(no subject)
The Bridge. || brendon/ryan ||
He has photo frames and photos and he has memories. He's twenty-five and he's in love.
It’s not about suicide, or making the front page of the news, or forcing his father to wake up to himself. It’s about absolutely nothing. It’s about the pull and push of the wind, it’s about leaning dangerously further away from the safety of the bridge, it’s about his fingers loosening around the handrail. He almost smiles. His shirt flutters and he almost cries. He’s eighteen and the wind is biting against his cheeks.
A voice sounds from behind him. “Look, I don’t know you, yeah? And I don’t know what happened to make you think that this is an… appropriate choice. But, dude, maybe you could… come back over?”
Ryan turns his head in surprise, eyes blinking and mouth wide. The other boy is staring at him, caught between helping and running away himself. He turns away with a blush. “I’m not going to jump.” Again he loosens his fingers and feels his body inch closer to oblivion. The breath of his exhale shudders with his heart. “I was never going to jump.”
“Oh.” The other boy is confused now, disbelieving. “I know a fair few people that could probably argue against that. Given your current…position and all.”
Ryan shuts his eyes in content. “Like you said, you don’t know me.”
The other boy is annoyed now. Brows furrowed and lips thinning. “Look, here I am, walking down the street, going home after another day at school and I see this kid. This kid dangling over the edge of a bridge with his eyes shut. What am I supposed to think? That this is a cool hangout that I’ve somehow missed? Sorry, dude, but that seems pretty unlikely.”
Again Ryan turns, glancing over his shoulder at the boy. “My name is Ryan Ross, my father is an alcoholic, I’m a fuck-up at school and the only place I feel I can breathe is on the wrong side of a safety rail. You don’t have to worry about fulfilling any civic duty anymore, so can you please just leave?”
“Well, Ryan Ross, no I can’t.”
**
He’s seventeen. His mother is long gone and his father an unresponsive stain on the lounge. His falling marks depict a perfect arc. His house smells, his bedroom is dark and his stereo hurts his own ears. He’s Ryan Ross and sometimes he cries. Friends he thought were friends turn their heads when they pass in the hallway, enemies he thought were enemies sling arms around those he thought were friends. The world still spins.
He turns his music up, stepping carelessly over clothes and broken china, before collapsing back into his bed. He cries silently into pages eleven and twelve of his university application booklet. The ink spreads and the prerequisites blend into the course names. His anger blends into his sorrow. The booklet hits the floor. The pages stick.
His clock reads 3:07 and he falls asleep.
He’s seventeen and he doesn’t have a plan for the rest of his life. He’s seventeen and he cries himself to sleep once again, ignoring the choking snores of his father and the beat of his heart. He sleeps and perhaps he dreams.
**
He’s alone and he can hear his mother screaming. Screaming and throwing and drinking and screaming. He pulls the worn material of his thrift-store blanket over his head. It does little to muffle the sounds of his mother; it all but deafens his own tears. In the dark he can’t see himself and in the dark he doesn’t exist. He cries like the ten year old boy he really is.
His room is sparse. His life is in the process of decay and he watches as his father takes a swig of amber over his cereal in his dreams. He sees his mother, he sees her broken fingernails and he hates her sun-stained, fake hair and jagged eyeliner.
His hipbones show and his clothes hang awkward. The kids at school don’t notice, the mothers of the kids at school do. The teachers do. The next week his bones protrude further and his clothes hang looser. They see and then, as the turn their heads, they don’t.
His bag is empty. His lunch money non-existent and sometimes he wants people to pressure him about the bruises just to hear their voices, just to imagine their care.
**
He had a friend once. A really good friend. Spencer, that was his name. Spencer didn’t care about the holes in his shirt sleeves, or the food he never had in the lunchbox he didn’t bring to school. Spencer was cool and calm and didn’t mind sharing his peanut butter sandwich with the skinny kid he partnered in science class.
“Spencer,” Ryan would murmur in way of greeting.
The other boy would raise his hand in mock-salute and they would sit in almost silence. Spencer wasn’t popular but he had friends and sometimes these friends would invite him to share a table at the cafeteria, Ryan was always there when they would, his blush would flare in shame and his fingers would pull at the frayed threads of his jacket. He was never included in the invite and couldn’t stop the tears that collected between his lashes.
