Warnings mild slash (homosexual themes), dark themes (death, implications of attempted suicide)

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~   .   a n d     y o u     d o n ’ t     e v e n     f e e l     a     t h i n g   .   ~

~     dead     heart     ~

by d2ragnarok []

There are nights when he wakes with the familiar sensation of warm skin in his arms, more substantial than the bed he dreams on, or even his own breath warming his exposed shoulder. During these nights he nestles closer to steal some of that wonderful heat, but only to press his cheek into cool midnight sheets and an untouched pillow. And with a start, he realises that the left side of the bed is empty.

It takes a moment to realise why.

He half-dreams in reality. There are times when he can truly feel a hand tracing the bumpy ridge of his spine, or a ghost of a kiss on occasional mornings, feels it brush feather-light along his temple before becoming still and vanishing as his eyes receive sunlight in an empty room.

He can recollect their secrets with a lucid, frail imagination. He has unravelled mysteries there, built his own without knowing shame, discovered wine-red passion, as throbbing as a bruise on a heartbeat. Sentiments of a body he knows better than his own trouble him when his awareness is half undone, clutching an empty sheet when there should be flesh. Sometimes, in dreams he pretends not to remember, he maps the unique flavours of an absent body with his tongue, classifying each one with imaginary words, like ‘swaky’ or ‘dritty’. The fire of bodies and hands in dreams don’t fade with the rise of the sun. The solitude of the bedroom haunts him. His body still remembers night spent in the company of pleasure, feels it miss the contented equanimity that’s quite unlike the ones spent at the breakfast table. It’s not like the equanimity of weekday mornings spent drowned in coffee and conversations about groceries or work, whichever would seem to be more concerning at the time.

The kitchen habits were almost as intimate as the bedroom kind, ones that were spent in something akin to peace, though on a lesser definition. There would usually be a fuss on what to eat, but he never listened to the other’s suggestions on having bacon, sausages, and whatever horrible inedible thing would come to mind.

“You can eat selected parts of dead animals when I die,” he would usually reply at the expected groan when he pulled out tasteless cereal and random fruits from the fridge.

“You won’t die until you’re one hundred years old with the way you eat,” would come the expected quip.

He misses that.

He misses it enough that he forgets he lives alone. It scares him. He sometimes makes meals for two, absently, out of routine, unconsciously waiting to hear a car pull up and a door shut, expecting some quirky phrase at the door about a poetic hunger that doesn’t involve food. It’s so deeply ingrained in who he is that he doesn’t even stop to think about it anymore.

He had set the good dishes one evening in early August, humming ‘The Greatest View’ to himself. When the sound of the china meeting the table resounded, he froze and felt iron claws clench at his heart. Before he could mentally prepare himself for cold-hearted realisation, he found himself watching priceless china break into worthless pieces against the wall. A choked sob echoed in the hollowness of his apartment. It was the only testament of his humanity before he struggled to reign in his emotions, locking them quickly beneath the reinforced alloy of his disintegrating heart. He pressed a shaking hand rigidly against his mouth to keep from weeping, leaving the kitchen for the broom and dustpan to clean the mess.

He only drinks tea, preferably mint- or mango-flavoured, but the box brands are steadily losing ground in the cabinet, and he now drinks black coffee with toast, if he has time, because it reminds him of security; a kiss in the morning before parting, and a hand ruffling his hair as he turns away. Affection. He misses that too.

He empties all the picture frames one evening when autumn arrives, without any forethought (the box is just conveniently there, waiting patiently to fulfill a purpose and stormy eyes follow him everywhere, in every direction he turns he sees them continually watching him, and no, no, he can’t stand it). He discards each photograph heartlessly into the shoe box. He tapes it with duct tape and shoves in the darkness of his (because the entire left side is empty, except for a shirt that smells like aloe, it’s just his, not their,) closet, as far from daylight as possible. He can hear it beckoning for him at nights when he can’t sleep, and it takes weakness to ignore its existence because indifference can soothe over his shredded passion, like thin skin over an unhealed wound. It helps. It makes him feel less human, less hysterical.

So he has empty picture frames all over the apartment.

“He’s dead, Jordan!” Anita screams one Wednesday evening, when he mentions finding a deck of pornographic playing cards under the couch when he cleaned up that late afternoon. It had their initials and cutesy little hearts all over the fifty-two cards. He remembers it being a joke Valentine’s present, though he himself had been dismayed at the time (to much amusement), but he pretends to know laughter now because it’s better than acknowledging the anguish that only tears deeper into his spirit.

 “I know,” he says with a rickety breath.

Anita begins to weep. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“I know,” he wraps his arms around her. “It’s okay.”

Dead people aren’t supposed to be alive in someone’s head, and certainly are not supposed to have a role in someone’s crumbling reality. They’re not supposed to kiss him in the mornings to attempt rousing him, or breathe a harsh sigh against his neck, nor have a solid presence when he closes his eyes. They’re not supposed to be at the corners of his eyes, smiling with a cup of coffee in hand, or reading a dusty book that sleeps closed on a table, or in the bathrobe that barely covers anything decently because he donated it to the Salvation Army in August. If he turns his head to acknowledge them, they’re gone like a whisper of smoke fading into obscurity. Gone, so he learns to stop looking for them in crowds, and enjoy their presence in the privacy of his prison. He begins to remember conversations that never took place, and moments that he dreamed up the night before. He should not smile to himself when he thinks of yesterday, or the day before that, and think of those instances as Real. It’s wrong. It’s insane.

