Discovering Inspiration

by Make A Choice. Shine On

Something about the lone boy on the edge of campus was unlike anything I had ever seen, in movies or imagination of otherwise. I spent that lunch period watching a ghost, or so he seemed to me. I fell in love.

And these fingertips
Will never run through your skin
And those bright blue eyes
Can only meet mine across the room
Filled with people that are less important than you

'Cause you love, love, love
When you know I can't love
You love, love, love
When you know I can't love
You love, love, love
When you know I can't love you

- Of Monsters and Men

It began on the twenty-third of November, Fifth Form. I was in lunch detention, caught up in the confusion of a class prank and too apathetic to stand up for my innocence. Outside the window was a lone boy in a coat that was much too big for him, hands in his pockets, lingering on the edge of campus as if ready to leave it forever, as if his oversized coat would suddenly billow out and transform into a pair of wings, and he would take flight and never be seen by any of us again. I could only see so much through the dusty windows, and lunch only lasted for so long, but I could see, or perhaps I imagined, that he had lonely eyes. Detached but not vacant, as if he were gazing through some invisible tunnel at a world beyond secondary school that no one else could see, a world better than Earth, a place where everything was to his liking. I wanted to see that world; even more, I wanted to be a part of it. Something about the lone boy on the edge of campus was unlike anything I had ever seen, in movies or imagination of otherwise. I spent that lunch period watching a ghost, or so he seemed to me. I fell in love.

I saw him once after that, at graduation, and then I didn't see him for three years. Sometimes I thought about the world past the invisible tunnel. I thought about that world more than I thought about its creator, because for me he only existed in a single frame - a diluted image of a lone boy on the edge of campus which I could never erase from my mind, even when I forgot milestone family memories and the faces of old friends. Over time the image lost its appeal, but the world beyond the invisible tunnel never did, because I imagined it differently every time; a fortress surrounded by water, a city made of ice in the midst of a blizzard, a never-ending office, a secondary school with a single student, and this student was the architect of every different version of the world. He was an all-powerful genius with one fatal flaw: he was alone.

Three years passed and it was November again. I found myself in a university art class sketching a version of his world. Someone behind me dropped a pencil. I'm not sure why I turned around; perhaps I was just anxious that day, but I like to think it was meant to be. When the student behind me appeared from beneath his table, pencil in hand, I saw in his lonely blue eyes the world that was already portrayed on my paper, but I had it all wrong. I turned back around and crumpled the fraudulent landscape in my hands, but not before its original architect stole a glance at it.

"Why'd you do that? It looked nice," he said, and his voice was all that I had imagined it would be and a complete disappointment at the same time, perhaps because I had always assumed he didn't have a voice.

"It wasn't what I intended it to be. I haven't done the image in my mind justice," I said, and by my mind I meant his. He didn't respond, but I felt an unspoken understanding between us that lingered for the remainder of the hour and helped me produce a much more satisfactory second draft.

When class was dismissed, I turned in my seat and asked him if he'd like to get to know each other over a cup of tea. It was an impulse inspired by fear. I was certain that if I let him slip away this time he would disappear not just for three years but forever, leaving me with a single sentence in a dark enchanting voice to accompany the single poignant image of a lone boy on the edge of campus in an oversized coat. He accepted. Passively I noticed the look of surprise on a fellow classmate's face as he filed past us. Only later, much later on, did I realize the cause of his surprise; the simple fact that the offer had been accepted.

"My name is Sherlock," he said, the moment we sat down.

"John. I believe we went to the same secondary school."

"Really?" I found it odd that he didn't ask which one, to confirm.

"Yes. I recognize you."

"It must have been someone else. No one recognizes me."

I could have told him that I was absolutely sure, more sure than I had been in my life, that he was the same lone boy that he had been three years ago, except in a coat that fit him. Instead I mumbled some cordial remark meant to comfort him that both of us recognized as petty.

"You have questions," he said suddenly.

"Are you gay?"

"People are people."

"So you are?"

"If you're asking if I would have an affair with you then yes, I would."

The conversation was so rare and unusual but at the time it made perfect sense. I had become a part of the lonely boy's world and suddenly everything he affected, I accepted. What he wanted I subconsciously made true, no matter how unorthodox.

"You free tonight?"

