Half a World Away
Title: Half a World Away
Summary: the blood stains on his memories will never fade away; not even by the passage of time, or the reek of his regrets. He will never come back. He will never love him again.
Rating: R
Disclaimer: the title comes from a song by Secret Garden; and I assume everyone already knows that none of these ever happened.
Warning: stream of consciousness (or what I tried to write), pure angst…don’t expect anything happy coming out of this one. Sorry.
Chapter 1: http://community.livejournal.com/__vam/4291265.html#cutid1
Chapter 2
April 15, 2010
He was sprawled on the bed, my bed…but it was ours now; I hoped. He was naked, and he was beautiful with sunbeams pouring all over his pale, marble skin, but still there was something rather unsettling about him; I couldn’t put my finger on it, though. Perhaps it was the fact that he was too thin; but then again, he’d always been too thin. Perhaps it was the hair. It was too fucking short. Yeah, it must have been the hair; or the way he was holding his shoulders-tense and stiff even in sleep; or the irregular pattern of his breathing. Now that I thought about it, there were just so many things wrong about him. This was not what I imagined our ‘morning after’ to be. Not after so long…it was great though; to feel the softness of his fears and longings under my touch; I had almost forgotten how heavenly it felt to have him in my arms, stripped of all the walls that kept him locked inside. And it was scary; somehow. To see him like that…naked to the very last detail; scary in the sense that he looked too damn vulnerable and I didn’t know how to protect him now that he had let go of his walls. I could have been his walls, I should have, but everywhere I touched, I feared that he would wither and scatter all over the bed like fine dust…be blown away by the softest breeze, right out of the open window I then regretted not having closed before getting him naked. I was all thumbs and desire and he was all raw beauty and undefiled melancholy. When he came, almost sobbing his orgasm out, I was a little taken aback. He came hard; his whole body shook like it was electrocuted and my fingertips burned every time they came into contact with his skin. It seemed he hadn’t come for a long time. Not that I was surprised; he was more than a hermit anyone gave him credit for. And it was not just the sex and the booze. It was far deeper than that; more dangerous, yet less noticeable. He was dissolving into himself; running all over the canvas like splattered oil paint; unpatterned, unruly, vague. It was hard to recognize the original painting, the beautiful art that he used to be, under the now ruined, running paints. He was still beautiful, but, in the wrong sense of the word; like, he shouldn’t have been beautiful. For god’s sake, he was melting, and the more I looked at him, the more he resembled that painting ‘The Scream’, and he was still beautiful despite all of this and I wished…and I wished that he wasn’t.
“What time is it, Bam?”
I was startled out of my reverie as his deep voice vibrated around the room; he was still lying on our bed motionless, with his bare back to me. I could hear his breathing, shallow and wheezing, in the morning quietness. His voice, though, was smooth; as if he hadn’t been sleeping just moments ago. Perhaps he wasn’t. I really couldn’t tell. He made it so hard to read him; whether unconsciously or on purpose, he was an ancient book with sturdy, black volume, locked deep inside an equally ancient oak chest. I still put it to his fear; that was all I could ever claim I knew about him; his fear…his mind-consuming, everlasting fear…of what, was still a mystery to me.
“Late enough for me, soon enough for you.”
He sighed; his only indication that he heard me. I could have just told him it was 10:30; plain and to the point; just like how his question seemed to be. But somehow, I felt there was more to his question than met the eye. The fact that he was actually staring at the face of the alarm clock on the nightstand should have been proof enough. But his sigh told me that I didn’t give him the right answer. If it wasn’t ’10:30’ he wanted to hear, then what was it?
“It’s pretty quiet without her, isn’t it?”
This time, I wasn’t taken aback. I had been preparing myself for this ever since Missy and I broke up. I knew he would dish out something like that; not outright mean, as it might have sounded to anyone but me, but still painful in its raw simplicity and truthfulness; that yes, it was indeed quiet without her and I didn’t regret not having her around and I just realized what he meant all this long and I knew what he was thinking right now, that it was too late, too late to have finally realized what it meant to wait, to wait so long and how it felt to be the second best, but I hoped it wasn’t. He was all I was left with; all I ever wanted to be with. I didn’t want it to be too late; not for us; never for us.
“I got over it.”
But this wasn’t what I had prepared myself to say. I thought I knew some lines- neat and mechanical- somewhere at the back of my mind. But at the last second, I realized I couldn’t do ‘neat and mechanical’. My honesty, blunt and ugly, always hurt those I loved the most. It must have hurt others that I didn’t, but I didn’t give a damn. I couldn’t tell if I had hurt Ville with my honesty; I must have; for more often than not. And if I could let go of this self-deception, of all the times I didn’t lie to others but lied to myself, I might have realized, and with a start I was sure, that I was the reason why Ville looked so ruined and gone now.
