It's the end of the world as we know it_2nd post
It's the end of the world as we know it!!!!!!!!!!!1111111111 (and I feel fine)
(When last we left off our intrepid heroes, no they weren't shaggin' *blush* at least not yet)
"So, for your last day on earth, what do you want to do?" Alejandro asked. "I mean, your Dad is going to find out your gay, your Mom is going to disown you, and Ricky is going to finally get to pick on you publicly about your homoness so ... how are we spending your last happy day on earth?"
"Homoness? Seriously." Jeremy laughed. "Homoness ... dude."
Alejandro moved his hands down to the boy's ribs and started tickling him. Their book bags sat on the bus stop bench while they laughed and tussled in the grass in front of the library stop.
It was ragnarok, it was armaggedon, it was, well, the end of the world, and school was the last place they wanted to be.
:3
Life, the universe and everything were working to collide in what was likely to be a spiraling mass of disaster waiting to fall dead center in Jeremy Hart's life. Finding out you're gay is no easy thing, coming to terms with it, then when you finally get past the self-loathing, learning to accept yourself you still have the hurdle of telling everyone in your life that you're different than they are and not just because you like reading, or science fiction is your thing, or you have an inate desire to own three hundred different pairs of shoes, nothing so droll as all that, no. You're gay. A religious abomination, an obscenity that hates the opposite sex for no reason, or worse a victim most likely of some form of sexual depredation. But most of that was really bull sh*t for Jeremy.
It had all started when he was twelve or perhaps going back further when he was six and he liked playing doctor games with the other boys more than the girls, but who really knew? The point was one day he realized that while all his friends around him were genuinely interested in girls, he simply was not. Perhaps that meant he didn't care about love. That was alright, Jeremy was all set to be a stoic, a creature of dispassion but then suddenly ... no, the cutest boy he'd ever met, a cousin of his best friend entered his life and he knew that there was something not allowed about the way that boy set his heart racing, or how he longed to be the reason that boy smiled or how he just wanted to be near him all the time. But what the hell was wrong with that? He wasn't committing any adultery not even in his mind, like the priests had warned during Catechism. No. His was a purely ... romantic attraction. Brett looked handsome, and he was always playing fair and he always had a smile for Jeremy. Soon enough he was gone replaced with another love, and another, his 7th grade Algebra teacher, a more mature romance, the captain of the basketball team, a purely aesthetic love the boy's body was the image of male perfection, David come down from stone and walking. And so on and so forth, and Jeremy had stopped thinking perhaps it was just a minor flaw or a one time thing.
One day he merely accepted the inevitable that he was gay, and he hated himself for it, but that too passed. "You can't go on with life hating yourself, it's a dead end," he'd reasoned. He put his father's gun away that day and never thought about it again.
Then, after all the ordeal he'd decided, he just wouldn't fall in love and of course, the universe, God and everything laughed and landed Alejandro in his lap. Unashamedly gay, completely loved by his family for who he was, and accepted by them all, though as he often ellucidated, it didn't come without a price and many 'lloradas' and 'pleitos'.
---La'buela casi me corria de la casa, que porque no le iva a dar bisnietos. Pero cuando papa amenazo hechar me a la calle ... ella me robo. Me saco de su casa y no me dejo regresar hasta anos despues, y hay se acabo todo,---dijo Alejandro.
And indeed, his family's acceptance came at a price. Jeremy had lived in happy denial, hiding his affections in Alejandro's house, and staying in the closet and living a normal adolescent life just trying to be under the radar. Until that fateful morning when he'd been up all night left his books, and his stupid leather bound 'journal' or whatever it was since it was so much more than a simple collection of thoughts on the day's events, a collection of his own poems, favorite poems, mementos, scraps of his life like the wrappers off the Tootsie roll lollipops that he and Alex had first shared on their first unofficial date, pictures of things he found interesting, clippings from magazines and ... well, so many things that were him. In a rush his father had likely picked it up with his papers from that morning shoved them all in his briefcase and he'd driven off to work and Jeremy late had also shoved everything into his satchel and had not noticed the missing book until he wanted it to write something in ...
When I look into his eyes,
i see ice cream sundaes on Mondays,
the sky is all opal white,
there are invertebrates on the clouds dancing down,
when i look into his eyes
spinning the world around, i lose myself
not touching the ground
where is the sound?
when i look into his eyes ...
or something like it, some trivial piece of adolescent poetry like ejaculate, something private, too shameful to show in public, too private to keep to yourself, while your soul hungers for someone else, just one person else to think the way you do, or see the technicolor parade of life in the same shades as you.
The book was missing, and it was not a difficult mystery to solve. Where had it gone? Not through Ricky's machinations would his illicit affair with Alejandro go discovered, but by his own hands, his guilty hands, which he wondered had they put the book there on the table knowingly, wanting to be free like Alejandro, free to be himself to be loved or loathed but just finally not hiding himself?
"It's funny you know? It's like ... well being gay, it's kind of like being a super hero you know? You've got this super secret identity you have to keep to yourself, you don't want it out. The you your family knows, the respectable one that goes to school, and kisses your abuela and pues tu sabes, no? Lives your ordinary life and then ... well, there's your self, who you truly are out in the world ... I mean the whole secret identity. It's to protect the ones you love, no? I mean you don't want them to get hurt, not by your actions. Like Peter Parker and Aunt May. If he ever told her the old bat would just keel over and die, no?"
"If Aunt May were anything like your Abuela Pancha I don't think she'd be dying, you know."
"That's not what I mean," Alejandro continued his light hearted banter. Jeremy loved him all the more for it, trying to steer his dark thoughts from darkened dead end alleys.
"Besides, when we're in the closet we're wearing the masks with our family and the world we live in ... not the criminals."
"What's so criminal about being in love? The criminal part is when the people who suppossedly love you start acting all kinds of stupid, and start trying to hurt you or hate you because you're not what they wanted or like everyone else."
"I thought you were trying to take my mind off of this stuff," Jeremy said, as they jumped up and down on the backseat of the bus.
Alejandro sighed, "So, did you hear about the new Flash?"
Jeremy smiled.