Holy shit I forgot I wrote this
Was going through old files and found an old relic. A character sketch that turned into an interspersed story. College days resurgent.
Aurora was born in a rustic one-room log cabin that she built herself.
At least, she enjoyed telling people that when it came time for the first days of 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th grades. She scanned the room side to side upon announcing it, buried into the list of teacher-imposed questions such as “what is your favorite subject in school?” and student-imposed questions such as “which member of Menudo do you want to have your way with backstage after an especially sweaty performance?” She would pay close attention to who in the audience would nod (ditzes), who would keep looking down at the glossy pages hiding in a lap underneath the desk (inconsiderate fuckers), who would furrow a brow or knock a head back as if to announce their discovery of an error in the presentation (people far too rooted in logistics and procedure to interact with), and who would release a tiny snicker or some other exhalation of charmed comedic approval. That last group was generally the one to begin culling through to see who was compatible for coexisting.
Alas, the non-enumerated grades didn’t offer that opening-day helping hand, and much of her middle school and high school careers were spent alternating between “the shy one,” “the loner,” “the weird one,” “the unique one,” “Honorable Mention,” “the kinda cute mod-ish chick,” “the independent girl,” and “Rora,” which some amicable friends would occasionally call her. These were the same people who would rise to their feet in the applause portion of a poetry reading to shout “ROAR,” with a cheer that can only come from the most devoted and timeless of companions.
But that’s all the past. Aurora is now much more of what she would call “refined.” Not in the greater aristocratic, look-down-your-nose-at-people social sense, but just in terms of not having to bounce around identities quite so often anymore.
###
Modest stack of CDs in cracked cases. Chipped celadon ceramic cup with forty-seven pens poking out like blue quills. Cheap picture frames stacked face to face so that the people depicted therein will have to spend the trip awkwardly staring at one another like passengers on a train that didn’t bring anything to read. The last three issues of Bust Magazine, crinkled from frequent readers and wounded from cut out ads and feature pictures.
This random assortment, this semblance of everyday whatever. This portrait of me all floods into worn cardboard boxes snatched from the grocery store. It’s weird, really, to finally think about moving things around. My clothes go in my laundry bags and suitcase, my rarely-touched blankets fold into a corner of the car, my computer monitor sits in the back passenger seat (to counter my weight on the driver’s side, because dad would freak out if the car was slightly out of balance, sure to fly off the road in a storm of licking flames). But everything else has no place, all the important day-to-day parts; my stapler, my pretentious novels, my telephone all have to cozy up to each other in a thin little box that once shipped cereal from Reno to the rest of the world. They’re the tiny, important pieces that we couldn’t live without; shouldn’t they all have their own little carrying cases? Why should they be so tumbled about? I guess that would get tedious. I would be comfortable with throwing the cases in a box, though, when my life isn’t in transit.
“Hey Rora, you taking the compass?” Colleen asks, holding aloft a tarnished metal disc with a button-latched cover that I always pretended was a pocket watch when I was little.
I try to say yes, but my voice comes out too low to be heard, and I give a quick cough and send a louder “yeah” across the room. She should be back at her place working on note cards for some test she has tomorrow - I can’t even remember the subject - but she insisted that I need help packing. I’ve never been good at it, I always just wait until the night before I have to go, then throw handfuls of possessions into the back of the car the next morning. She’s always planned these things out more. She brought boxes. Really, I just think she didn’t want me to be alone.
“What about the little carton of mustard packets?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? Why do you even have these? I never see you eat the stuff anyway,” she plucks a little plastic container from the carton, swishing the oily yellow liquid inside between her thumb and middle finger. “I mean, if you ever got the craving, do you think there’s some crippling condiment shortage that would prevent you from having some?”
“I dunno, just throw it in there, my dad eats it all the time.” I push out the words with exasperation. I don’t mean to take it out on her, I never do. She nods like a scolded child and slides the item into the corner of a box.
“Are you hungry or anything?” she almost whimpers. “I haven’t seen you eat anything today. I haven’t seen you eat much at all lately, really.”
