Chapter II: Please, Make Me Real

2018: One full moon I run through the cold night, breath labored with phlegm as the wind beats through me. I stop under the subway and look up at the white light behind a thin fog.

I remember everything. I remember the the last night before college in the mountains when he stayed up all night carving me a bird in flight with his swiss army knife; he smashed the eighth or ninth beer against his forehead, threw it into the fire, and stared at me with the crackle of sparks flitting through the air across him. The crimson light in his eyes reflecting back at me, as he handed the wooden token to me he said:

Evan, for you, for all of the places you will go, and I hope you always remember the first time you felt you could fly.

2013:

He is becoming the rain.

Wednesday night—a school night—I’m 17, and I’m learning what it means to love an explosion. He stares at me, his jeans pressed to a breaking picnic table, leather jacket refracting the glittering water.

“What if I told you I didn’t want to live?”

The question feels sinister: a threat, or a plea?

“I wouldn’t know what to say. I wouldn’t know how to live.”

He smiles at that. He stares up at the streetlights, the rain cascading onto his cheeks. Then he juts his chin back down.

He’s vacant.

“Who I am to you… I could never be this, not to anyone else. They wouldn’t let me live.” One single tear falls from his eye, to dance with the rain. He nods at at camera, protected underneath my jacket.

The photo would enshrine this: This person he could never be—that person did exist. That person could live.

I see the words in his glance:

Please make me real.

To take the photo would mean this secret self… this sensitive, emotive boy, free from violence…would forever live with me.

Unveiled. Seen. Permanent.

I lift the camera to my eye, line up the shot.

The tear falls to his chin.

Real, true, mine, irrefutable.

I take the camera down.

All I can hear is the rustle of the wind, the chill of the winter enveloping me. He wipes another tear from his eyes, and leans his head to look at his feet. Dispirited. Shameful, even. He had always been my emblem of confidence, and now all I could see is the outline of his hair, his widow’s peak and gelled bangs blocking my view of his turned-away face.

Instinct: I close the space between us.

His head moves into my shoulder. The smell of skin and leather has a coldness as it rushed through my nose. I cannot see him. Only the rain defying time. Deliberate and slow, calculated and freeform, dancing in the streetlight.

When I look back, I see everyone who I clung to in order to free myself from you.

Everyone was a mirror of you.

Every hand, your hand.

Every gaze, your gaze.

Every word, your word.

Every smile, your smile.

Every kiss, the one you feared to share with me.

Was I looking for you all along?

He taught me how to know others’ suffering; how to sense it on them. How to find someone more truly, in the unspoken, the unseen, the unheard.

But even though I convinced myself it were fact, even though I believed it were true, even though I told myself otherwise, even though he lied that he wanted me to move on from him—

I chose him every time.