"Certainly."

"My dorm is in Building B. Number 221."

"I'll see you there," he said, and was off as abruptly as he had appeared. When his world left with him and reality engulfed me again, every abnormality hit me at once, and I sat there wondering for twenty minutes if what had just happened really happened, and contemplating how to classify the divine influence he seemed to have over the universe around him, or maybe just me.

We met about once a week in 221B, sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes we kissed, sometimes we shagged, sometimes we just talked. The world beyond the invisible tunnel existed in my dorm room when he was there, more alive than it had ever been, making it seem like an entirely different place when he left so that I didn't know where home was. The more I learned about him, the less I thought I knew. Around every bend, across every creek, an entirely new landscape spread out before me. No matter how long I traveled, I knew it was impossible to map all of them.

"What are we?" I asked one evening.

"You're John and I'm Sherlock."

"That's all? We're not even friends?"

"Friends don't exist. Neither do lovers. People just like to think of themselves as such."

I spent the rest of the night pondering those words, postponing sleep because I knew he would be gone by morning like he always was. I think what he meant was that people liked to perceive themselves in a favorable way, in the light of the idealistic opinions of others, surrounded by people they've made kind promises to for their own benefit. They considered people to be friends and lovers when in the end, they would always care more about themselves. It was a true and natural law that each person's world revolved around his or herself.

However, there was one crucial thing missing from his conjecture. For all his knowledge and his astounding intelligence and his astute understanding of society, he didn't understand love.

Compulsively, I imagined Sherlock and myself in a situation where only one of us could survive, and it took me less than a second to decide that he would be the survivor. That was when I realized that I loved him and he didn't love me, that I was just another less-than-sentient being in the world where everything was to his liking, just like everyone else, just a convenient tool. After that fall I didn't traverse the same route again, knowing I would only get hurt every time I tried to climb the infallible mountain known as Sherlock's Heart, that was not at the center of his world but pushed to the outskirts, deemed unimportant.

One time I came close to the summit by accident. We were in the palace in the sky, atop the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, side-by-side gazing out at the Thames. I stepped away to answer a call from my mother and tell her that I was busy, and when I turned back Sherlock was standing atop the railing, perfectly balanced, not even holding on to the cable above his head.

"What are you doing?"

"Seeing," he answered, as he stared down at the black waves disappearing beneath the bridge, like the indiscernible people of a crowd, like all the dead bodies commencing around the world that no one would ever know or care about. I think he saw himself in the procession.

Out the open window of a black Camaro someone shouted, "Don't do it, man!" I thought I recognized the mocking voice from our school, but I couldn't place it. Whoever it was might as well have shouted jump, because all he had done was confirm that the 'man' standing atop the railing didn't have an identity.

I grabbed Sherlock's arm and he looked down at me in surprise. "I wasn't planning to-" he started, but it wasn't necessary to finish the sentence. I knew he wasn't planning to, but he was thinking about it, and perhaps on sudden impulse or loss of balance he would have followed through.

Then he stepped down and faced me with an unspeakable coldness in his eyes. "I didn't need help," he said.

At first I was confused. Then I was angry. I had been scolded for caring. The explanation hit me later, when I was laying in bed alone, angrily mulling over the day's events in my head. The truth was that Sherlock was much angrier than I was. By grabbing onto his arm I assured him that if he went over, I would go over with him.

Somehow I had broken the rules of his world and denied his absolute freedom. When he faced me with that biting coldness in his eyes, he pushed me out of the palace in the sky as punishment, and as I was falling I saw the summit of Sherlock's Heart below me, and I reached out and tried to grab it but the ridge was just barely out of reach and I tumbled all the way down the mountain back to Earth, back to where I started.

I knew it wasn't out of love that he had to spare my life, despite how close I had gotten to it. I was never meant to reach it. Sherlock simply understood the laws of the real world too well, and because my less-than-sentient self made the real world a little more bearable for him, he felt he owed me a debt.

Over the next few weeks, some subconscious part of my mind dedicated itself to observing him with more consideration than it had before, and I began to understand what had happened on the bridge. I never saw him with anyone but myself, and the only reason I saw him was because I was looking for him. He kept to the periphery, the niches and back alley shortcuts, choosing the path less taken wherever he could. When he had to be in the open he walked at the back of crowds and along walls, which served as camouflage. Often I lost track of him seconds after seeing him, realizing only after closer inspection of the area that he must have slipped through the crack between two buildings or ducked down a stairwell that students weren't even supposed to use. He must have had a better understanding of the campus than most faculty members.