I tell her I’m fine with a tone that says “shut the fuck up.” Of course I’m not, no one would believe me at this point, but still, I just want to get this done. But really I don’t, I have no desire to throw shit in a box. I want to go home, just not under these circumstances.
###
The person currently using the name Aurora starts her day by waking up to the static fuzzed clack of her gentle wake alarm speaker turning on. She generally leaps across the room immediately to shut it off before the rhythmic electronic wails begin, a sound which she now and forever will associate with a squeezing ache at the bottom left corner of her brain. On certain alternating days she will look back to apologize to the person she stampeded over in her haste, with a whispered “sorry Collie,” occasionally taking the time to hear a grumbled response. Usually pretty good about pulling a clean pair of underwear from the drawer along the other side of her meager, not so rustic, one-room, non-log dorm, she is less adamant about freshness when it comes to sifting some sort of clothing for the day from the swamp of cotton that carpets her otherwise tiled floor. A thin, thin t-shirt and some sort of sweater of varying degrees form-fitting, though preferably with a high, thick neck to add some bulk to her own, which was quite long but definitely not thick. All of this capped on top of a skirt of some dark color, which she had started utilizing at age thirteen to tone down what she felt was her rather pear-like shape, and continued to enjoy long after her body assumed its intended tube-like form.
Her hair, choppy at the ends from the free haircuts administered by her friend Kris, and hinted with slight muddy auburn streaks which barred over her dark chocolate mane-ette (flowing and puffy on occasion, though not nearly long enough to warrant the exalted title of mane), is left to its own devices on most mornings, and sometimes stretched to attention with a green plastic comb if it got a little too chummy with the pillow over the course of the night. A quick glance out the window will usually determine if leggings or bareness are in order, or if a brisk wind will blow her into a pair of tight jeans. Capping it all off with the shoes her six-year-old cousin once likened to pilgrim attire, Aurora is ready for a day of academic pursuits towards a goal of forever ending her academic pursuits.
A Nutra-Grain bar is consumed somewhere in the fray as well.
###
“How was your mom doing today?” Colleen asks, still huddled over the boxes, pulling stacks of office supplies from my desk. I wish I could cheer her up. Or myself, for that matter, so I could stop bumming her and treating her like shit.
“She’s ok. Just wants me home. Wants to be with family right now.”
“Yeah,” she says solemnly.
A quick explanation. My brother Terran was born sixteen years and eight months ago with a wonderful smile, a sunny demeanor, a mild case of awkwardness, and a severe case of wanting to please people. This led him to frequently bend over backwards for his friends. So on Saturday night when four of his douche bag acquaintances wanted him to drive them out to an isolated cow pasture while they made pathetic attempts to utilize a bong carved from an overripe mango, he was happy to do it. Then, when one got paranoid (probably overacting, that little shit) about hearing someone approaching from the darkened field, he protectively hurried them back into his car and launched down the gravel road. Loose, slippery, goddamn pebbles. The flat, subtle hills of rural Pelham mean that any dives off the side of the road won’t go far vertically. It also means there is little inclination for a car to stop rolling, tossing teenagers and fruit shavings about like a god’s food processor.
I was still sleeping in next to Collie when Dad called. Mom would have done it, if she could join syllables yet at that point. It would be another day or so before she could accomplish that.
Suddenly I feel idiotic, sifting through old graded essays and brittle pine cones collected from the courtyard of my dorm.
###
The few hours that the university steals her body, Aurora’s mind generally spends reviewing songs stuck in her head, filing erroneous information just in case, and sending directions to salivate over thoughts of chicken, mushroom, and cheese; three ingredients prevalent in her day-to-day diet when funds permit the first two. When confronted by either a point of addressing a classroom or conversing with someone she intersects paths with on campus, her words are thoughtfully selected despite her sentences being oftentimes improperly constructed, far too short, or excessively run-on. But her demeanor is unbreakable. The only people who can make her stutter are her friends Aeron and Jamie (but only when they are together) and Colleen (the one who she sometimes runs over in the mornings), though admittedly in very different ways.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her abruptly, falling back from upright on my knees to the floor, legs bent at my sides. A stance of defeat; random thought. Her head pops over, to look at me with saddened, furrowed eyebrows that don’t match her hair.
