you still live in the same part of town as he does.
he's seen you in town a bunch of times, no special occasion, just while doing everyday things. going to the laundromat. buying groceries. getting some coffee. just really ordinary things. sometimes he nodded at you across the aisle, or just tried to make eye contact, but you always turned your head away. needless to say, he doesn't really go out that much anymore.
it started around a month after the incident, “the incident“, that's what we're calling it.
he keeps telling me that we'll never speak of it, but he still makes references to it all the time.
he never tells me any details of what exactly happened that night, but i could recite every single detail of the morning after by memory just from what he's told me. boiling coffee spilled on the floor. plates shattering against your parents' kitchen walls. two black eyes, one for you, one for him. bruises and cuts all over both your and his arms. two missing front teeth, yours. one broken nose, that's his. two broken ribs, his as well, with a punctured lung to go. light head trauma, his. a broken ankle, that was yours.
i remember how he took the bus to the emergency room. “i fell down the stairs.“ that's what he told the other passengers. blood flowing from his nose, past his swollen bottom lip. three people offering him a seat.
“i got mugged.“ that's what he told the nurses and doctors. the white of his right eye turned red and the dark purple around slowly fading to black. i wasn't with him at the time, or even aware that anything happened, but he described it to me in such vivid detail that i recall everything like it was yesterday.
“i couldn't exactly report it as a hate crime,“ that's what he told me when i came to visit him in the hospital. wincing with every word he spoke and every breath he took. “'cause it wasn't a hate crime, it was a love crime.“ he laughed at that, or at least it sounded like it was supposed to be a laugh, but the bandages around his nose made it sort of difficult to tell. i couldn't force myself to laugh along.
he only told his parents about the injuries after he left the hospital again, and that was the day when he packed his bags and left home. he never told me whether he lied to them, or whether he left by his own choice.
he arrived on my parents' doorstep that day, his nose still crooked from the punches, the skin around his eye still slightly yellow and his brain mellowed down on painkillers. mellow yellow. ha.
he told me that he needed to get away from home, and whether he could live with me until he'd gotten over you. you and i have lived on the same street since pretty much forever, but nice try.
my folks didn't object to him sleeping in my room, and they didn't dare to ask any questions after he showed off the scars and faded bruises on his arms.
later that night, we were lying in bed and he began to tell me the whole story. i'd dragged an old futon from the attic into my room for him, but he'd insisted to sleep in my queen size bed. queen size. ironic.
the mattress is big enough that we could both lie there without as much as our shoulders brushing against each other. he always sleeps on his back, on the very edge of the mattress. we don't ever touch when we're lying in bed. it's an unwritten rule of sort, i stay on my side, he stays on his side, no cuddling, no touching, no accidental elbowing in the middle of the night. some nights i watch him while he's lying on his back, limbs stiff, and if it weren't for the sound of his quiet breathing i would guess that he's dead. physically dead, i mean.
in his defense, he really did try getting his life back together during the first two or three months. he went to a handful of community college classes and got this part time job at a movie store downtown. it started out pretty well, really.
we'd wake up in the morning, with him on his side of the bed and me on my side of the bed. i'd make coffee and he'd use it to wash down his vicodin, half a tablet, to minimize the pain in his chest, he'd say. it's what the doctor had prescribed. after a few weeks he started increasing the dosage, one tablet a day. he started calling in sick to work and skipping classes, not too often, maybe once or twice a week. when i asked him why, he'd always say the same thing, “wasn't feeling too well,“ and then he'd say something about dizziness, nausea, headaches or vomiting.
“must be some kind of flu,“ he said, and i shrugged. dizziness, nausea, headaches, vomiting.
one quick google search told me that those are common vicodin side effects, but i'm still not sure whether it really was the vicodin or just you.
one tablet a day became one and a half. he'd stay home three days a week.
one and a half became two. he was fired from his job.
two and a half tablets of vicodin, he stopped going to college altogether.
he's already lying on his side of the bed when i come home from work every night, with his hair still wet and skin still flushed from showering. sometimes he's forgotten to put clothes on, and on those days i can't help but eye him from head to toe and wonder how i ever was attracted to him. how i'm still attracted to the surgery scars on his chest, his permanently crooked nose and the sallow skin that looks like he bought it a number or two too large. vicodin kills one's appetite almost as well as one's pain.
that very first night, i turned the lights off and rolled onto my side, all the way onto the edge of the bed, as if i could have possibly pretended that he wasn't there, that he wasn't breathing only three feet away from me and that the stench of hospital didn't still stick to him. as if he hadn't called me from the hospital after we hadn't spoke a single word for over a year. as if he hadn't let me down for the sake of someone like you.
i covered one ear with my pillow and the other with my hand, but that still couldn't keep me from hearing him.
