Chapter Forty-Four Love: Part One: Survival 2 page

Something inside me broke, realizing all of the circumstances leading up to this. My hopes had been high, too high, because I was relying on assumptions. The last time I had spoken with the man before me, he had still been despondent. Not nearly as much as he was now, but when we had talked before, we had fought. We didn’t even really fight; you needed two people for that. It had just been myself yelling and confused while he took it. I was coming back into his apartment right where we had left off, only now there was no hope of recovery because the cops had taken it all away. I had been making too many assumptions again. I thought Gerard would be happy to see me, want to see me, and more importantly, want to love me. But I stood before him, my head sinking into my chest much like his own that refused to look at me for longer than three seconds. He was begging me to leave. He didn’t want me there. And though I knew it wasn’t my fault, I knew if I had never even gotten so mad at him beforehand, none of this would have ever happened.

“Are we over?” I asked him suddenly against the dull backdrop of silence. The question itself had been almost a constant entity inside my head, but breathing life into it was a completely different matter. My eyes were closed, face cringed, and fists clenched just anticipating the answer.

“We shouldn’t have even started,” Gerard said with another sigh, almost as flat as the canvases he painted on, or used to paint on. He hadn’t done anything to do with art since I had left; I could see that in the apartment, on his clean hands, and more often than not, his eyes. Not only was the covering there, but that gleam of passion had been snuffed out to embers.

“Don’t say that,” I begged to him quietly, his words constricting my chest so much that even if I wanted to yell at him, I couldn’t have.

We stayed in the thick silence for a while, neither of us wanting to tackle the issue that hung in the air like cigarette smoke. I was the braver one, repeating my claim from before.
“Are we over?”

“No.”

It was a firm no, a definite one, and he even shifted his weight, staring me in the eye again. I would have breathed out a sigh of relief, but the flat tone and the ever so pained expressed in Gerard’s countenance made me keep holding my breath, along with my hopes.

“Not yet,” he added like a footnote, and I dropped everything to the ground.

“Don’t say that!” I exclaimed, my words coming out through gritted teeth. I clenched my fists, but fought the urge to swing them around. I wasn’t trying to be big, intimidating, or trying to get his attention. I had his attention, he was looking at me. But it didn’t mean he was listening.

“Don’t say ‘yet’, Gerard…Don’t say we shouldn’t have started. Don’t say that…”

“What do you want me to say then?” he asked me back, moving suddenly and waving his arms in defeat. His eyes bulged out at me, begging me for something more. I felt my stomach and heart flutter, finally getting an emotional response out of him. It wasn’t a hard and flat tone anymore; his voice had ridges and mountains again, and though he was still stuck in one of the pits, I knew how I could get him out.

I had forgotten about the bag on my back, slowing crippling me and making me forget about the camera inside, but I had not forgotten the other reason I needed to see him.

“I love you,” I said, almost as a beg. I wanted him to stop telling me to leave, and to just give into his feelings. I knew it was a hard thing to do; it had taken me long enough to realize this unquenchable emotion, but I had it now, and I gripped it hard. I needed to thrust it upon him and have him know it too.

The way his back stiffened, eyes widened even more, and body turned away, I had a feeling that Gerard was rejecting my gift, even though it was something that I could never, ever take back to the store.

“Not right now,” he told me, almost defiant. He ran his hands through his hair, touching his temples in pain. “Not right now…”

“Then when Gerard? When can I tell you I love you?” I objected, stepping up the staircase even more. I was on the same level as the bench now, but still a few paces from him. I stopped where I was, knowing that I had to take this slow. “When are we allowed to do things together again? We’re running out of time right now. We were caught once. I know you don’t want it to happen again, but we can’t just stop seeing each other. We need each other, I know that. But more importantly, I need you. When am I going to be ready?”

My words had been long winded and chained together, but of the necklace they made, the last gem stuck out. I saw Gerard’s eyebrow move, and even a little bit of his smile form, recognizing the dove inside of me, the dove that was no longer in his apartment. He breathed out easily, but still didn’t say anything to me.