###
“Hey, peach pie, it’s okay,” she assures me, crawling haltingly over the floor as the tile grates against her shins and palms. My first year in this little box it was clean as could be, but they didn’t seem to scrub things down between that and my second year; leaving a desert’s worth of grit flowing about my dorm. It hurts. I know. Rearranging herself to sit cross-legged, Colleen lends an arm in front of me and I latch on to it slowly. She pulls me into her lap, toppling me. I fall easily.
“He never even told them, you know? He never got the chance,” I tell her. Tears are still far off, but I can tell they’re rallying. Colleen looks surprised at my change in tone. How much time do I have to make sense with what I say before they conquer me for an hour or so?
“About being gay?” she asks. We had just been talking about it a few days before.
“They’ll never have any idea. They’ll never know that part.” I’m still speaking slow and overly soft. That usually stunts the approach of the uncontrollable, batshit bawling. To think, I hardly ever used to cry before Sunday.
“You did, though. He had the chance to tell them… it just wasn’t the right time, and you know that you can’t push that, you know it. It’s not like he was totally alone,” she’s running her fingers through my hair, the best comb there is. That’ll make the tears speed up. “He told you, there was someone he felt comfortable telling. A lot of people don’t even get that.” She’s trying hard. But there is no rational voice, no bright side, no softening the blow.
“But no one else will get it. He never told any friends, and Mom and Dad are just going to go through his room and find…” I choke a little bit. Fuck, here we go, “they’ll see all this shit on his shelves and hung on the wall and piled in a drawer but they won’t…” goddammit, just please let me finish talking, “they’ll miss out on this whole huge fucking part of him.”
###
Certain Tuesdays (her least demanding part of the week) her afternoon is spent ambling through downtown from the south end, at the very tip of campus, to the northern edge where her few favorite places to exist reside. Along the way she’ll scan for “help wanted” signs and other indications of offered employment, in the hopes that she can lighten the load from her loans, summer job savings (housekeeping), and generous contributions from her mother, who always remembers to throw a chunk of money in Aurora’s account when depositing her own paychecks from the dealership, and always inquires as to whether her daughter has to pay for water or other utilities (because once she does, maybe she’ll be less carefree with her extended showers).
The family, a very small-nosed Germanic collection of New Hampshire savages (as her distant, Tenneseean pro-life, anti-taxation, pro-antagonizing uncle characterizes her father’s chosen home), has always been exceedingly kind in her eyes, and ridiculously hard-working, leaving her annoyingly bereft of the juiciest material about which to write angst-ridden stories and poems. Though, as displayed by many of her personal interactions and creative works, she’s never had much trouble fabricating something to fit the bill. They were saddened though supportive when Aurora revealed her 1,580-mile-away choice of school, and awkward though eventually supportive when she revealed the part of herself which would send her aforementioned uncle into an eye-rolling “what is the world coming to” hissy fit.
###
“It isn’t lost, you knew it. You’ll always know that part. Maybe that was the bond you and him get, maybe that’s what will set you apart from everyone else for him. I bet he would be comfortable with that, he loved y-“ she cuts her word short, and with the cover of a throat clearing, hopes I didn’t notice her tense,
“…loves you.”
He did, and I know this, and under the blurred shield of salty tears I can pretend that I’m just upset because my parents will probably never know that my brother was gay.
After a few more minutes of clawing at Colleen’s legs, my neck stops twitching and the ends of my lips slowly release and slide back away from my cheeks, which had been divided by my sobbing. Eyes, looking and feeling like they’ve just been scraped against a sidewalk, calm down.
“But what-“ I force a cough to break through the crackling of my voice, “but what else was there, you know?” Colleen looks down at me, and for a second I almost thought I saw water at the corner of her eye. I shroud my own internal storming with youthful backup-terms.
“What else?” She repeats.