When I could keep track of him I invariably saw him doing one of three things: traveling with an ostensible mission, working in a manner that indicated that whatever he was working on had importance equivalent to a device that would change the fate of the world, or standing on the edge, gazing out through the invisible tunnel. It was when I saw him in these moments, so alike to the first time I had ever seen him, that I fell more in love with him. I loved his loneliness. I loved his inscrutability. I loved that there was always so much more going on in his head than any of us could imagine or withstand ourselves. I loved everything about him, even the fact that he didn't love me, and then I hated him.

I thought it was for my own good when he knocked on my door, which I usually left unlocked for him, and I didn't answer. I was leaning against it in a way that I hoped he would notice I was there and prayed that he wouldn't. My heart was beating fast even though I knew there would be no confrontation and no later meeting. Sherlock would take the hint after this single instance and never come back, and he wouldn't care.

When I heard him leave I slid to the floor, head in my hands. I resolved not to look for him anymore around campus, which undoubtedly meant I wouldn't see him at all. There was a deep sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that didn't leave for months.

Things didn't get better. My room got messier, my inspiration ran dry, and my ability to focus became less than before, if that was possible. Sherlock's world had become a sort of drug for me, and now that I had no invisible tunnel to see it through, I was lost in reality. Sick with a broken heart.

I could spend hours talking about what I missed about him, but what I missed the most was the magic he inscribed in everything around him, that when he entered a room it exploded in color, and where he walked a trail of sparks followed in his wake, and what he touched suddenly had a life and a vivacity and a meaning. Especially when he touched me.

I missed the feeling that living life was an adventure, because now that I had experienced it I knew that it was the only thing that made life worthwhile.

I found myself looking forward to graduation again, but when it came and they called the name 'Sherlock Holmes' and no one appeared, I wondered what exactly I had been looking forward to. I didn't wonder where he was, how he was doing, or even why he wasn't there. I wondered what I had expected to happen when he came onstage to accept his diploma and I saw him for the first time in two years. He would have appeared for that one moment and then disappeared from my life all over again, causing just as much pain in one moment as he did in the year and half I had been intimately acquainted with him.

After the ceremony I sat outside on the back steps of the conference hall, trying to displace the emptiness I felt with the pride and delight I knew I should have been feeling at that momentous time in my life. Somehow it didn't feel momentous at all, because Sherlock wasn't there. The adventure in life ceased to exist. I realized that the inspiration I had found in his invisible world was something that could never be replaced, and the emptiness trickled into pain.

The edge of the campus was before me, and the empty street and the lifeless foliage beyond it, and I tried to imagine him standing there looking out with his lonely eyes wearing the coat that fit him, but the invisible tunnel he looked through was impossible to recreate. He was just a vacant memory of an inconceivable experience, a feeling of being alive that I could no longer comprehend.

I accepted that he was gone from my life and never coming back, and suddenly the pain became unbearable, but somehow I beared it.

Within a few years I rose to the top of a small magazine company and made a gracious living for myself. The previous publisher, who passed his position onto me when he retired, always told me he appreciated the stark realism I put into my articles; our company prided itself in honesty, which is probably why we were small. His observation was ironic to me because of how much time I had spent and still spent imagining things that weren't real.

Outwardly I accepted the truth because I needed to stay sane according to the rest of the world, but secretly my mind found its retreat in the clouds, in my deficient memories of the place beyond the invisible tunnel, because that was the only place my heart felt at home, and I was afraid that if I left it homeless for too long it would simply stop beating.

In November, ten years after that fateful day in lunch detention, I stood before a crosswalk waiting for the little walking man to light up in green, and my impatient eyes wandered upward. In the sky I identified a thousand different shades of blue and indigo composing the usual grey, and in the buildings I imagined a thousand stories simultaneously taking place, and on the people on the street I noticed the latest adornments and telltale expressions and innovative new styles. For a split second I couldn't fathom how I was seeing the invisible world without an invisible tunnel to look through, and then I saw what my heart had acknowledged even when my conscious mind had not; the face my eyes passed over when I glanced up at the sky. His gaze cut straight through the crowd and past the bones in my chest, lighting a match that scorched me from the inside-out. Then he turned and an outline of sparks was left in the shadow of his body and I almost yelled out because I couldn't let him get away from me again, because no matter how much it hurt to be around him and not have him, god, not being around him hurt so much worse.