“You told me you would never leave me until I was ready to fly, Gerard,” I pestered further, playing on the weak spot I had observed. Again, the eyebrow twitched, and again I kept going. “I’m not ready, Gerard, clearly. Just look at me.”

I stepped in front of him, not caring if it was a sudden movement. I didn’t touch him, just stood there and let him look at me. I motioned with my arms up and down my body, and though I had caught his gaze at first, when he saw me present myself fully like that, he grew scared again and turned away. He stared at my feet, like I had done with Jasmine earlier.

“No, Gerard,” I said, getting down on my knees to be eyelevel with him. I grasped his hands that were on his legs, not giving a damn if I scared him anymore. He may have been scared, but at that exact moment, so was I. I was about to lose the only thing that had meant something in my life, and I couldn’t just let it go away willingly – especially since Gerard wasn’t willing. I could see that there was still something there, a small part of him trying to break through that film and practically leaping to the other side. I had to be persistent.

“Look at me, Gerard.” I paused, squeezing the tops of his hands in place more as he tried to squirm. “Just look at me and see how I’m not ready to leave you.”

He tried to move his gaze away a few times, but I kept following him, my hands overtop of his, not interlinked. Finally he gave up, lured into me by seeing some small detail. I felt myself beam inside, grateful that he could finally notice the sheer desperation in me. His whole body relaxed, easing into something else entirely. We were still far, far away from positive emotions, but Gerard had seen something, at least temporarily, to delude himself from his own pain. I even let one of his hands go free as he reached it forward, his brow furrowing as his soft fingers touched my cheek. And that was when I knew what he was really looking at.

The mark from my father’s hit. It hadn’t been large, or really anything that significant. It was merely a few burst blood vessels from being so worked up and the sheer brunt of the action. I had been surprised the thing had not gone away yet, but I figured with the stress of the upcoming legal proceedings and not being able to see Gerard, it had continued to flame and stayed there. I had even stopped noticing them myself, thinking they were a part of my daily face. It almost looked like small bits of acne – nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t really study myself that often, and no one, aside from Gerard just then, had noticed. Not Tom, my shrink, the doctor, or even Jasmine had mentioned it.

When I had told Gerard to finally just look at me, he had been the first person to observe my marking. It had been one of the first things he had seen. As his fingers brushed over it gently, I closed my eyes. Not because of pain, but out of something that I knew I could identify as love. Gerard had been the only one to see that marking, to see that side of my pain no one could ever understand. He saw it because he had been through it as well. He had told me about the night his dad had belted him for over an hour, so badly that his brother had to take care of him the next day and that he still had small scars from. This was not a belting, and it wasn’t as severe as Gerard’s dad, but it hurt the same way. It had been for the same essential thing. And that Gerard knew. He wasn’t going to sit and lecture me, yell at me, or start to compare stories and battle wounds because we already knew. I didn’t have to have a massive tangible scar for the emotional pain of being beaten by a parent. Gerard knew that. We didn’t need to speak it.

Gerard didn’t even have to see much of anything to know what the marking was. He was an artist; they were supposed to notice details. I saw a light in his eyes just then, realizing a clear distinction between the two categories he had lost himself in. Artists notice the details that the monsters make. He couldn’t be both of them; they weren’t the same thing. He was an artist, always had been, and always would be.

At that moment, his artistic finger brushed over my warm skin, around my ear, and rested on my shoulder. It was a heavy weight, but a good heavy. It was constant and comforting and so fucking familiar. I suddenly felt Gerard’s other hand go to my shoulder, then tucking behind my back, grasping the nape of my neck and pulling me closer to him. I let myself go, the air rushing out of my lungs. We were getting somewhere. He placed our foreheads together, and I found myself somewhat disappointed that our lips hadn’t met as well. I could feel his breath on me, and knew this act was just as intimate. It was safer for Gerard, who was still shell-shocked from all of the painful memories coming back to him. First the police and their atrocity, and now his own father.