“That was one secret that got tossed to me while my foot was halfway out the door. Because I had just come out and he knew I would understand and our parents were still kinda weird about it and he thought it would make me feel better to know. No one else got that one, what else was there in him?” I sit back up, scratching at the edge of my eyelids to soak up the moisture with my finger, a trick I picked up in elementary school for when I didn’t want people to make fun of me. I reach around the box I had been sitting at and pull over a sheet of wide-rule with shaky pencil lines on it; the item which first made me stop, apologize to Collie, and push my legs out from under me.
“He gave me this when I was nine,” I place it in her lap for her to read. It’s a school assignment with ‘Terran’ scribbled at the top right corner. A retelling of his daily routine, mapped out with slightly inaccurate times of the day. Everything from eating Fruity Pebbles while Dad watched the news to playing four-square at recess to having licking contests with Travis, a golden retriever we used to have, who we repeatedly told Terran not to lick, no matter who started it. At the very bottom was an entry set apart with a star, reading “All day long - love mom and dad and arorra.”
“This is the kind of thing he is now. Old pictures, progress reports, birthday cards, clean clothes. Corny shit. Everyone, including me, is going to look through his room and what’s left of his car and see all this stuff and nothing else. Only what he let us see so far. I mean, fuck, he only got sixteen years. Who knows what else he wanted to say? How could he have…?”
Colleen stares back at me, my crying left behind long ago, now. Without noticing it I’m back up on my knees, and I’ve been waving my arms around almost angrily. She doesn’t know what to do, she’s probably scared. I must seem like I’m out of my mind.
“I’m not…” she sucks her bottom lip in slow, pensive, and bites at its sides. “I don’t, I mean I don’t know what to say. I love you, I wish there was more I could say than just that, I wish I could be more of a comfort or something, but…” I love her too. I don’t know if she really means it, I haven’t been sure for the past few months since that jazz started, but right now I really mean it no matter her level of preparedness. Who knows how long I would have gone before letting that rant out. I probably would have ended up breaking down in front of a dozen family members, chiding them for never knowing that Terran was gay. Sure he would have loved that. “I just don’t think you can obsess over that, there’s no way to find out unless he…but even then, if he wasn’t ready to tell you things, or your parents…” she’s grasping out for something of comfort to say to me. “Then maybe you just shouldn’t know.”
I droop down into her lap again. I won’t cry anymore tonight, I don’t think. I read that the idea of catharsis is actually a myth, but I could make a case for it right now.
“I just don’t want him to end up like this, you know?” I stutter out, clutching the decade-old paper in both hands, holding it out in front of my face and staring into it, burning through it, enveloping it. “I don’t want him to be a bunch of shit in a box and a character sketch. I don’t want him to be an itinerary.”
She returns her fingers to my hair and says simply, through grated, scored voice;
“I know.”
I guess I just wanted someone to say that.
###
Colleen, by the way, was still kept hidden from that family. Saved as a carefully planned and conditioned meeting for some visit down the line, and only mentioned when her mother would, in that manner that irkingly caught her off guard but also tugged at her heart because of the effort and attempted involvement, ask “so are there any new girls in your life?” Colleen was the possessor of many traded shirts, a hot-water pot that Aurora never really used anyway, and half of her virginity (the other half belongs to a very dear friend from the winter of age seventeen that she’ll always love in some way, despite the awkward and doomed nature of their sweet, endearing time together).
At least half of the week’s evenings are spent with her, cobbling together some sort of supper in the kitchen of whichever dorm they were spending the night at, and relieving each other of the layers of tension the day has attached. Doing homework while listening to her friend Jamie’s radio show on the college’s station will usually prove enough to make her brain weary by eleven, though the rest of her doesn’t usually make it between the sheets until two in the morning. The night is spent without blankets, due to concerns and discomforts about overheating, and hopefully with an arm draped over a curved shadow filling the other side of the bed, which unfortunately tends to be the side between Aurora and the little loud-mouthed digital demon which waits eagerly to end this most pleasant of times.