I didn't wait for the approval of the little green walking man. Something bumped my right leg and something else bruised my left and horns were blaring and none of it mattered. When I reached the other sidewalk and saw that the crowd had momentarily swallowed him up, the world's vibrancy started fading back to the cold unchanging oblivion I had known for the past five years, and I suffered to think that I had actually adapted to such a terrible place. I felt a panic unlike any spasm of fear or anxiety I had ever felt before. I flung myself into the horde.

Suddenly I found myself clutching the very end of a coat I recognized well and meeting those lonely eyes that seemed lonelier than ever but impossibly more alive, and everything was back to normal.

"Are you free?"

"Not as free as I used to be."

"No, free, as in, will you come home with me?" I stuttered, and it was first time in five years that I was able to say the word home and mean it.

He smiled and it was as if the whole city smiled with him and simultaneously took an ax to my heart.

"Certainly," he said, and he followed me home as leisurely as if he hadn't had anything planned for the entire day, because in his world the universe slowed down for him and everything rescheduled itself in his favor. He lived more freely than anyone I knew and I couldn't understand how, but in the end I didn't want to know because magic was magic, and he had it.

Inside my flat I mumbled, "Make yourself comfortable," and took off my jacket, watching him and the intelligent restlessness that appeared in his eyes whenever I took him to a new place. He observed everything and then created his surroundings anew, with more color and intricacy than the original designer could ever dream of.

"Have you been well?" he asked, and I didn't respond but came to him and kissed him, noticing that he'd gotten taller since last time, so I almost had to raise my heels off the floor to reach him. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware that he could have another shag buddy by now, but I didn't care. Our relationship existed in a mutual apartness from everything else. Nothing would change what I had with Sherlock, because we weren't lovers or even friends, because according to him those things didn't exist. We were fellow explorers in a world beyond reality, and while he was busy building new landscapes I was caught up in the beauty and intrigue of a single one, staring up at the majestic peak known as Sherlock's Heart and perpetually wondering whether or not I should try to climb it again, or if it was possible for anyone to climb it, or if it even existed or was just a facade.

"I take that as a no?"

"I've missed you."

"I thought you wanted to have nothing to do with me."

"I thought so too. Funny, that." I kissed him again and stayed close, breathing in the life that inspired life all around it, running my fingers along his cheek, his skin composed of porcelain sparks and spices. I half-expected him to ask a question, but wasn't surprised when he didn't.

I forced myself to pull away from him and take a seat to create the atmosphere of casual comfort. He sat across from me. "What have you been doing?" I asked, knowing better than to ask him how he had been doing, because he would call it trifling and refuse to impart any type of emotion except indifference and possibly annoyance. He would think even this question was petty, but as a common person I wanted to know.

"Gambling. Investing. Selling off demoralizing information about prominent figures and companies to journalism groups."

"Gambling?"

"Easy money. I can read a person's hand in their movements."

"And the journalism bit?"

"It's fun."

"You think it's justice, don't you?"

"Justice is relative. Truth is absolute, and I am never dishonest."

I believed him. In the place of white lies he'd always given me silence. He didn't bother trying to please anyone with partial truths.

"What about you?" he asked, for the sake of social equilibrium, because it didn't require a lie.

"I'm running an honest magazine company. Perhaps you should make a contribution sometime."

He chuckled, but responded with disinterest to the rest of the data, as if he already knew. Several times I tried to start a new topic of conversation but decided against it because it was small talk, and we preferred exploration without a planned route, without all the useless talking. We communicated without words. Sherlock once told me that he stayed quiet because everything was more real without talking. Actions were much truer than words.

Neither of us wanted to talk, so I took his hand and brought him to my bedroom and spoke to him through sweat and sensation. I told him that I loved him for his silence, his self-sufficiency, his strength, his unfought battle against everything that society considered real. I told him that I wanted to stay near him for the rest of my life, no matter how much pain it brought me; that I wanted to be worthy of exploring his world forever, even if I could never reach the top of Sherlock's Heart. But I knew that I would never be worthy.