But it’s different in the bedroom. His secrets, his mysteries, can uncoil and he can open his heart without fearing it to break. The shadows stir behind his eyelids, and he sighs into a mouth that will never be there to steal his breath, but imagines a lover watching him. The fabric of reality can shift ever so slightly to accommodate the universe contained in his dark bedroom, held together by grief, loneliness, and fear that the piece of his missing soul can never be found again. At night, it’s okay to say it’s real. It’s real. Warmth. Skin. Eyes. Whispers.

“You’re beautiful when you—”

He opens his eyes. “Sorry, what?”

“You should find a smaller place,” Anita advises, in a voice that suggests more than just a smaller apartment, a voice that tells him in his kitchen that his unemotional response with the loss of his person was disturbing.

He smiles a small smile. Anita always referred to the other as his “person”, as though they had been the same entity, as if they shared something deeper than just a relationship wrapped in an apartment. The evidence is in the books he refuses to move, he realises. The books were more sacred to him than any other intimacy; because how many lazy Sunday afternoons had he spied on his lover reading some ridiculously thick novel, and watched the unguarded expressions flicker through stormy grey eyes? Too many, he thinks. He left them exactly the way they were with bookmarks and post-its tucked carefully between the uncreased pages, stacks of books, notes, and pens lay abandoned on the table beside an old red recliner, even the thin quilt his mother made for him one Christmas hadn’t been folded. He didn’t have enough strength to move them, so he left the portrait of paralysed time the way it was on the rainy Tuesday night when the police called. Easier, he believed, than erasing memories completely, just to pretend not everything was lost.

He continues drying the plates they used for supper. “I’m happy here,” he replies evenly after a moment of letting the suggestion hang in the air.

But he’s not. He’s not.

He can count his ribs now. It’s not as though he stopped eating completely, but he avoided the kitchen because it triggered the hallucinations, each one more vivid and terrifying than the last. He never noticed his thinness before. Not until this morning when he takes a quick shower before work and makes the mistake of looking in the mirror, a passing look over his shoulders before the stranger stops him with that one glance, noticing the jutting ribs first, then his hollow eyes. As he properly looks himself over for the first time in some months, he realises he doesn’t remember what he used to look like before that phone call on June 27th informing him that Mr. Edward Thomas has died at McKellers Hospital at 9:12 PM. You were listed as next of kin. We’re sorry.

Anita gets a call later at work, hears a murmured apology from Jordan who suspiciously sounds as though he had been crying. She tells him to stay where he is, hangs up, and prays. Twenty-five minutes later (and undoubtedly getting fired for leaving work without notice), she unlocks the door with the spare key that Jordan gave her and finds her best mate in the closet with pictures scattered everywhere and blood. Blood. Jordan tries to explain it was an accident. He hadn’t been trying to commit suicide. He cut himself while he had tried to shave and his hand shook so badly—but shaving cuts don’t happen on wrists.

“Scarlet passion,” he whispers, and baptises a picture of two men smiling exotically from Spain.

Anita doesn’t understand. She fears too much.

It’s okay now. His heart is dead.

~   .   i     a m     h u r t i n g   .   ~

Four months later he packs up Edward’s things in a box, as part of slowly unEdwarding himself. He’s getting better at addressing his dead lover by name now, and more comfortable talking about the things he bottled up in the six months leading to his breakdown. He’s medicated; a genuine crackpot. Anita tells him not to call himself that, but he can’t help it.

Anita, being a nerd and well-meaning friend, presented him with a photograph and a vintage ivy-motif picture frame last week, as a Welcome Back present. The photo had been taken in some obscure location in the city. He and Edward smiled brightly at each other and were quite unaware of the camera Anita had been pointing at them. What made it nerdy was the fact that Anita had it reprinted in black and white. He keeps it by his bedside, because he likes the unpretentious sincerity in their eyes, the smiles that aren’t picture-about-to-be-taken smiles.

He puts all the old little trinkets that once endeared him to Edward in the box. He carefully wraps each piece with newspaper and carefully arranges everything inside the box to prevent damage, though he admits some of these things would look better in the garbage. He remembers Edward once telling him his trinkets were everything to him, possessively hugging an antique (that was what it was, no matter how Edward argued) in such a cute way that he allowed it to stay. It was an atrocious little duck-man thing, almost a fiendish parody of a dominatrix Donald Duck.

He sits with the little duck-man thing in his hands on the living room floor.

“He loved this,” he says.

Anita sits down next to him, bringing more old newspapers. “He loved everything.”

“Even the man who killed him?” he asks, out of bitterness.

She pauses, but says with uncommon gentleness: “Edward would say: ‘Better me than you’.”

“He would,” Jordan agrees, sighing. He stares into the faded eyes of the duck-man. Funny, how little things like this could mean so much to someone, even though it is a rather inappropriate thing to be attached to. Edward had always been so odd in that way.

“Stupid bastard,” he murmurs affectionately.

“He found that the day he met you, y’know,” Anita supplies without looking at him. She carefully wraps another bizarre-looking candleholder. It looks like a moth, or a butterfly—no, definitely a moth.

“What?”

“A lady sold it to him, saying it would bring him luck. And being Edward, he bought it right away. Said it was his best investment since starting the shop, but I don’t think he was talking about the trinket.”

For the first time since he’d seen the horrid thing, he smiles at the duck-man.

He thinks of keeping it next to the bed, by the photograph.

~   .   h e l p     m e     t o     b r e a t h   .   ~

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BGM: Duvet, Serial Experiments Lain. Opening song.

Song Mentioned: The Greatest View, Silverchair. Off of Diorama.

I love the herbal teas from Leika Foods, especially yummy ones like these:

Teas Mentioned:

Mango [rosehip, hibiscus, orange leaf, lemongrass, orange peel, citric acid, natural mango flavour, spice]

Mint Velvet [peppermint leaf, spearmint leaf]

Mmm.