Chapter Fifty-Three Letting Go: Part One Learning 5 page

This aspect of my teaching also made my stomach quell down a bit with nervous anxiety. I was not being a child with Gerard. I was not taking and taking and taking with nothing in return. I had been giving him what he had wanted but never found his entire life. All this time, I had been grateful for him finding me. I never thought that he was just as grateful for my face appearing next to him every morning as I was with him. Those mornings of waking up together were soon going to fade, but we were still learning our lessons and I didn’t know how long it would take us to finish, if we ever did.

“This risk idea,” Gerard continued his story after our small embrace. “It was what started to teach me about freedom. I started to feel freer in my own body, mind, and soul. Most of all, with you. I suddenly didn’t care if we got caught. I wanted to be with you, and that was all that mattered. Even when there were times when it was hard, you and those eyes of yours,” he paused, his voice expressing such an emotion as he leaned forward, touching my cheek. He turned my head, gazing into my eyes more and more as he talked. “They would light up again when you saw me, and nothing mattered anymore. I could get lost in them, I swear.”

I let him touch and grip my face, looking into my eyes, but I couldn’t stare back into his. They were too deep and the olive colour was almost gone, the pupil dilated so much. All I kept thinking was that I had felt the same way. Everything Gerard was saying, was a matching parallel with me, at the exact same time. I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long, in the pit of desperation and departure to realize everything. I didn’t want this to be over just yet; we were still finding out so many things about each other that I had no clue about. I looked at Gerard’s torso, counting the bruises for the millionth time that day, my mind wandering. Gerard was giving me freedom and apparently I had given him the same gift. I was free to think and live and be on my own, but what kind of freedom had he obtained? I knew there were so many kinds, like the layers of an onion and intimacy, forming ones on top of the other, fusing together, but I still had no clue.

“Why do you have to leave?” I found myself asking, even if it was redundant and cliché by this point in time.

“Hmmm?” Gerard mumbled, still captivated by my eyes. He raised his eyebrows, pushing his lips forward, paying attention.

“If I taught you all you needed to know, then why do you need to go to Paris? Was there something I missed teaching you?”

I bit my lip at the thought, my stomach dropping out from under me. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so Goddamn naïve for most of our relationship and actually clued into this teaching bullshit before he had been beaten up, maybe he wouldn’t have needed to leave me. Maybe we could have just stayed in his apartment forever, The Eiffel Tower behind us, merely painted on the mural.

“No,” he said right away, cupping my face, petting the side and trying to calm me down. “It’s because of you that I have to go. You made me realize my dream.”

“How?”

“By achieving you own,” he said back, without skipping a beat. Still seeing my frazzled countenance, he took a break, sighing and brushing his own hair over his forehead, regrouping his thoughts. “Without you coming around, I would have still been in this apartment, merely painting my dreams and thinking I was okay with it. You made me realize that there are some things that you can’t just be okay with. You have to fight them to get and truly appreciate them. Like you.”

He smiled at me, grazing my shoulder gingerly, but it did nothing to help me feel better again. I suddenly began to hate when he tried to drag me into the conversation about Paris. It made me feel like it was still all of my fault that he was going, and in a way, it was. But it wasn’t the type of blame you resent. It was the type of blame you love. And I still loved him, in spite of myself and all the things going on around me. If I didn’t, and he didn’t love me back, then this would not be happening. We felt so strongly for each other, but I had thought they were for different reasons for the longest time. We were the fucking same person, and looking at him then, I begun to realize something else.

“Gerard,” I started, letting the words fall from my tongue slowly, because I didn’t know how else to say them. “If we belong together now, what happens when we’re torn apart?”

The thought, I realized, had been haunting me for awhile. If we were two puzzles pieces, coming together and learning simultaneously, what happened when one piece was removed? Would things go back to the way they were? The idea fucking scared me, and I clung onto Gerard.

“You don’t tear. You fly.”

I sighed, my chest hurting as I did it. “But what if I fall, Gerard? What if I can’t fly?”

“You can.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m ready, just like you are,” he said, his head bobbing a bit as he did, the words shaking him. They shook me too, but I was rendered immobile. “We exchanged the same gift, Frank. I gave you freedom, and you gave it right back to me. We’re both ready. That’s how I know you can fly.”

“But you still don’t need to go.”

My sheer desperation from the situation beforehand was coming back, my complete will to not let him slip through my fingers. I thought I had been okay with his Paris departure. It wasn’t my favourite idea, but I could let him go because I was ready, or so he told me. But I wasn’t ready because I still didn’t know all I wanted to about him. I wanted to dive inside his head, scoop out all the knowledge I could.