###
I fold it up and put it in my pocket. Then just fucking cry.
Aurora was born in a rustic one-room log cabin that she built herself.
At least, she enjoyed telling people that when it came time for the first days of 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th grades. She scanned the room side to side upon announcing it, buried into the list of teacher-imposed questions such as “what is your favorite subject in school?” and student-imposed questions such as “which member of Menudo do you want to have your way with backstage after an especially sweaty performance?” She would pay close attention to who in the audience would nod (ditzes), who would keep looking down at the glossy pages hiding in a lap underneath the desk (inconsiderate fuckers), who would furrow a brow or knock a head back as if to announce their discovery of an error in the presentation (people far too rooted in logistics and procedure to interact with), and who would release a tiny snicker or some other exhalation of charmed comedic approval. That last group was generally the one to begin culling through to see who was compatible for coexisting.
Alas, the non-enumerated grades didn’t offer that opening-day helping hand, and much of her middle school and high school careers were spent alternating between “the shy one,” “the loner,” “the weird one,” “the unique one,” “Honorable Mention,” “the kinda cute mod-ish chick,” “the independent girl,” and “Rora,” which some amicable friends would occasionally call her. These were the same people who would rise to their feet in the applause portion of a poetry reading to shout “ROAR,” with a cheer that can only come from the most devoted and timeless of companions.
But that’s all the past. Aurora is now much more of what she would call “refined.” Not in the greater aristocratic, look-down-your-nose-at-people social sense, but just in terms of not having to bounce around identities quite so often anymore.
###
Modest stack of CDs in cracked cases. Chipped celadon ceramic cup with forty-seven pens poking out like blue quills. Cheap picture frames stacked face to face so that the people depicted therein will have to spend the trip awkwardly staring at one another like passengers on a train that didn’t bring anything to read. The last three issues of Bust Magazine, crinkled from frequent readers and wounded from cut out ads and feature pictures.
This random assortment, this semblance of everyday whatever. This portrait of me all floods into worn cardboard boxes snatched from the grocery store. It’s weird, really, to finally think about moving things around. My clothes go in my laundry bags and suitcase, my rarely-touched blankets fold into a corner of the car, my computer monitor sits in the back passenger seat (to counter my weight on the driver’s side, because dad would freak out if the car was slightly out of balance, sure to fly off the road in a storm of licking flames). But everything else has no place, all the important day-to-day parts; my stapler, my pretentious novels, my telephone all have to cozy up to each other in a thin little box that once shipped cereal from Reno to the rest of the world. They’re the tiny, important pieces that we couldn’t live without; shouldn’t they all have their own little carrying cases? Why should they be so tumbled about? I guess that would get tedious. I would be comfortable with throwing the cases in a box, though, when my life isn’t in transit.
“Hey Rora, you taking the compass?” Colleen asks, holding aloft a tarnished metal disc with a button-latched cover that I always pretended was a pocket watch when I was little.
I try to say yes, but my voice comes out too low to be heard, and I give a quick cough and send a louder “yeah” across the room. She should be back at her place working on note cards for some test she has tomorrow - I can’t even remember the subject - but she insisted that I need help packing. I’ve never been good at it, I always just wait until the night before I have to go, then throw handfuls of possessions into the back of the car the next morning. She’s always planned these things out more. She brought boxes. Really, I just think she didn’t want me to be alone.
“What about the little carton of mustard packets?”
“Yeah.”
“Really? Why do you even have these? I never see you eat the stuff anyway,” she plucks a little plastic container from the carton, swishing the oily yellow liquid inside between her thumb and middle finger. “I mean, if you ever got the craving, do you think there’s some crippling condiment shortage that would prevent you from having some?”
“I dunno, just throw it in there, my dad eats it all the time.” I push out the words with exasperation. I don’t mean to take it out on her, I never do. She nods like a scolded child and slides the item into the corner of a box.
“Are you hungry or anything?” she almost whimpers. “I haven’t seen you eat anything today. I haven’t seen you eat much at all lately, really.”
