I haven't written in a very long time, but I got a little bit of inspiration so I wrote whatever came to mind.
For Blue blue skies
They told me I couldn't fly.
They told me I would fall and hit the bottom and crash, and that I would splatter across the concrete like a butterfly against a windshield.
When I sat at the edge of the apartment roof and stared wistfully and longingly at the ground below, they told me to get down before I hurt myself.
When I jumped off the roof of Shotgun's doghouse and skinned my left knee, they told me I should have been more careful, I shouldn't have stood on top of it; I should avoid accidents like this.
I couldn't bring myself to tell them that it wasn't really an accident.
When the weatherman on TV said there was a hurricane watch, I ran outside, arms spread, waiting for the wind to blow me somewhere. Anywhere.
I got in trouble and they told me I was being foolish.
Then later that night, they told me I was beautiful, like the butterfly, and that while we couldn't help it if we sliced and diced those butterflies, we could keep me from hurting myself. Because, well. I was beautiful, apparently.
They told me not to be so stupid. I was only human, after all. Of course I couldn't fly.
Human, I asked? Yes, human. You see, we all have a heart and lungs and intestines and kidneys and veins. And we have a brain, so use it and stop asking all these silly questions. I stopped asking questions, because I already knew what human meant. I knew that the thumpity-thump-thump underneath my palm was my heart and that the blue line running along my arm was a vein. That wasn't the problem. The problem was, I didn't feel all that human. Humans are weak and humans are stupid and humans are greedy, and mean, and unkind.
When I turned eighteen, they started saying things like, "use a condom" and "don't hurt her feelings". When I asked them what the hell they were on about, they all looked at each other and said, "You need a girlfriend. You're a man now."
A man, I asked? Yes, a man. You see, you are eighteen now and you're legally an adult, which means that you can live on your own, work on your own, feed yourself, house yourself, take care of yourself. And if you want to get technical, you have a penis, which is the male organ of reproduction, which must be pretty neglected by now—or worse: is on very familiar terms with your hand. I snapped my mouth shut with an audible snap because, well. They were on very familiar terms at this point, and admitting this was just plain embarrassing. So I nodded and said "okay" and that was that. Except that wasn't the problem. The problem was, I didn't feel like a man. Men were cruel and harsh and rude and they just did not think before they did anything, and men decided it was okay to shove their dick into some fifteen-year-old boy's ass, no matter how much he screamed and begged the man to please stop, it hurts—please, please stop.
I didn't feel like a man; I didn't want to be that person.
So I didn't try to be.
I went off to college, still just a boy. I dormed, because there was no way in hell I was going to stay with them and listen to them tell me about my love life.
"Oh! She's a nice girl. And so pretty, too!"
"This girl is the perfect girl for you!"
"She likes all of the same things as you, how wonderful."
"Look at those curls. Gorgeous. Oh! And she's single—isn't that such a coincidence?"
No. It wasn't. Maybe she wasn't lonely. Maybe she was content with her life the way it was. Maybe she didn't want a man, either. Maybe she didn't need a man.
So I packed my bags and I left. I got to the right place, picked the available bed. I couldn't shove my clothes into their spot fast enough. I needed some kind of closure to prove that I was finally living somewhere else. That I was finally living at all. I was rooming with only one other boy, because this was one of the smaller dorm rooms on campus, and if the college administrators put more than two boys in here, the fire marshal could come and fine 'em left and right. So I was with another freshman. His name was Cadence, or so his lone marble notebook had told me. Cadence SomethingOrAnother had creamy brown colored hair and gray eyes.
Wait, gray eyes?
Oh. Oh. Here come the sunglasses; whoops, my bad. And then because I can be a mindless fuck, I wonder if he gets the handicapped parking spots at the mall and then I realized that DUH, you can't drive if you can't see. Of course, you can't.
But then again, I couldn't fly, now could I?
He turned around to face me and his eyes rose to meet mine. How he figured where my eyes would be was beyond me, but I was glad that I could really look at him without him thinking I was some kind of a freak for it. I couldn't help being curious.
And then, before I realized it, my eyes were watching the curve of his lips and the strong sketches of his jaw line and the slight point to his chin and the way his fringe swayed every time he exhaled and how his long curtain eyelashes cast shadows across the apples of his cheeks. Then his little pink tongue darted out to lick his lips and he plopped down onto his bed, bouncing a little on the mattress. He looked so tiny, sinking into the mattress, in his shirt that was obviously meant for very skinny people yet still somehow managed to hang loosely off of his body. In fact, with him on the bed looking up at me, it was easy to see the dark shadows cast by his collar bone, and I could see the sharp angles of his shoulders. I wondered if he ever ate or if I was being roomed with an anorexic or bulimic or something, but then he spoke. And all he had said was, "Are ya gonna keep staring at me, or are ya actually gonna say something?" but he had said it in a voice that sounded like liquid silk or wind chimes or steady rain or maybe all of those things together, and even though I wasn't sure what it sounded like, I knew that I liked it.
That was the first time my feet lifted off of the ground and I knew what it was like to fly.
More importantly, I knew that I could fly.
"If I can fly, then you can see," I say.
This is the scene:
I'm on my back, on my bed, on top of the covers. Cadence is curled up into my side, his head tucked neatly underneath my chin, with one arm resting across my stomach, and the other arm curled up in front of him. His fingers clutch the side of my shirt. One of my arms is around him, fingers hooked onto one of the belt loops on his jeans. My other hand meets the end of the arm stretched over my stomach. Fingers laced. His breath is warm and it tickles as it blows across the hollow of my throat, and his hair is soft against my neck. I can feel the sharpness of his shoulder blades and the bumps of his spine, and my palm is curved around the pointed angle of his hipbone. I can feel his eyelashes fluttering against my Adam's apple, struggling to stay open.
"But you can't fly, Rich," he says. Quiet. Content. Right now, his voice is the sound of a star exploding: something so much bigger than everything else, yet so, so far away, and muted by pure, empty space.
"I'm flying right now," I whisper.
He laughs at that, light and airy and rather more of an amused scoff, but he doesn't say anything and I can feel his eyes close. I can feel him understand, I can feel him see.
He traces the number 8 onto my palm until his breathing evens out and the thumping of his heart falls into sync with the systematic up and down of his breathing. I think about that for a long time afterwards, why the number eight? I close my eyes and imagine the number. I can see it scratched onto the insides of my eyelids like a dream: 8.
"Cade?" I ask, checking if he's asleep or not. I get no answer.
I'm on the fuzzy beginnings of sleep when I realize that it wasn't the number eight, but rather ∞.
The sign for infinity.
Oh.
And then I fall asleep and I dream about stars and supernovas and infinity signs. Somewhere along the way, the dream hits the bottom and crashes and splatters across the concrete like a butterfly against a windshield, but it's okay, because when I wake up later in the evening and watch the birds fly into the moonlight with Cadence still nestled and asleep against my chest, I'm still flying.
If anyone got confused by this, after the dividing line of the story, it switches into the present tense, whereas the first part was in the past. I don't know why I did that, it just switched to that tense in my mind while I was typing it so I went with it. Also, I don't know if anyone took it the way I meant it or not, but I did definitely imply rape in there.