“I’m so sorry,” he finally breathed, pushing our foreheads together more. His voice quivered, but he did not cry. It was just too intimate, painfully so for the both of us. I ran my own hands down his clothed arms, then to the nape of his own neck, feeling the warmth of his skin.

“Don’t be,” I insisted. “You don’t have to apologize for something that’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault.”

“No, it’s not.” I dug my hands into his back, showing him my sincerity.

“Yes,” he said with more finality, pressing back. He took a long breath, closing his eyes and furrowing his brow against my own. The next words he spoke were the quietest that had ever come out of him. They were like a ghost, wandering the hallways of his memories, still plaguing him to this very day. “I could have taken your life away.”

“I could have taken yours.”

Gerard had almost died when he was a child at the hands of his father, but I knew, or at least I hoped that it would never happen to me. But Gerard - he had almost been dead himself when I had arrived. The cops could take away life so easily without even knowing it, thinking that they were saving one in the progress. If they had been successful, they would have only caused two people to burn out, while their souls died all together. Thankfully, somehow, life was being pushed back into Gerard’s veins. I could feel warmth in his grip and in his words; I needed it to stay like this. And stay like this forever, even if there was no such thing.

“I don’t have much life left to take, Frank,” he stated weakly.

“Gerard…” I pulled away from his head for a moment, my hands still on his body as I positioned our faces at a close eyelevel. “You’re not as old as you say you are.”

He nodded, pursed his lips a bit as he answered, “Yes. But they make me feel that way.”

“Fuck them. Ignore them. They’re wrong.” I paused for a moment, watching him nod vaguely before I continued. “How do I make me you feel?”

“Younger,” he answered with a small scoff and a sigh of certainty, bringing his eyes up to meet my own. “Better. Happier.” He smiled weakly, and it seemed like it had been the most he had done in ages.

I became aware that our faces were navigating closer again, but it wasn’t just our foreheads that were going to touch. We were going to kiss, but we were going agonizingly slow. It was almost as if Gerard was unsure of the action itself, acting as if we had not done it about a million times beforehand. His eyes dipped and dropped all around, as if expecting something to change in my willing countenance. I wanted to kiss him, but in the back of my mind, there was still that one question, that one urge I had to get out, and I sacrificed his lips for it.

“Do I make you feel in love?”

I couldn’t help my high hopes from before coming back again, a light smile twisting on my face, ready and willing to kiss right after I got my answer. However, Gerard merely sighed and pulled away again. His hands slid down from the nape of my neck to my knees, while I still desperately tried to cup my hands on his arms.

“I told you before,” he started critically. “I don’t love. I consume.”

I smiled despite the minor rejection, remembering my thoughts from before. Love and consumption were practically the same thing in my mind. And though Gerard told me he consumed me nearly everyday, I needed him to say love. Love made it sound a lot more pure, a lot more whole – a lot more validated. Not that we needed validation from each other, but we needed validation for the outside world. We were not going to tell anyone ever again about this, and we were going to be extra careful this time around, but we needed that love element in there. It gave us something extra to fight for. Also, I needed to know if my feelings were reciprocated. I could decipher they were by his actions, but those could be misread. Words could be tossed around like they were nothing, and easily misread, but I knew from his hesitation to say it, that this was sacred to him. It was not something he said every day – it seemed like something he didn’t want to say at all. He was afraid, but even so, people are only afraid for a reason.

“You have to love something,” I told him, coaxing him into my appeal. He looked up at me skeptically, but I merely shrugged my shoulders. “You just have to. It’s conditioned into humans. We have to love.”

“I don’t have to do anything,” he shot back at me, his voice low. He turned his head away and looked down, bringing one of the hands that was placed on me to his mouth, biting his nails or twisting his hair in between his fingers.

He’s nervous, I realized, noticing his habits.

“I don’t have to love. I can’t love.”

I felt myself smile because, for once, I knew something that he didn’t. In order to avoid something, you had to manifest it – give it a name and a significance so you could escape it. By doing these actions though, it only made the force more prevalent in your life. Gerard was doing this with love, and though it was deeply rooted in fear, it was still there.