We lay there together in the dark and I tried not to blink, because anytime I blinked meant that I could accidentally wake up to the empty morning.

"Why are you crying?" he asked quietly, neutrally.

"Because I love you," I answered. Because I love you and you don't love me back and never will, and when I wake up tomorrow morning you'll be gone like you always are.

"Stop it. I don't want you to cry," he said, putting an arm around me and hugging me close to his chest, his chin resting atop my head in a comforting embrace. It was the first time he had ever said anything to me involving his own emotions.

"Well there's no point in hiding it anymore."

"Then there's no point in hiding that seeing you today made me happy."

I cried harder because even if it wasn't a lie, it wasn't love either. It was fun, it was convenience. It was him taking me in a helicopter to glimpse the summit of Sherlock's Heart and then slamming the door shut the moment we came close enough for me to jump down and stick my flag in it. It was his systematic formula for keeping me there for him when he was never there for me, so that he could indulge his whims.

I felt so angry that I convinced myself I wouldn't sleep that night; I would stay up watching him and when he got up in the ungodly hours of the morning to leave like he always did, I would confront him and scream at him until my lungs gave out, because it would take at least that much air to express all the emotions I felt toward him in one day, let alone all the time since I had first seen him. I didn't matter if I scared him off because he would leave either way, and without school to keep us in the same reassuring vicinity, there was even less guarantee that I would ever see him again.

In the end the lure of sleep was irresistible. When I woke up the next morning I turned over as if I expected him to be there, as if my dreams would finally spill over into reality. His side of the bed was empty. Like it always was.

I got up because I felt sick, but when I stumbled into the living room the invisible world reflected in the window restored my vitality. He was standing there in my pajama pants and an unbuttoned flannel shirt pilfered from my drawers, looking out through his tunnel, but this time I could see through it as freely as he could and not just through the tiny porthole past his shoulder.

He looked toward me. His hands were at his sides but because I was inside the tunnel, I could see that he was holding out an invisible flag.

"What are you doing here?"

"Is it alright?" he asked, still beckoning, but I was too dazed to act upon it. I felt out of breath. "If I stay?"

"Of course it's alright, but..."

"Do you remember what I said about committed companionship?"

"That it's based on dishonesty and is nothing but a silly inconvenience for both parties?" After five years, I was almost surprised that I remembered every word.

"That was silly."

He swallowed and for a second I thought he was nervous, because letting someone into his world meant running the risk of outside destruction, and the entire purpose of his loneliness was to guard against that type of thing.

"You're staying," I mumbled, and it was more to myself than anything, because I needed confirmation. I was still trying to believe that I had really woken up this morning, because reality was never anything but cruel, and suddenly it was having a stroke of fairness.

But fairness, like justice, was relative. The truth was absolute. The truth was that he was here and asking to stay, and that for the first time in my life I hadn't woken up alone, and if he stayed I would never have to wake up alone again.

I was in his arms with his lips against mine and while he was distracted I pulled the flag from his hand and used it to pull myself up onto the summit and claim it as mine, and what followed was a feeling of joy unlike anything I had ever felt, a taste of victory that was sweeter than I had imagined, a feeling of overwhelming love for the lonely boy in the oversized coat and the man he had grown up into.

At that moment I didn't fully understand why he had stayed, only that I was happy about it. Over time he expressed things to me; passing statements that revealed what he felt, little favors that would pass unnoticed by someone who didn't fall in love with his every action like I did. He had learned that he had emotion and that he couldn't always suppress it, that it could actually be perceived as a pleasant advantage, even by him.

He was a lonely boy who had been lonely for so long that he'd forgotten why he was lonely. It was protection, of course, but originally it was protection from people with no guarantee, people who would hurt him, and in his loneliness it evolved into protection from humanity in general. When he met me he didn't recognize that I was different. I was a part of humanity as well, but a part that wanted to do just the opposite for him.

At first he thought I was just another accessory, but at some point he must have realized that there was something of substance hidden within the folds. I was his bulletproof vest and he was mine, and nothing could destroy one of us without destroying the other first, because there was no way I was ever going to remove it of my own will.