Post-513 drabbles by Sannea
Epiphany
An epiphany should be an earth-shattering experience. It aught to be rays of pure blinding light slashing through the washed-out muted shades of every day life bringing knowledge and clarity, especially if you’re an artist, a fucking brilliant, making-his-way-in-NYC kind of artist.
It wasn’t supposed to be looking up with preoccupied fondness at your faithful new friend and roommate Paul over a stale turkey-on-rye sandwich and hear him complain that you just called him Mikey.
And then that slow building realization that this is exactly what he is to you- a Mikey.
What the hell does that say about you?
Reversal
That night, before the mirror and really seeing you for the first time in months. Or rather, you see the expensive clothes and the carefully maintained aloof attitude that you wrapped yourself in like a borrowed cloak of success when you stepped of that plane.
And it worked. You are the best homosexual east of Pittsburgh, supported almost exclusively by your art.
Flashback to that last night with hazel eyes uncharacteristically softened and vulnerable, the roles reversed, finally making you step up to the plate and denouncing the symbols.
But if you became Brian… what then was left for him?
Guilt trip
You have kept up-to-date on him.
Michael gives you long, detailed accounts of Babylon’s renewed progress with fatherly pride which you choose to let slide.
Ted complains weekly about the lack of distractions for Mr. Success, Slave Driver Kinney these days.
Your mothers, one of them suburban sophistication and the other anything but, are both too proud and too worried about you to let anything slip, let alone register. Instead, you listen and analyze the pauses.
Emmett serves up colourful gossip about everyone else and then his voice goes an octave higher reassuring you Brian, well Brian will be ok.
Disillusion
Suddenly everything is a fucking cliché. You, doing NYC your way - bright lights, big city and all that shit.
Your art was never subtle, no vapid watercolours for physicians walls in your repertoire. But now every streak of paint is an exclamation point.
You decide against rash action, decides to outwait the upcoming show before making any life altering decisions. After all, aren’t epiphanies supposed to be overrated these days?
The art critics rave about the existential intensity. Personally, you can’t see it anymore. Wonders if this is how Brian feels when middle-aged commercial closet-cases rave about his lay-outs.
Merry-go-round
Paul, the friend, never see it coming. He’s become complacent about the state of things, considers you an untouchable rising star with only your faithful companion for company. Suddenly it’s obvious to you that Paul would happily waste decades settling for picking up your socks and listening to your frustrated artistic rants.
For the first time the question of what Brian might think escapes the tight confines of the deepest corner of your mind where you banished it once, huddling on your borrowed couch in all your newfound independence.
When you leave, messenger bag across the shoulder, Paul only stares.
Carefully Considered Means of Communication
Your cell phone gets left behind along with the airport coffee dregs and greasy muffin left-overs right around the time Paul regains his senses enough to tattle to your agent.
It’s ok.
You don’t need it anyways.
You could have called Michael of course and tell him you’re coming. Or you could have called the calmer version, Lindsay, more objective by ways of geography if nothing else.
Even safer choices could have been your mothers or equally maternal Em but the phone’s battery would never have been equal to the task. This is easier.
Brian, obviously, was never an option.
Anchors
That last encounters replays in your mind through various modes of transportation.
“We don’t need rings or vows..,” your memory mocks.
How mature.
How calmly Brian responded by phone the next day when he suggested you take the time to start your new life unencumbered, even using that fucking word, unencumbered.
Stalemate.
And you were too muddled to object. Even though your ass still fondly remembered that he hadn’t been all that collected the night before.
Maybe now, with the bravado of recent success you can truly reach this new improved Kinney as your teenage logic once did the old.
Rationalizations
The old sliding door at the loft ends all your pretty rationalizations. Every scratch and dent taunts you with the memory of precisely how you left.
How years worth of thinking yourself emotionally older and even the added confidence of his ludicrous romantic gestures was washed away by a few scalding drops of moisture from his eyes, hidden against your shoulder.
Taking New York by storm was the right thing to do.
Everyone thinks so, including Brian, especially Brian!
Pretty ironic though, isn’t it? That when he finally stopped running, really stopped running, as opposed to merely proposing, you started.
Of All People
It wasn’t quite how you’d imagined it, but never mind.