“You can love, Gerard. Trust me, you can. And you’re amazing at it”

“No. I really can’t. I can do many things in this earth, but that emotion…” He laughed, almost skeptically. “That fucking emotion. It always tricks me. Eludes me in one way or another. It’s a lie, Frank. Love has always been a lie.”

“I’m not lying. I can’t be lying. Loving someone doesn’t make you a liar.”

“Right…It just makes you stupid.”

“How?”

“Because you only end up destroying it in the end.”

And then, everything went silent.

I used to think his saying – you destroy the things you love – was brilliant. So truthful. But now I wasn’t so sure. He was talking about a different kind of destruction here. An accidental kind. I was used to the purposeful. The smashing of your paintings just because you had more power than them. But this… he was talking about dropping a painting before he had been able to love it completely. This wasn’t enlightening, this was painful. But then again, I guessed that was all love was supposed to be.

Before, I wanted to destroy Gerard because I thought he would hurt me, because his lessons were useless. Now I wanted to covet him, that love feeling, hold it forever and ever. But forever didn’t exist. I knew that. I wanted it to, but it wouldn’t. Would I destroy Gerard when I didn’t want to? Would he just be an accident in my life? Would I hold him so much that he would break and crack and fall away from me? That was what happened in life, I began to realize. You either chose to destroy the thing you loved, so it wouldn’t hurt you, or you tried to keep it alive and failed. Even if you didn’t want to destroy them in the first place, they would leave anyway. If you just cut out that middle ground of hurt and just do it yourself, you saved yourself a lot of woe.

Was that all Gerard was trying to do? Hurt me so I didn’t hurt him, forget the love and just think of consumption? You could still fail with consumption. Things and people could still leave you in that scenario. It just didn’t hurt as much.

But love had to hurt. Destruction had to hurt – it wouldn’t be called destruction if it didn’t. Whether it was by an accident, or purposeful, everything always hurt. We were a prime example of that.

But you needed pain to remember things. I was going to make sure Gerard didn’t fucking forget.

“I can tell you love me,” I started slowly, unsure of how to gather my thoughts properly. “I can tell from the way you act around me. You take care of me. You let me come over when I want. The way you touch me isn’t just sexual. I can see, and more importantly, I can feel love in you.”

I found his hand again, squeezing it hard to emphasize my point, because I had no words left. He squeezed back, not as hard. I could see the pain in his eyes. They squinted, exposing the crows’ feet as his lips pursed together, fighting something he wanted to come out.

“Gerard, you’re so capable of love it’s fucking astounding.” I squeezed his hand again, I thought I would never stop. “And I know, I just know, that you love me.”

“Then you don’t need me to say it,” he finally cut in, dropping my hand mid-grip and letting it rest on his knee like a dead weight. He heaved a heavy breath, but he was not mad at me or anyone else for that fact. I could see the amount of confliction running through him. Though my insides were tearing apart bit by bit, oh-so slowly, I needed to press forward. He would have done the same for me.

“I do need to hear it. I know you need me, and consume me, but I need to know if love is there, too. I need you to tell me for clarification and validation in my own head for my own feelings -”

“I don’t know how you’re feeling. I’m not inside your head.”

“You don’t need to be,” I interjected, coming forward. I had been in a combination of squatting and standing on my knees, and the pain from positioning had started to kick in. I shifted myself, building up body and mental strength. I looked him in the eyes, letting him know that he didn’t have to be inside my own head to get what I was feeling. I found his hand again, interlocked our fingers, and started squeezing again.

“I love you.”

“You don’t love me, Frank.”

In the silence that had passed before, I never thought those would have been the words to come out of his mouth. He could call me a liar and say I would only destroy that love – those were very Gerard things to say. But denying the emotion all together? Especially in someone else? No way. He always told me that feelings were feelings. They just were. There was no use denying them. Why had he changed to brutally?

I knew how I felt, and it hurt ten times more that he was discrediting it into nothing. I would have almost rather had him just tell me he didn’t love me back than to tell me my feelings were invalid.