I tell her I’m fine with a tone that says “shut the fuck up.” Of course I’m not, no one would believe me at this point, but still, I just want to get this done. But really I don’t, I have no desire to throw shit in a box. I want to go home, just not under these circumstances.
###
The person currently using the name Aurora starts her day by waking up to the static fuzzed clack of her gentle wake alarm speaker turning on. She generally leaps across the room immediately to shut it off before the rhythmic electronic wails begin, a sound which she now and forever will associate with a squeezing ache at the bottom left corner of her brain. On certain alternating days she will look back to apologize to the person she stampeded over in her haste, with a whispered “sorry Collie,” occasionally taking the time to hear a grumbled response. Usually pretty good about pulling a clean pair of underwear from the drawer along the other side of her meager, not so rustic, one-room, non-log dorm, she is less adamant about freshness when it comes to sifting some sort of clothing for the day from the swamp of cotton that carpets her otherwise tiled floor. A thin, thin t-shirt and some sort of sweater of varying degrees form-fitting, though preferably with a high, thick neck to add some bulk to her own, which was quite long but definitely not thick. All of this capped on top of a skirt of some dark color, which she had started utilizing at age thirteen to tone down what she felt was her rather pear-like shape, and continued to enjoy long after her body assumed its intended tube-like form.
Her hair, choppy at the ends from the free haircuts administered by her friend Kris, and hinted with slight muddy auburn streaks which barred over her dark chocolate mane-ette (flowing and puffy on occasion, though not nearly long enough to warrant the exalted title of mane), is left to its own devices on most mornings, and sometimes stretched to attention with a green plastic comb if it got a little too chummy with the pillow over the course of the night. A quick glance out the window will usually determine if leggings or bareness are in order, or if a brisk wind will blow her into a pair of tight jeans. Capping it all off with the shoes her six-year-old cousin once likened to pilgrim attire, Aurora is ready for a day of academic pursuits towards a goal of forever ending her academic pursuits.
A Nutra-Grain bar is consumed somewhere in the fray as well.
###
“How was your mom doing today?” Colleen asks, still huddled over the boxes, pulling stacks of office supplies from my desk. I wish I could cheer her up. Or myself, for that matter, so I could stop bumming her and treating her like shit.
“She’s ok. Just wants me home. Wants to be with family right now.”
“Yeah,” she says solemnly.
A quick explanation. My brother Terran was born sixteen years and eight months ago with a wonderful smile, a sunny demeanor, a mild case of awkwardness, and a severe case of wanting to please people. This led him to frequently bend over backwards for his friends. So on Saturday night when four of his douche bag acquaintances wanted him to drive them out to an isolated cow pasture while they made pathetic attempts to utilize a bong carved from an overripe mango, he was happy to do it. Then, when one got paranoid (probably overacting, that little shit) about hearing someone approaching from the darkened field, he protectively hurried them back into his car and launched down the gravel road. Loose, slippery, goddamn pebbles. The flat, subtle hills of rural Pelham mean that any dives off the side of the road won’t go far vertically. It also means there is little inclination for a car to stop rolling, tossing teenagers and fruit shavings about like a god’s food processor.
I was still sleeping in next to Collie when Dad called. Mom would have done it, if she could join syllables yet at that point. It would be another day or so before she could accomplish that.
Suddenly I feel idiotic, sifting through old graded essays and brittle pine cones collected from the courtyard of my dorm.
###
The few hours that the university steals her body, Aurora’s mind generally spends reviewing songs stuck in her head, filing erroneous information just in case, and sending directions to salivate over thoughts of chicken, mushroom, and cheese; three ingredients prevalent in her day-to-day diet when funds permit the first two. When confronted by either a point of addressing a classroom or conversing with someone she intersects paths with on campus, her words are thoughtfully selected despite her sentences being oftentimes improperly constructed, far too short, or excessively run-on. But her demeanor is unbreakable. The only people who can make her stutter are her friends Aeron and Jamie (but only when they are together) and Colleen (the one who she sometimes runs over in the mornings), though admittedly in very different ways.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her abruptly, falling back from upright on my knees to the floor, legs bent at my sides. A stance of defeat; random thought. Her head pops over, to look at me with saddened, furrowed eyebrows that don’t match her hair.
