Chapter 9: The Chains
I remember. Days later, after you had denied my suggestion to go back hunting, and I was about to be at a loss, even when I would never have given up, you came to the room that I never actually used, but had been entitled to be mine, in the middle of the day. Except for right now, when I was using it, because I had actually needed some distance from you and your grief for a bit. Not because I couldn't bear the view, but because I couldn't bear being incapable of doing anything against it. I had assumed you asleep for the entire day in your room as usual, but here you were, with a newspaper in your hand, fully dressed and with an amused smirk in your face.
"Cas, you need to see this," you said, without even giving me a choice. You sat down beside me on the bed, so close to me that our thighs and shoulders touched. You shoved the newspaper into my face and on the front page I found an article about some real estate mogul, who abused his wife, with a big picture of the man in the middle, leaving a building surrounded by reporters, visibly unhappy.
"Who is that?" I asked perplexedly and turned my head towards you. And I still know, that I wished I hadn't done that, because as close as you were sitting to me, now the tips of our noses also almost met. For a tiny moment we rested in that position, where I saw your face like in a far too close close-up. Then your turned your eyes back to the newspaper in my lap and tapped at a part in the bottom left corner, so that your body almost completely hung over me and your left side pushed into my chest. I briefly looked to the ceiling and wondered if you did that on purpose, or if you simply didn't notice.
"Not this," you said with it, "That!"
I regarded the photograph of a smaller article in the corner and found a crowd standing around an accident, in the middle in-between the people a confused and glancing helplessly Garth, obviously in the middle of a job and unluckily unflatteringly caught in the picture.
"Look how stupid he looks!" you squeaked and I couldn't help but smile. I didn't pay any more attention to the article, my eyes were directed at you and your sudden cheerfulness. I was almost shocked at finally hearing your laughter again, for I hadn't heard it for a long time. I put my hand on your back and moved it in soft half-circles upwards to your neck, where I stopped for a moment and then let go of you. You looked at me with a gaze full of affection and suddenly and abruptly one thing became clear to me: no matter how good and for how long I had known you, no matter how much I knew about you and would still learn, I would never fully understand you. You were like a puzzle I could never finish, because the more pieces I put together, the more new pieces appeared.
"What I love about science is that as you learn, you don't really get answers. You just get better questions."
(John Green, "Turtles All The Way Down")
But what I had discovered about you a long time ago was that you always seemed to have chains on you. The chains of your father's endless demands and orders, the chains of having to save your brother from the addiction of demon blood and from Lucifer, the chains of the apocalypse coming upon us, the chains of having to save the world from Leviathans, the chains of the Mark of Caine and becoming a demonic killing machine, and ever so on and on. Life doesn't ever seem to stop putting you in chains.
And even when I on the other hand had always had wings, in the truest sense of the word, I was so much more captured than you could ever be. Held down to this earth, pushed to the ground like a small hawk, stuck and lost at the same time, and even in all my inability to fly away, or at least run, and my constant desperation and frustration, I never wanted anything else, because this is where I belonged. This is where I was the happiest. I was like a bird that had forgotten how to fly on purpose, because it had finally found the nest of his choice. Even when, in truth, I hadn't forgotten and it wasn't any purpose behind it either, but had rather been made unable to fly. My wings were now nothing more than a bad decoration on my back, decayed and tattered, hackly and broken. But it was okay, because I didn't plan to use them, I didn't need to fly, I wouldn't even know whereto.
"It's a weird phrase in English, in love, like it's a sea you drown in or a town you live in. You don't get to be in anything else - in friendship or in anger or in hope. All you can be in is love."
(John Green, "Turtles All The Way Down")
And I really was. I was in it, upon it, underneath it, next to it and all around it. It was all inside me and all inside me was it. It actually was like I would drown in it and even when my head seemed to be under water, I could breathe fine. More than that, I could breathe better than ever before. Everything was unclear and unsure, everything was so hard to understand and blurry and I didn't know what I was doing and didn't know, if I did the right things, all my decisions being made by only and alone my heart and by the terrible realization and fear for that one day I might have you less, that one day you might not be mine anymore. And as much as I didn't understand you sometimes, because your actions and words and mood swings and practically all about you hardly ever made sense to me and I, no matter how intensively I studied you, never really comprehended, it didn't seem impossible to me, even when an endlessly infinite task. You were crazy and I was out of my mind.