Witching Hour (GBE 43; Reality)(Life as Fiction)

I have never forgiven myself for that night.

It doesn't matter now. I’m not sure why I hold onto it so tightly. I’m not sure why that night sticks fast in my memory, frozen, perfectly preserved so that I can smell your aftershave masking the desperation. So precisely detailed that the sheen of sweat on your forehead shimmers surreally in the half light of my memory and I can still taste the salt on my lips from the kiss I gave you more than a decade a go.

In reality, that night was irrelevant to what followed, wasn’t it? You never said a thing to me. You never hinted that anything was other than fine.

I want to say that I wish you had, but I don’t. It is easier for me to take comfort in my ability to say that I had no idea. That I can say I never saw it coming allows me to reconcile myself to it. I understand why you never said anything to me. I have been where you were since then and it’s a place that you can only go alone. There is no room there for anyone else, because there is nothing that can be said to bring you back from there.

I get that.

I understand, now, what it is like to go days, even weeks with no physical contact. I understand that you cease to exist when you do not exist to someone else. I understand the intoxication of an unexpected touch. How it yanks you back into yourself and you are forced to confront what brought you to that point to begin with.

Then, I did not.

Then, you were just a boy I knew. Just a friend. Just a coworker who would always cover my ass when I was inevitably late. Someone to sit with in the cafeteria and mock the yuppie bitches trying to land rancher husbands who smelled of their daddy’s money. You made me laugh, but you did not exist to me.

Now I understand what happened after, but I do not understand what happened that night.

Why did you come to my room if you didn’t want to let me help you? You were there for hours and you never ever let on what was coming.

You didn’t even say good bye when you left, my lipstick print perfect on your cheek in the dim light of the 3am hallway.

They told me the next morning that you were already gone at dawn.

Two hours from my bed to your grave.

Why didn’t you say something? Was there a plan already formed? Was I some kind of test? A good bye? A last chance? Could I have said something, anything to bring you back from there?

Or was the reality of your life that you had believed there was no other choice?

There was a choice.

There is always a choice. You could have said something. Anything. Asked to stay, asked me to stay with you. I would have.

A decade has passed and most of another and if I could have back that one moment, that pause in the hallway when you turned from the stairs to look at me, I would trade my teasing go home for a come back. I would give you one last hug.

Maybe it would have been enough.