###
“Hey, peach pie, it’s okay,” she assures me, crawling haltingly over the floor as the tile grates against her shins and palms. My first year in this little box it was clean as could be, but they didn’t seem to scrub things down between that and my second year; leaving a desert’s worth of grit flowing about my dorm. It hurts. I know. Rearranging herself to sit cross-legged, Colleen lends an arm in front of me and I latch on to it slowly. She pulls me into her lap, toppling me. I fall easily.
“He never even told them, you know? He never got the chance,” I tell her. Tears are still far off, but I can tell they’re rallying. Colleen looks surprised at my change in tone. How much time do I have to make sense with what I say before they conquer me for an hour or so?
“About being gay?” she asks. We had just been talking about it a few days before.
“They’ll never have any idea. They’ll never know that part.” I’m still speaking slow and overly soft. That usually stunts the approach of the uncontrollable, batshit bawling. To think, I hardly ever used to cry before Sunday.
“You did, though. He had the chance to tell them… it just wasn’t the right time, and you know that you can’t push that, you know it. It’s not like he was totally alone,” she’s running her fingers through my hair, the best comb there is. That’ll make the tears speed up. “He told you, there was someone he felt comfortable telling. A lot of people don’t even get that.” She’s trying hard. But there is no rational voice, no bright side, no softening the blow.
“But no one else will get it. He never told any friends, and Mom and Dad are just going to go through his room and find…” I choke a little bit. Fuck, here we go, “they’ll see all this shit on his shelves and hung on the wall and piled in a drawer but they won’t…” goddammit, just please let me finish talking, “they’ll miss out on this whole huge fucking part of him.”
###
Certain Tuesdays (her least demanding part of the week) her afternoon is spent ambling through downtown from the south end, at the very tip of campus, to the northern edge where her few favorite places to exist reside. Along the way she’ll scan for “help wanted” signs and other indications of offered employment, in the hopes that she can lighten the load from her loans, summer job savings (housekeeping), and generous contributions from her mother, who always remembers to throw a chunk of money in Aurora’s account when depositing her own paychecks from the dealership, and always inquires as to whether her daughter has to pay for water or other utilities (because once she does, maybe she’ll be less carefree with her extended showers).
The family, a very small-nosed Germanic collection of New Hampshire savages (as her distant, Tenneseean pro-life, anti-taxation, pro-antagonizing uncle characterizes her father’s chosen home), has always been exceedingly kind in her eyes, and ridiculously hard-working, leaving her annoyingly bereft of the juiciest material about which to write angst-ridden stories and poems. Though, as displayed by many of her personal interactions and creative works, she’s never had much trouble fabricating something to fit the bill. They were saddened though supportive when Aurora revealed her 1,580-mile-away choice of school, and awkward though eventually supportive when she revealed the part of herself which would send her aforementioned uncle into an eye-rolling “what is the world coming to” hissy fit.
###
“It isn’t lost, you knew it. You’ll always know that part. Maybe that was the bond you and him get, maybe that’s what will set you apart from everyone else for him. I bet he would be comfortable with that, he loved y-“ she cuts her word short, and with the cover of a throat clearing, hopes I didn’t notice her tense,
“…loves you.”
He did, and I know this, and under the blurred shield of salty tears I can pretend that I’m just upset because my parents will probably never know that my brother was gay.
After a few more minutes of clawing at Colleen’s legs, my neck stops twitching and the ends of my lips slowly release and slide back away from my cheeks, which had been divided by my sobbing. Eyes, looking and feeling like they’ve just been scraped against a sidewalk, calm down.
“But what-“ I force a cough to break through the crackling of my voice, “but what else was there, you know?” Colleen looks down at me, and for a second I almost thought I saw water at the corner of her eye. I shroud my own internal storming with youthful backup-terms.
“What else?” She repeats.
