, changing for better or worse, and how much we all treasure that bleeding stone. Maybe he has given it to all of us.

I look at the picture again and see the anger I felt when I made it, the loneliness and desperation, the fucking love.

I never showed him any of the Sisyphus series—which is really what it's become over the years; my Lovely Assistant told me, standing in the warehouse, crates of my old work cracked open and laid out to be photographed, catalogued, when she was archiving all these old bits years ago, that when I'm dead and rotting away in some mausoleum art critics and curators are going to call it my Sisyphic Period and snorted when I told her that wasn't a word—thinking of that just makes this harder, more immediate. Makes the thing on my chest heavier.

Anyway.

It bothers me now that I never have.

Sometimes it was deliberate. When we were just back together and Cigarette Break was up in the school gallery I never told him or any of our lose lipped mutual friends. I didn't want him to see it. I didn't want him to recognize the emotions in it, to think of the timing. We both wanted to put that time behind us. To find footing as Us again.

Sometimes it wasn't intentional at all. When I was in New York he didn't see all the little things I did that never made it into a show. Things that were just exercises, doodles in a way, studies or ideas of things I wanted to do at some point.

Never came up.

And now it feels like a thing. It feels like if he finds out I've had this obsession with him and large rocks for years and hidden it there will be a QueenOut to end all QueenOuts. Just another day in the Taylor-Kinney household really but… Avoidable?

I look at a sketch of him, old, disgruntled, alone, two enormous, boulder-like testicles dragging in the grass.

Telling him could go badly.

But with the new piece, the one I've just started, the one he'll see in my studio for months, the one that will show in galleries but never sell—No, sorry Mr. Norimoto, not even for the figure with six zeroes you just wrote down—the one that will someday hang in a museum somewhere, the one I have to do or I'll never stop feeling this way—and I can't keep feeling this miserable, depressing weight on my chest forever, I just can't—he's going to want to talk about it. I know, Brian Kinney is going to want to talk about it… It's a fucked up world.

And he's not the only one. Art critics will be up my ass wanting to get some little slice of this painting. And, while the real life aspects of it are none of their fucking business, I'm going to have to play with them. It's going to come out that I've had a thing for Sisyphus for years. Somebody might even dig out Cigarette Break at PIFA.

And then I'll be well and truly fucked, but not by Brian.

Which'll just suck.

The down side of marriage, commitment, caring about people in general, is this stuff.