Chapter 10: The Togethership

"I is the hardest word to define."

(John Green, "Turtles All The Way Down")

I remember. We were still sitting on my bed. I was leaned against the headpiece, my legs spread out and my hands resting in my lap. You on the other hand cross-legged somewhere on the level of my knees, your back buckled and your head hanging over the newspaper. It's strange how different we can experience postures. What is uncomfortable and tense for the one, is the most snugly position of all for the other. It was just a little something, but it showed me once again how different we were. You awkwardly uncontrolled and self-confident, comfortable in your cambered crouching posture, all your hinges angled, almost like your angled mind. Me straight and thoughtful, insecure and actually uncomfortable in every posture. What one may conclude from that train of thoughts is another matter.

I observed your face that, even at such a silent and calm thing as reading, was the most hectic and most restless piece of human I had ever seen. Your eyes were flying to and fro, again and again interrupted by the blink of your lids, your lips were moving along to the words you read, your chin with them, your eyebrows every now and then hurled upwards and very rarely you wrinkled your nose. You were no one, who dabbled at reading, who scanned and skimmed something, no, when you read, you deepened yourself so much in it that your face became your thoughts. That face that knew so many different looks that you could fill a whole encyclopedia with it. And as well as I knew you, I always found new ones, while the only one of them that I will always remember was the first one of them I've seen. Right in that moment, right from the start, I had known that I had found a home for both my eyes and my heartbeat.

And perhaps you weren't perfect. Perhaps you couldn't sleep. Perhaps you couldn't always stay sober. Perhaps your soul was cracked and ripped in so many places that it almost wasn't a whole anymore. Perhaps you were stubborn and unteachable. Perhaps you also drove me crazy and got me into danger over and over again and yes, perhaps you even were something like a disease inside my system, which I couldn't rid myself of, which would break my back piece by piece, which one day would get me killed, like a poison that kicks in slowly. But likewise you could also be strong and confident. Likewise you could be changing me in a good kind of way, helping me, needing me, over and over again not being able to live without me. Likewise you could be not the disease, but the cure.

"And we're such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn't real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracise and minimise. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with."

(John Green, "Turtles All The Way Down")

You looked up from your newspaper and caught me staring. Somewhat ashamed I instantly turned my head in another direction, the cold bald walls of my room my new focus. I heard an amused snort and couldn't stop the corners of my mouth from forming a little smile, while from the corners of my eyes I peered back at you, my hands folded in my lap, as if to pray.

"You know," you suddenly began and put down the newspaper next to you on the bed, "we could as well talk about it"

In my sheer ignorance I knitted my brows and glanced at you, as if you would suddenly speak another language, and said, "About what?"

"You know," you answered, although I did not know, and made a gesture between us, as if that would make anything clearer. I watched your waving hand with a look that must have resembled a toddler staring at a book, although it can't read. For I didn't understand what you wanted to tell me, I found back to your eyes, which looked at me expectantly, and tried to read something there.

"I mean…," you began and stopped for a moment, while you moved your hand over your chin and stared at the blanket underneath us, as if to search for words there, "… u-us… we… our… come on, do I really need to say it out loud?"

I tilted my head and through squinted eyes I glanced into yours and found an almost amusing desperation. Then I said, slowly and as if I would only really discover it along the way, "You mean… the kiss?"

A sigh of mere relief came out of your lungs and for a few milliseconds you even closed your eyes. "Yeah," you said quietly, it was almost a whisper.

For a while we remained silent and however the willingness to talk about it was hovering in the air, we both didn't seem to know what exactly we wanted to say. It happened weeks ago, it almost felt like an eternity, I even already started to believe it had only be a dream. Of course I don't sleep enough to have dreams. To be precise, never.

All of a sudden, like out of an impulse I hadn't noticed myself yet, I put my hand on your knee and our eyes met again. I smiled so much at you that I passed it over to you.

"Good things do happen, Dean," I said and reminded us both of the night we had met for the first time. Inside the corrugated sheet iron structure you and Bobby had scribbled on all sorts of symbols against all sorts of creatures, only not such against creatures like me. Where you had repeatedly, and with all you had, tried to kill me, only to realize that you had nothing and couldn't do it and that I am a thing you neither knew, nor had believed was real.

Your smile widened, when you repeated another sentence of our past, "We're just better together"

For only a short moment we were staring into each other's eyes and smiling, when you suddenly put your hand in my neck, pulled me closer and sealed your words with our lips.

This was our story. A marvelous story. About love, heartbreak, loss. Of fear and anger. Of loneliness and a togethership that needed to develop first and for a long amount of time, but eventually, here we are. Both fractured and broken, both suffering from our past and present and probably also our future. We weren't always good people, what we were is people, who are trying to do good. And no matter how many evil creatures we stopped, the ones inside us, our very own demons, could never be stopped. We saw them in each other's eyes, we felt them in each other's touches, they were just all around us. But as long as we had one another, they couldn't do us any harm.