“You’re too young,” he added as his only explanation.

But this wasn’t an explanation to anything. Just a contradiction in all of his teachings. He was discrediting my feelings, saying they weren’t there, but the justification he was giving just didn’t work. It didn’t compute. You didn’t need to be any age to love. You just needed to do it and be aware of it. Fuck, I thought Gerard of all people would know that.

“Stop telling me I’m too young,” I demanded, hardened edge in my voice. I dropped his hands but still kept my hands on his body. I needed to feel connected to him at least in some form. “Everyone has been telling me I’m too young.”

“Everyone’s been telling me I’m too old.”

“Then you should know how I feel,” I enunciated, combining both of our desperation into one single statement. Even though I had said the words, they never truly hit me until they were in the air. Gerard and I always felt for each other, I knew he was hurting and he knew I was frustrated, but it had never occurred to us that we were feeling the exact same things at the same time, caused by the same situation.

The police had both questioned our roles in our relationship. They had treated me as the victim, while he was the monster. I thought it felt bad being looked down upon for something that I had had done to me (especially since it was false), but I had never given the consideration of the opposite spectrum of events. Being made out to be a monster was a horrible thing, and Gerard had almost lost himself in that. I had almost lost myself in the victim façade, questioning his actions since the beginning. We had both been trying to shed that role that other people had placed on us. We wanted to love each other, I saw that in his eyes, but we were still faced with so many difficulties. Our ages were being cursed, whether it was too young or too old, it didn’t matter. The feelings of rejection for age still felt the same, especially when it was used in the sole basis of a matter so important like love and this relationship. We were still together – Gerard had said we were not over. But it was when we acted like this, not knowing that we felt the same thing, that we were so close to letting it slip all away. It was so hard to see your own reflection sometimes, even when it was standing right in front of you. Or sitting, in our case. We had everything we ever wanted, but everything we couldn’t have in our hands. We just needed to grasp it without the help or hindrance of others.

“We’re becoming the people we hate,” Gerard stated, bewildered, coming to the same conclusion at the same time in his own mind. I looked up at him, his eyes open wide but staring off into the distance while his mouth was drawn into a clever pout.

“And it’s times like these,” I started, clutching his hands and making him look down back at me, “where I know I do love you.”

The words hung in the air again, only having stronger merit this time. I could back them up; I loved Gerard because I needed to. We were one person, one soul, and we felt the same things. If I loved him, he loved me. I just needed to get him to open his eyes and let it fall from his pursed lips. His eyes were open, but as the sentiments still hung, draped in the tension, his lips didn’t move into the formation I wanted them to.

“Frank,” he started again, in that tone I hated. I crushed my eyes shut, knowing what was coming next, but not expecting it at the same time. “You don’t love me. You love the idea of me.”

I nearly choked and coughed out loud, not of anger this time, but of sheer absurdity. Gerard furrowed his brows again, for once not in the same feelings as before. He looked down at me, wondering why I had suddenly grown a sense of humor.

“The idea of you, Gerard? The idea of a forty-seven-year-old fag pedophile? No, I don’t love that Gerard.” I smiled, presenting to him the clear facts that hurt just as much as made us both chuckle. I marveled at his grin for a moment; how his smooth cheeks tacked up his lips with such a force, wanting to break free from the serious countenance he had possessed for too long beforehand. I watched his cigarette-stained, tiny teeth impart in his jaw, his lips even raising high enough to expose his dark fleshy gum.

“I don’t love that Gerard,” I started, referring to the prior, inaccurate model. “I love Gerard the artist. The teacher. The philosopher. The friend. The mentor. The everything…” I paused, and for the first time since we had connected, I felt Gerard give me a squeeze.

“Fuck,” I gasped, taken aback by it all. I was scared again, but this was a good fear. “I love you.”

I closed my eyes after I said the words, letting the feeling of his hand in mine, the love inside my chest, and just everything reverberate through me. His response was still nothing but silence, but it still felt good. I needed to get those words off my chest, and it seemed that with each time I said them, it became easier and easier for me to handle. I wanted to scream it, to yell it, and not have anyone give a damn.

