Two Boys Kissing(31)
We would wake in the middle of the night. Sometimes there were tubes down our throats. Sometimes we were attached to machines that seemed more alive than we were. Sometimes the darkness was laced with light. Sometimes we had been dreaming we were home, and that our mother was in the next room. We didn’t know the room we woke into, or we knew it too well. The last stop. Final destination. And there we were, trapped in those endless, unforgiving hours. Unable to sleep. Unable to live. Unable to leave.
The world is quieter now. It is never quiet, but it can get quieter. What strange creatures we are, to find silence peaceful, when permanent silence is the thing we most dread. Nighttime is not that. Nighttime still rustles, still creaks and whispers and trembles in its throat. It is not darkness we fear, but our own helplessness within it. How merciful to have been granted the other senses.
There are very few lights on in this town at four in the morning. Most of the ones that are on were left on by accident. There are one or two night readers, one or two night wanderers, one or two night workers to be found. But most everyone else is asleep.
We are the ones who are awake.
Except on the front lawn of the local high school. There, two boys remain kissing. Muscles sore, mouths tired, eyelids weighty, Harry and Craig hold on to each other, hold on to the forces inside them that will keep them awake. At four in the morning, you can be so light-headed that even the stars seem to have a sound. Harry and Craig sway to the sound of those stars—the few that glimmer over their heads—but also to the sound of all of the unseen stars, all the nebulae that are out of reach but still present. At four in the morning, you can imagine the whole universe is looking down at you. Harry and Craig dance for the universe, and also for the friends who have gathered, the ring of people that remains around them. Mr. Ramirez is snoring lightly in his chair. Tariq’s fingers tap out a language on his keyboard as he responds to questions from Rome and Edinburgh and Dubai. Smita’s mom takes orders for coffee. Jim laughs at something another boy from tech crew has said. Mr. Bellamy, our Tom, tells his husband all is well, that he should go home and get some sleep. Harry and Craig dance to these sounds, too. Craig needs to be held, and Harry is holding him. Harry is letting his mind wander—to books he’s read, to movies he’s seen, to things he may want to say to the tens of thousands of people who are watching them. But Craig’s mind doesn’t wander much farther than Harry. With everything that’s happened, Craig is retreating into the closeness of Harry, the familiarity of his body, of him. This is what he missed when it was gone, what his loneliness calls out for. He knows the reason Harry is kissing him, but he still feels it as a kiss. He can’t help it, because it helps him. He can’t help it, because right now he needs it so much.
He is not wrong to do this. When you need to hold on to something, you should. Whatever gets you through, take it.
Harry needs him, too. Even if he’s not concentrating on that need right now, it’s there. He is so safe within it that he hardly realizes it’s present. Like the coolness of the night, like the small sounds that soundtrack the stars.
We know what it’s like to need to hold on. We hold on to you. Which is to say, we hold on to life.
You have music at your fingertips. Any song you want to hear, there it is.
We marvel at that. The infinite jukebox.
If we want to hear a song, we must steal the sound waves that you send into the air. But there are moments that are so palpable, so in sync with a song we once knew, that it plays itself from some long-lost cassette player that even our memory doesn’t seem to control.
Like the moment Ryan wakes up and thinks of Avery, and the moment (forty minutes later) that Avery wakes up and thinks of Ryan. There is only the sound of their breathing as they blink themselves into the day, only the shift in the mattress, the accidental fall of a pillow to the floor. This should be all that we hear, but there is also the unmistakable sound of Aretha Franklin in our ears, singing “What a Diff’rence a Day Made.” They both wake into happiness instead of uncertainty, into a better version of the world because yesterday was so welcome. There is no way they would articulate it in the same way Aretha does, when she bursts out with “It’s heaven, heaven, heaven when you / When you find love and romance on the menu.” Go and listen to it right now—you have it right at your fingertips, for less than the price of a candy bar. The lyrics sound old, but the music is eternal—that joy in discovering that the right person at the right time can open all the windows and unlock all the doors.
The world wakes up around Harry and Craig.
Harry lifts his feet, wiggles his toes, and only feels soreness, bloat. His back feels like sandpaper has been put between each vertebra. His neck is a wire hanger that an elephant is pulling on. His eyes are dry, but his body is damp. He still smells the egg, feels the egg. But maybe that’s just what sweat smells and feels like after twenty hours. Despite the fact that he’s surrounded by electricity, he finds himself wanting it to rain.
Craig wants to brush his teeth. He and Harry experimented with mouthwash when they were practicing, but it never worked—it was impossible to spit and kiss at the same time. Usually Craig’s fantasies of Harry are elaborate—dancing in tuxedos across the floor of Grand Central Terminal, or canoeing on a lake as the world around them turns instantaneously from summer to fall, all the trees burning into color at once. But now the deepest, clearest fantasy Craig has is of the two of them sitting down. That’s it. Him and Harry, in those two chairs right over there. Sitting down. Not even holding hands. Not kissing. Just sitting there, resting. No one else in the whole world. Just the two of them, sitting down.