“I do. I need to walk away from you, so nothing can stop you anymore.”

“You never stopped me before.”

“I know, but you stopped yourself because of me.”

There was a silence that followed the words, as if the sun had crashed down, leaving us in darkness and despair, but one that we could still cling onto. I was growing up; I knew that fact because he had told me it so many times before. He was doing it too, though he was an already grown man. Learning and growing were things that a person never stopped doing and I wondered how we could do it apart from each other.

“We’ll only stop each other as much as we’ll save each other, Frank,” he clarified more, poking the black silence with the sun’s rays. “We’re one in the same. If I’m okay, you’re okay. And though I’m leaving, I’m more than okay.”

And then the sun came back up again, in the small darkness of the bedroom. I should have known it would never end. I wanted to say something back to Gerard. But he didn’t need to hear it. He already knew the answer anyway.

The puzzle we created together was now separating, but we could fill in the missing pieces on our own. I didn’t need Gerard anymore, and he didn’t need me. I wasn’t sure what thought hurt more, but they both left my eyes with a stinging that I couldn’t remove. My eyes were dry, too dry, and ready to fall out of my head if I didn’t do that horrible act once again. I felt the shudders begin to overtake my body, my face and nose start to swell and finally, once the salty tear hit my cheek, the wail started once again.

I wasn’t so embarrassed about crying this time as I had been before, but I still didn’t like the way it made me feel. My chest hurt, and as it heaved up and down again, I felt my headache return, my brain throbbing inside my skull. I didn’t want to leave Gerard, but it was coming closer and closer. Each tear, each perfect droplet falling down and crashing against our two bodies was like a second passing, a second I could never get back, no matter how hard I tried. I had rewound the story of us when I told it to Jasmine, but there was no longer a button to push for this. Gerard didn’t want pictures, and I was going to listen to him. This would only stay in our memories, no matter how harsh and bitter.

I felt Gerard’s arms wrap around me, tucking my head over his shoulder and stroking my hair as the tears kept coming. I clung onto his body, my mouth open in a cry, teeth grazing his shoulder. I was so grateful he had moved me closer because I didn’t know if I could have done it myself. I hated crying, and I hated the time moving, but at least I could pass by those dreaded events with Gerard in my arms the entire time. It made everything a little easier to bear. I felt like a girl crying so much, but I didn’t want to stop. I had accepted crying more now than when I had first started and I saw it as a necessary evil. This was the only way my emotions were going to get out, all of them without compromise. You couldn’t misinterpret a wail or a sob, the way you could twist around words, having them mean something completely different. A tear meant I was sad, too full of emotion that it was leaking out. I was leaking all over the place, and it was okay now. When I was losing something, and gaining it at the same time, it was expected that I cry.

The more Gerard pushed me into his clammy body, the more I began to realize that his breathing was matching mine again. He was crying too, and the thought made me cry harder and harder. We were one in the same, just like he said.

“Gerard,” I choked out, trying to control my mouth that seemed to snap open anytime a particularly hard thought came in. He squeezed me tight, letting me know he was listening. Our heavy and jagged breathing made it a little difficult to hear. “What happened to you?”

“Hmmm?” Gerard questioned and I was forced to clarify my thoughts. I didn’t really know what I had meant right off the bat when I said the words, they just kind of came out. Hearing his talk of how he changed for the better, how I had helped him and gave him freedom, threw me for a loop. All this time I had been so used to seeing a put together, self-assured man. Even as our relationship went on, and he was apparently learning and finding himself, I still saw this self-assured man. His image in my mind never varied, and I thought it never would. He was still there in that light; Gerard the cocky artist, but his words and tears threw me off course.

“I thought you were strong,” I said, the statement coming out more negative than I meant it too. He didn’t take offence, merely scoffed though his laughter, wiping away some wetness before he answered.

“I still am strong. Stronger than ever probably.” His answer satisfied me, but I could tell, through his shudder of a breath that there was still more.

“But…?”

“But,” Gerard agreed, calming down as well. It was ironic, how the next statement which should have made us sob even more, only succeeded in his burying our faces in each other’s neck, accepting our potency, no matter what the degree.

“It’s just that seeing the strength in others, especially those you love, leaves you feeling kind of weak.”

The Dove Keeper [53iv]
The Dove Keeper
Chapter 53iv

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1035