“let me tell you a story,“ he said, with his voice still nasal, and at that point i had been almost completely positive he'd already fallen asleep.
i didn't say anything, and i'm still not sure whether he ever knew that i was awake that night, or any night after that, for that matter. he started off with telling me about his sophomore year in high school, about how he met you, and all i wanted was to press the pillow over my head until i'd suffocate. maybe his head, i wasn't picky. all i wanted was to not hear about you. he told me how he fell in love with you at first sight, love, as if actual love could have possibly ended like that.
i'm not the type of person to accuse others of throwing words around until they're meaningless, but in that moment i couldn't help but wish that he had done it more often in relation to me back then. he said your name that night, and the way he said it made it sound like the single most desirable thing in the world.
the morning after that, after i'd made us coffee and he'd taken his vicodin, he asked me to never speak of the incident, and i agreed, under the condition that he'd never speak that name in front of me. he still does it at least once every night, and every time he does it i push the pillow onto my head a little tighter. i never say anything, but i still wish he'd say my name like that.
it was about two weeks ago when i finally snapped. he was hanging off the bed stark naked and even more lifeless than usual, and if it hadn't been for his heaving ribcage, the smell of soap still clinging to his shower-moist skin and the distinct absence of flies circling his body, i would have guessed that he'd finally gone past his expiration date. i grabbed the container of tablets off the nightstand, and i guess the sound of pills rattling sent him back into full consciousness.
“what are,“ he said, a whisper at first before it rose into his usual nasal voice, “what are you doing?“
“no one needs two and a half vicodins a day after over three months,“ i said. i think i had meant for it to come out calm, but i couldn't stop my voice from rising.
“NO ONE,“ i said, once again, and he rose up from the bed.
if someone were to ask me right now, i wouldn't have been able to tell why, but in the next moment i open the window and drop the container with all the remaining tablets down onto the street way below the apartment, and in the next moment i hear the crunch of SUV wheels driving on plastic.
“YOU NEED TO GET YOUR FUCKING LIFE TOGETHER,“ i jump onto him and thread my fingers in his unkempt hair
“i'm trying,“ his fingernails scratch across my shoulders and dig through the cotton of my shirt
“YOU CAN'T JUST STAY HERE FOREVER,“ my knee digs into his stomach
“i'm trying,“ my hand is on his throat
“YOU'RE GONNA HAVE TO GET THE FUCK OVER HIM,“ his fist barely misses my eye and hits the bridge of my nose instead
“i'm tr–,“ he doesn't get any farther than that before my other hand pushes onto his mouth
“AS IF POPPING PILLS FUCKING EQUALS TRYING,“ and my fist smashes straight into his crooked nose.
blood started spurting from his nostrils almost immediately, and i pulled back instinctively. he sat up and i just watched as the red liquid dripped down, past his bottom lip and onto his chest from where it started running down towards his crotch. déjà-vu if i'd ever had one, except for the bit where i hadn't ever actually seen him like this.
i went out for dinner on my own that night, and when i came back he was already lying on his side of the bed. his hair was untangled, but the dried blood was still sticking to his face and bare chest. i changed into sweatpants before i turned off the lights, and i lay there in silence listening to his breath. waiting until he'd start once again, “let me tell you a story“. really, it's not that i missed listening to him talk about you, quite the opposite in fact. i guess i'd just gotten used to it.
he finally started speaking after what seemed like a good few hours, but this time it was a different line.
“i'm sorry.“ the sheets rustled, and i felt him shift on the mattress, until he was this close to lying on my half. his hand awkwardly moved across my side until it finally grasped at mine. it's the first time he's touched me since he let me down back then, it's the first time anyone has touched me like that since then.
“i'm sorry. i'll try.“
i turned to face him, and in the faint glow of the streetlight from the window he looked even worse, his skin even sallower and saggier, his eyes even deader, his everything even deader. the dark red stripe leading from the bottom of his nose down his chin made him look as if he was growing a particularly unattractive beard.