Gerard heaved a contented sigh, and there was a part of me that thought maybe that would be enough to get through the rest of my life. I knew he loved me; he didn’t have to say it. I just would have been nice.

I suddenly felt him slink his other hand around my arms again, pulling me into another hug. I still kept our other hands clasped together, as if to prove our bonding love or some foolish thing in my mind. His hand brushed the back of my hairline as I turned my face into his neck, breathing him in again. He didn’t smell like he usually did; a mix of his weird European shampoo and cigarettes, making me think it had been awhile since he had bathed.

He got that way when he was depressed, he had told me earlier, sometimes not bathing for days on end. He said he went nearly a month after his mother died, until Raymond had to practically fling buckets of water on him, when begging hadn’t worked. It was a comfort thing, Gerard had told me. He kept his clothing on and the layers of dirt surrounding him because it was something he was familiar with. He didn’t want to show his new skin to the world, so he never washed it. Most people didn’t eat when people died, but Gerard loved food, so as an alternative, he didn’t wash. It made my heart ache as I hugged him, literally smelling the depression on him. I didn’t need him to tell me he loved me. It would be nice, but a lot of things would have been nice. Like actually being allowed to go out with him in public without people accusing him of rape constantly.

“I can’t express my love for you right now,” Gerard stated with as much emotion as possible when we had ended the hug, but even with that added emphasis, it still came out cold and sterile, fact-like. I tilted my head to the side a bit, furrowing my brow.

“Why?” It was like he wasn’t ready yet, when I knew that he was one of the most assured people I knew. I was the one who wasn’t ready, and the words came so easily to me.

“Because if I said I love you to you, I would be saying it to your idea,” he stated, using his term from before that I hated. He gave me a weak smile for his weak argument, clinging onto something before he would actually give in and let himself feel out loud. He was always able to bleed his soul out on canvas, to color the world with whatever shade he was, but this was coming so hard to him. Maybe the paint fumes and lack of art had affected him deeply, his emotions not coming out through words. Maybe he would have to paint me a picture before he could say the words, or maybe, just maybe, he could say the very same thing in a slue of pastels and charcoals.

“I can’t express my love for Frank the seventeen-year-old jailbait. I just can’t.”

“That’s not me,” I argued, my smile wide and not as hurt as his own. “I’m not Frank the jailbait. I’m Frank the guitarist, even though I can’t play all that well anymore. The painter that you helped create. The friend, the student, and as much as people want to fight it, I’m Frank the lover. Your lover.” I paused for a second, looking him hard in the eye. He stared hard back, and gave me another squeeze as I went on. “I’m Frank the photographer –“

“Photographer?”

“Yes, photographer,” I smiled, forgetting the point I had had before.

I unleashed the backpack, pulling it in-between our two bodies. It took me mere seconds to undo the zipper and pull forth from the pack my new passion in life. I casually draped the heavy object and its newly bought strap (a present from Jasmine) in my hands in front Gerard for us both to marvel at.

“The photographer,” he stated slowly, a proud smile spreading across his lips as he gazed at the lens.

All of the hurt, pain, and confusion we had been plagued with for the past half hour had dissipated with the presence of this object. We both looked at it in a state of sheer and utter amazement. And right then, I knew for sure it was what I was supposed to do, and seeing the look of approval in Gerard’s eyes only sealed the deal.

“Yeah,” I agreed again, not really knowing what else to say. The air from before was being masked by something I couldn’t put my finger on. It could have been love or acceptance or even a newfound respect because I had found this passion on my own. Regardless, it was a welcome change.

“And look,” I added, a thought coming into my head. I gave Gerard the camera to hold, which he took gratefully, as I placed my hands in front of us to display the area that had once been a void, the camera now filling the space. “It fits with my hands. I’m supposed to do this.”

All Gerard did was smile along with me, his baby-like teeth and the stains running across them almost blinding. He wrapped his own hand in the one I displayed and tugged it tightly. We smiled together, and looking down, I noticed something else in my hands.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 520