When the door opens to Michael’s astonished face after all that fretting, epiphanies and otherwise introspective shit as Brian calls it, you think of Paul back in NYC and you laugh.
And laugh.
Helplessly.
Right through Michael’s enthusiastic and confused welcome that turns a shade belligerent as Brian patiently disregard his protests and shove him out.
That does the trick. This is no longer a laughing matter.
Brian doesn’t seem fazed. He calmly waits for you to go further inside as if months hadn’t gone by.
That’s kind of unsettling.
Some Things Never Change
You say all the little things of no consequence one does in such circumstances. The things you thought you’d never resort to with Brian.
You decline his offer of beverages and watch perplexed as he sips mineral water, perched as he is on the table amidst papers, laptop and Christ! Are those reading glasses?
Fruit on the kitchen counter, toys on the shelf and a few grey hair distinguishing his temples?!
You find yourself stretching to spot the familiar condom bowl on the night and heave a sigh of profound relief that this isn’t some freak alternative universe after all.
Full Circle
“So what brings Sunshine to Pittsburgh on this rainy day?” Brian drawls and leans back carelessly relaxed.
It shouldn’t surprise you.
Brian is the unsurpassed champion of one-liners.
“I wanted to see you,” you reply with artistic pause.
He shrugs; “Now you have.”
That’s the problem with Brian.
You can spend years figuring out his motivations and patterns of behaviour. But you’ll never really know since he will never tell you. Not in so many words.
Figuring him out will always be about knowing yourself, not him.
Why do you suddenly feel seventeen years old again?
Back to square one.
Forever Young, Forever True
Flashback to seventeen in tight, red clothing, dancing close underneath glitter to “Forever Young”, Brian being all sinewy muscle and flashing eyes, telling you not to let other people screw up your life because you are fully capable of doing that yourself or something to that effect.
Speaking of which…
Somewhere in between prom and a baseball bat swung at your head and you and Michael turning domestic, you seem to have forgotten.
Just because he usually said and did things for all the wrong reasons doesn’t mean Brian wasn’t right back then - or that you weren’t for that matter.
Finally
Food, as always, seems a decent diversion. You pick up a juicy, green apple and bite down while Brian’s eyes follow you with lazy contemplation.
You feel a smile battling the tartness of the fruit. It turns loose into a full-fledged beam in tune with Brian’s raised eyebrow.
His eyes glitter beneath the calm veneer as you walk around the table, stalking him.
“What?” you challenge.
“You hadn’t expected me?” you continue.
He bites the inside of his cheek, leans forward and gives you that look.
Your mouth goes suddenly dry and your pulse sky-rocketing.
Christ, how you’ve missed him!
The Language of Something Other Than Sex
This is how you truly speak to each other, how you’ve always spoken, your gasps and his moans.
For someone who has spent decades of his advanced years claiming that sex is solely about the mutual physical release and nothing more, the maximum pleasure with the minimum fuss, Brian is virtually eloquent in this language.
Every breath he takes, every time he exhales against your skin, you feel it, that, which he will never be comfortable saying out loud.
Afterwards his eyes are complacent and wry, telling you or maybe he’s asking, if he was right? Was it only time?
The Art of Conversation
“So…with the danger of becoming boringly repetitive...to what do I owe the pleasure and I do mean pleasure of this visit.”
Brian is looking like a debauched, yet debonair star of a film noir, casually draped across dark sheets, smoking and looking at you from beneath his eye-lashes.
The latest month’s worth of creative fury smoothes into a sweet, almost painful sensation. You ache to sketch him, touch him, Hell, simply finally be fucked back to oblivion.
And now Brian wants to talk?
And you don’t have a clue what to say.
Maybe you should let him talk to Paul.
Epiphany Interpreted
Sunday dinner and Debbie’s kitchen is as crowded, hot and basil-scented as ever.
You really are home.
Brian demonstratively caresses your thigh to everyone’s amusement, except Michael’s perhaps.
You discover, you are the only surprised person in the room.
It’s enough to drive you out into the backyard with its glitter of stars and memories.
An arm slides around your waist and pull you back against familiar, lean strength as you flick open his cell-phone.
It doesn’t work. Paul doesn’t want to understand but you’ll simply keep telling him.
Being Brian is unnecessary when instead you can be with him.