“i'll try my best.“ he pulled me by my hand until there was barely any space between our bodies. there was no my side or his side of the bed anymore, we were just lying together. “i'll try my best.“
my whole throat was constricting. i just nodded.
his arm wrapped around me, and i looked at him again, it should have been hard to believe that i wanted to have sex with this animated corpse once, but it wasn't in the least. i grabbed him by the jaw and peeled off the strips of dried blood before i opened his mouth and kissed him.
he didn't move a single muscle, and if it hadn't been for his warm breath in my mouth i would've been lead to believe that i was actually kissing a corpse.
his clammy hands moved around my torso and pulled off my shirt and then i felt his skin right against mine. no matter if he'd remembered to get dressed after showering, he always strips down before sleeping, and since we didn't usually touch each other it doesn't really matter.
i could feel more dried blood ever so slightly sticking against my chest, but this time i didn't get around to pulling it off before he pushed his open mouth onto mine. not only did kissing him feel distinctly corpse-like, so did being kissed. i pushed my hand down between his legs and his fingers slipped into my sweatpants. even his grip on me felt like being jerked off by a dead man's hand.
that night was the only one when he didn't talk to me about you, and judged by his reactions to me, he probably didn't even think of you. we didn't fuck, or make love, or even have sex. as far as i'm certain all of those things require at least feigning interest.
the morning after, he drank coffee without vicodine, and we both told each other to never speak about this night again. it was the third vow about things left unspoken we made to each other, and it's the first one we actually managed to keep.
every night he tells me some new details about his relationship with you. it's still as sickening as the first day, but all i ever do is lie still and listen to him narrate. i hear how jealous he was of every single girlfriend you ever had, how you were the first person to ever kiss him, how you were the first person he ever fell in love with. (there's that word again, love. if it had been love he wouldn't be telling any of this to me.) every single night i'd get to hear essentially the same story in different variations over and over again, how much he wanted you and how you kept ignoring him, and it's both made me realize how much i still want him, and how much i hate you.
sometimes he didn't stop at just how much he wanted you and also started talking about how he wanted you: on your back, with him straddling you and running his hands all along your chest; on all fours while you pull his hair; face to face, so he can wrap his legs around you while you touch him all over. he'd describe every single one of his sexual fantasies in detail, and sometimes i almost tried and imagined myself in your place, but instead the mental image of you fucking him keeps entering my mind.
then there's the nights when he decides to recount our own relationship to me, from the day he met me in a coffee shop, over our first date to the first time we had sex in a snow storm.
“you know what's funny,“ he told me during one of those stories, and i knew he didn't expect me to say anything because i never say anything. “every single time we fucked– every single time we fucked, i always imagined you were him.“ he obviously didn't say him. he said your name.
and i swallowed so hard i damn near choked on my own trachea. if he hadn't told me all those things about wanting you, maybe i would have thought he'd been kidding. but of course, even if it hadn't been for those sexual fantasies featuring you, i still would have been deeply in denial.
one can only pretend their boyfriend isn't saying the wrong name for so long.
he always drifts off to sleep when he finishes his stories, but i'm always left just lying there, with the exact images of you he'd been describing circling around my head. sometimes i can hear him mumbling your name in his sleep, almost moaning, and that makes it all just so much worse but as much as i want to the pillow still can't drown him out.
he didn't restrict the story telling to nights either. when one of my classes got canceled or i had a day off, he'd tell me the story of what happened between the incident and him moving in with me. it's the same story over and over, just with some new details sprinkled here and there. i can identify all people on the bus he rode by race, sex, hairstyle and rough age range, and i know how every single dish at the local hospital tastes, but i still don't know what put him there.
“nights are for the before, days are for the after“, he said to me once when i asked him about the incident, on the very first day, before we made the rule. there's no time of the day for the inbetween.
i started calling you every saturday morning back when he first moved in with me.
today is the first time you pick up. it's still ridiculously early, and the sun hasn't fully risen yet.
“let me tell you a story,“ you say, and i don't say anything. i just listen.
when i finally hang up, he looks at me from across the bed.
i never told him about the calls, but judged by his face he knows exactly what i've been listening to.
“tell me your version of the inbetween,“ i say.
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