Slowly, he got up, dragged the sheet with him, secured it around his hips, and turned towards me. With his new haircut, he didn’t have a morning head; I missed the sight, somehow. I thought, for a fleeting moment, how wrong he looked like that; standing at the foot of the bed, our bed, completely naked saved for the sheet around him, looking at me like he didn’t know me, or just discovered me among all his bearings. I must have looked ugly to him; of a deeper, unbearable kind. After all, he was looking at a man who had just said he had gotten over the absence of his wife in less than three months; a wife he couldn’t divorce for years; not even for a love of a more passionate, more secretive kind he felt for another man; this man…Ville Valo. I felt so ugly in those eyes…clouded, mysterious, but telling of a very familiar story; my story. Should have known; better than he did. Should have judged myself before he did; should have been much wiser than he was; at least, when it came to my story.
“I cannot survive your eyes when they are scarred with a need for some lesser form of love**.”
He said that with a smile, a crooked one, and let go of the sheet around him. My eyes, almost automatically, still as hungry, rest on his groin. Something pulled hard at my within, I actually felt like I was caving in, like an ancient house with longing instead of bricks.
… What did I still wanted form him?
How many times could you sleep with a man before you had enough? It was the same body, after all. And even if you pushed yourself a little bit higher to think of more valuable things, the same mind; which you didn’t even like. He had asked me this several times, and each time I had answered, ‘everything; I want everything’. But I lied. I didn’t want ‘everything’, I didn’t want his pain. I didn’t want his misery. As long as he put his misery into his songs, I was alright; but I didn’t want him crawling along the walls of my sanity and painting them grey with his heartaches and blood.
I couldn’t survive his pain; not when I knew, just as well as he did, that I was its creator.
“Do you want me, Bam?”
Just like the smile, his voice was broken; like he wasn’t simply asking if I wanted him but rather why I wanted him. But he didn’t ask it that way for he knew I had no answer for it. But I had the answer for this one…
“Yes.”
…And it was what he wanted to hear. A more subtle version of self-deception, but I couldn’t blame him for it.
“Then you can have me.”
I chose to ignore, how plaintive his voice was, as I encircled his torso with my arms. His pain had always been a turn-off to me. I wasn’t that coldhearted, but enough to turn a blind eye to his suffering while I claimed him.
His body, long and serpentine, curled around mine; he felt like cold liquid, slipping through my fingers, washing over my desire, drowning me. Sometimes, he would turn stormy, crashing his waves against me, but soon he would go rigid as I slid inside him; I paused for some seconds, for him to continue breathing. He always forgot to breathe when I entered him; like he was anticipating something terrible to happen to him. I told him to relax, to let go, and he did, like he was actually waiting for me to say it so he would obey. I didn’t know. And it didn’t take us very long to come. It never did. Somehow, what we did reminded me of a cheap, quick fuck; one that you would get in a filthy hotel room not in Castle Bam. But one look at Ville and I knew it wasn’t cheap. We had been to hell and back to be where we were now. It wasn’t cheap. If it was, I had gotten over it ages ago. Like Missy, like Jenn…like all my other girlfriends that came after Missy; I couldn’t even remember their names. I didn’t even remember their faces. But with Valo, things were different. I knew everything about his body. There was nothing there to surprise me anymore. And still…I wanted more. Why? Was it love? I didn’t know. I didn’t think it was. What Ville had told me about love sounded more beautiful than what I could ever create. It was beyond me, this sacred version of love. And it was what Ville wanted me to give to him, in response to what he gave me. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know how to create beauty; I just used it or defiled it. And he knew it. But he was still here. What did he want from me?
“Do you…?”
He asked tentatively; his ritual question that didn’t need to be completed anymore; it didn’t even need an answer. It was always the same. What was he, a masochist?
“No.”
The clouds moved over the sun and the room went dark. I thought I heard something break, but it would be impossible. His broken heart couldn’t have broken for another time. Perhaps it was mine…
I didn’t know.
TBC
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**The poem Ville is reciting is ‘Our Desires’ by Jack Kerouac’. Here’s the full poem:
Our Desires
There is a wind that seeks the crevice
under my heart
the way insects file at night
beneath a doorway
Its edges are rough, it slits
the cords. It trips my steady breathing.
When it comes there is no one
I can trust.
It seems, at times, I have designed
too well this vision of you.
I cannot survive your eyes
when they are scarred with a need
for some lesser form of love.
I admit to this conceit.
And though you will not accept it
You love it nonetheless
It is just like you. Our desires
will always be kept sharp
by a kind of perversity. A need
to be each forever alone….
Its color is violet, like lips
that have been smashed by nights
or robbed of blood by lack of breath.
The wind I was speaking of does this.
I can feel it now.
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so what do you think?