For Sherlock/Narcissus/Bingley
An exquisite pleasure had pervaded me, unconnected with anything, with no suggestion of its origin. It had at once made the vicissitudes of life indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, as does love, and had filled me with a precious essence: or rather, this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this powerful joy? - Proust
There are long sleepless nights that I never told you about; by the time the secret came out, I was at first too proud to tell you anything, and later too attached to another for it to matter in the grand scheme of lost stories.
Listen. I would sit around hopelessly on a dark, dirty porch listening to the 3am fighting next door and scowl at the audacity of the motif where a clueless adventurer out of peasant stock finds his way to the beautiful princess. It was too simple, too overdone, and everything I possibly wanted.
I remember how, at first, my pseudo roommate would come padding out at random hours when she realized I wasn't in bed and would slouch in the weathered butterfly chair across from me. It was a comforting routine: she'd steal a cigarette, ask if I wanted to talk about it (no), then move on to some variation of "love sucks" before putting out the cigarette in a pile of butts and going back inside. Then, after she had met you, she'd stay outside with me whenever she woke up to find me invariably on the porch and deep in reverie. We'd go through what seemed to be entire boxes of flavored Camels while she wistfully told me some variation of "that girl is amazing" and acted like some hot-determined-lesbian life coach for cowardly queer dreamers. She hatched grandiose plans to win you over, but I can't remember the details of even one of them. While she talked, I thought about you whenever my mind could get a moment to itself -- in the small silences between her words, or whenever her voice inadvertently harmonized with the inevitable fighting/cars/laughing that irreverently make their way into the night atmosphere of every rundown apartment complex since the dawn of industrialization.
I never thought anything deep, either. Over drinks you remarked that in some situations, the higher mind shuts off and that a human becomes just a walking bundle of nerves and sensory input. I laughed nervously, without explanation, because I didn't know how to say that those melancholic nights made me realize that truth long before you put it into words. I don't remember what you said or even what we did, but in my head that spring, I would think of you and New Years in nonsensical snippets.
Cold, no matter. Beautiful eyes alight. Peal of laughter. The way I felt when your arm linked to mine; warmth, longing, fulfillment, sadness, and my soul tearing itself out of my body because it wanted to linger inside yours. My nose was running atatimelikethis, and I found it ridiculous. Carefree. Brave. Tipsy. Incredulous. (YOU were next to ME. How? I thought that surely Heaven would only be a pale comparison to that moment, but I promised myself not to blame you for being the reason that eternal glorious salvation would seem like some lackluster purgatory...if you would just pleaseohplease stay near me alone one.moment.longer.) Home. You were finally back from Troy, and we were home at last.
There's supposed to be some moral here; something about how our friendship now is a thousand times better and that we're both happier with me married off elsewhere. We both know it's true, though, and there's no point in elaborating upon the obvious. Still, I don't want to go back into my memories and tell that suffering, insomniac girl that "it'll be okay" -- frozen in the past was the purest love possible -- whether it was for a hopeless ideal, for a heartachingly beautiful woman, or for all the potential she saw in a person whose day-to-day friendship revealed someone who eventually surpassed even her most feverish imaginings. Let's leave her alone, outside, and dreaming away spring nights thinking about a beautiful princess in a far off land.