Spencer would watch all this with a narrowed eye, continuing to eat his sandwich as if nothing had happened before glancing towards his friends. “I’m good,” he would say, “Ryan was just explaining something very cool to me which you wouldn’t understand.”
Ryan’s blush would deepen and his eyes would meet Spencer’s for the briefest of moments as the other boys turned their backs with a flurry of rude names. Ryan was eight and Spencer made his life warmer.
**
On his sixth birthday Ryan is at a pool party. The pool party of a boy in Ryan’s class. He clutches in his hands a gift, wrapped awkwardly in paper from the Christmas before and waits for someone to say hello, at the very least for the boy to accept his gift.
His mother had driven away before he could wave goodbye and he’d made his way towards the front door, head down-turned. He can hear the screams and cries of children having fun and knocks on the door with both fists, eager to enter the pool. The minutes tick past and the door remains a barrier between Ryan and the world. Frustrated tears slip to his chin and he doesn’t understand what he’s done wrong.
He’s six years old and he cries broken sobs between his knees on the front step of a stranger’s house. He cries because he’s lost, he cries because he can imagine the splash of cool water on his legs, he cries because it’s his sixth birthday and the only present his mother had wrapped wasn’t addressed to him, but to the boy who had decided to have a pool party and invite his entire class along for the event. He’s Ryan Ross and he cries until sundown.
**
He’s eighteen and he can feel the hand of a stranger warm against his left shoulder, he can feel the tears carve patterns down his cheeks and he can feel the overwhelming flow of relief.
“Come on, Ry,” the boy says, slipping so easily into nicknames and encouraging smiles, “I know this great little spot, we can have a coffee, laugh at the crowds and you can talk to me at a time when I can actually breathe without the knowledge that you may just jump any second now.”
“I don’t… know you.”
The boy laughs, his second hand smoothing a path across Ryan’s lower back. “My name’s Brendon Urie, the only class I have the ability to pass is music, my entire family is Mormon and I’m pretty much gay up to the eyeballs. Can’t imagine that works too well, can you?”
Ryan turns his head to watch the boy, Brendon, and pauses in thought. “Okay,” he utters softly, nodding his head.
After a quick fumble and with Ryan’s practiced ease they both stand, opposite one another, on the bridges footpath. Brendon blows an exaggerated sigh of relief and grins with a shake of his head as Ryan fidgets with the linings of his pockets in order to avoid Brendon’s attention.
“I’ve got so much to show you Ryan Ross,” Brendon laughs, looping an arm between Ryan’s to drag him down the street in a ridiculous march. “The world is going to love you!”
**
It’s Ryan Ross’s twenty-fifth Christmas day and his face hurts with the laughs. His house is a horrible mesh of Christmas traditions and clashing hordes of decorations. Presents overflow from beneath the tree. There’s chatter and drunken laughs and Ryan has never felt so in love in his life.
He glances around the room, around his house, watching the merry faces of these people, of his friends. He grins despite himself.
He’s twenty-five and his has a life. He has a job at the little secondhand bookstore, right next door to the little organic-milkshake bar that does something brilliant with banana, apricot and vanilla. He has a dog named Hobo and a semi-permanent cat named Dylan who seems to come and go with its owner. He has fresh application booklets to the university downtown and he has night-classes that he seems to pass with ease.
He has a bed and a blanket and a reading lamp without a broken bulb, he has posters and magazines and a guitar referred to as Baby sitting in the corner. He has photo frames and photos and he has memories.
He has love. He has Brendon Urie. He has breakfast in the morning and dinner at night with this boy. He has Disney marathons and he has poetry readings and he has long hours spent on an IKEA rug with a record and a bottle of cheap red. He has nightmares and arms to hold him, he has phantom bruises and lips to kiss them. In Ryan’s opinion, he has everything. His smile widens.
He’s startled from his thoughts as a body is pressed to his back and words muttered against his neck. “Present time, babe. Pete’s going stir-crazy, impatient bastard.”
Ryan nods, entwining his fingers alongside those which rest upon his stomach, and allows himself to be directed into the circle of friends surrounding the tree.
“MERRY CHRISTMAS TIME!” Someone yells, prompting a series of catcalls and raucous applause, before the first present is handed out. To Hobo, From Dylan.
Ryan Ross is twenty-five. He’s twenty-five and he’s in love.
***