“That was one secret that got tossed to me while my foot was halfway out the door. Because I had just come out and he knew I would understand and our parents were still kinda weird about it and he thought it would make me feel better to know. No one else got that one, what else was there in him?” I sit back up, scratching at the edge of my eyelids to soak up the moisture with my finger, a trick I picked up in elementary school for when I didn’t want people to make fun of me. I reach around the box I had been sitting at and pull over a sheet of wide-rule with shaky pencil lines on it; the item which first made me stop, apologize to Collie, and push my legs out from under me.
“He gave me this when I was nine,” I place it in her lap for her to read. It’s a school assignment with ‘Terran’ scribbled at the top right corner. A retelling of his daily routine, mapped out with slightly inaccurate times of the day. Everything from eating Fruity Pebbles while Dad watched the news to playing four-square at recess to having licking contests with Travis, a golden retriever we used to have, who we repeatedly told Terran not to lick, no matter who started it. At the very bottom was an entry set apart with a star, reading “All day long - love mom and dad and arorra.”
“This is the kind of thing he is now. Old pictures, progress reports, birthday cards, clean clothes. Corny shit. Everyone, including me, is going to look through his room and what’s left of his car and see all this stuff and nothing else. Only what he let us see so far. I mean, fuck, he only got sixteen years. Who knows what else he wanted to say? How could he have…?”
Colleen stares back at me, my crying left behind long ago, now. Without noticing it I’m back up on my knees, and I’ve been waving my arms around almost angrily. She doesn’t know what to do, she’s probably scared. I must seem like I’m out of my mind.
“I’m not…” she sucks her bottom lip in slow, pensive, and bites at its sides. “I don’t, I mean I don’t know what to say. I love you, I wish there was more I could say than just that, I wish I could be more of a comfort or something, but…” I love her too. I don’t know if she really means it, I haven’t been sure for the past few months since that jazz started, but right now I really mean it no matter her level of preparedness. Who knows how long I would have gone before letting that rant out. I probably would have ended up breaking down in front of a dozen family members, chiding them for never knowing that Terran was gay. Sure he would have loved that. “I just don’t think you can obsess over that, there’s no way to find out unless he…but even then, if he wasn’t ready to tell you things, or your parents…” she’s grasping out for something of comfort to say to me. “Then maybe you just shouldn’t know.”
I droop down into her lap again. I won’t cry anymore tonight, I don’t think. I read that the idea of catharsis is actually a myth, but I could make a case for it right now.
“I just don’t want him to end up like this, you know?” I stutter out, clutching the decade-old paper in both hands, holding it out in front of my face and staring into it, burning through it, enveloping it. “I don’t want him to be a bunch of shit in a box and a character sketch. I don’t want him to be an itinerary.”
She returns her fingers to my hair and says simply, through grated, scored voice;
“I know.”
I guess I just wanted someone to say that.
###
Colleen, by the way, was still kept hidden from that family. Saved as a carefully planned and conditioned meeting for some visit down the line, and only mentioned when her mother would, in that manner that irkingly caught her off guard but also tugged at her heart because of the effort and attempted involvement, ask “so are there any new girls in your life?” Colleen was the possessor of many traded shirts, a hot-water pot that Aurora never really used anyway, and half of her virginity (the other half belongs to a very dear friend from the winter of age seventeen that she’ll always love in some way, despite the awkward and doomed nature of their sweet, endearing time together).
At least half of the week’s evenings are spent with her, cobbling together some sort of supper in the kitchen of whichever dorm they were spending the night at, and relieving each other of the layers of tension the day has attached. Doing homework while listening to her friend Jamie’s radio show on the college’s station will usually prove enough to make her brain weary by eleven, though the rest of her doesn’t usually make it between the sheets until two in the morning. The night is spent without blankets, due to concerns and discomforts about overheating, and hopefully with an arm draped over a curved shadow filling the other side of the bed, which unfortunately tends to be the side between Aurora and the little loud-mouthed digital demon which waits eagerly to end this most pleasant of times.
###
I fold it up and put it in my pocket. Then just fucking cry.