Chapter Text
The first time we kissed, we had been sitting beneath the orange tree by my stable, wrapped in two blankets, watching the sky bleed fire: the first of the stars falling to the beaches, where they would cool and by January, down to the shore we’d go, baskets in hand, and collect our favourites.
It had been impromptu—he’d turned towards me, slid his hand into my hair and leant in, and for all my exceptions, I hadn’t thought it to be so wet. But it was lovely, too.
He pulled away after a moment and smiled, giddy like, and if later, we kissed again, soft and then hungry, and then soft again, it was merely because stopping now that we had begun seemed an inconceivable notion: by the time the sun rose, tangerine and apricot in the morning, he was almost naked under me and I found that the fit of my hand around his thigh was almost more erotic than his erection pressing against my hip.
-
I should have know that the bliss that fell over the end of November was not to last: as Timmy’s obligations to the Guild of Artists became more pressing and his studies intensified, I began to retreat behind the doors in my mind that had only been ajar since April, but now were flung wide open, and the vast nothingness that had been kept at bay, slipped silently over the thresholds of these doors and stained my blood with sorrow.
Upon the penultimate day of the month, I began to notice the dirt under my nails and the constant twist in the centre of chest: it felt like someone was wringing out a wet flannel, about wipe black dust from the top of their bureau—I wanted to flip a switch and be done with it, but I could not. And the burning desire to be something other than what I was, outshined all other pressing, fixable matters until I crumbled underneath their unseen weight and drove a nail partway into my palm.
“What have you done?” Timmy sounded almost more accusatory than worried, as he came through my door that same afternoon and saw me wrapping up my hand.
“Cut myself.” was the most I could supply.
“On purpose?” he asked, and I realised it was fear rather than accusation.
I nodded, though it was only half true; “I didn’t plan it, nor think about doing it, but once it was done I knew that I had wanted to. It wasn’t an accident.”
Timmy shifted, pulled his lower lip under his upper and then sighed, like a wave upon the shoreline: “what’s brought this on, then?”
I told him I wasn’t sure; that maybe I had been happy too long and the universe, which was habitual more than most seemed to be aware of, was jarred and took immediate action—“this is a product of such a seamless summer.”
“Seamless?” Timmy wasn’t convinced. Though, he had not known me the summer before when I cut my thigh and nearly bled to death. Had not known me at my worst, for I was afraid that if he did, he would cease to whisper into my skin that he loved me; that he would marry me if I wanted. I was afraid he would find me grotesque.
And so, from the end of November until mid-December, a darkness fell over the house.
On the days I woke before three and moved around, I spent the nights lying in the freshly fallen snow, unable to admit to myself what it was I was wishing for, until Timmy came and lay beside me, and after only a minute, I picked him up and carried him inside and he would hold me as I cried. He would hold me as I wept and as I lay stoic and silent and even as I raged against his comfort; there was nothing in him that faltered and I knew, that this calm was for me.
On the final day of my furious depression, I broke my hand.
It had been inevitable, for I always ended my bouts of excruciating pain with something dramatic; something to put it at ease for a few months, docile but there, until it reared it’s head and jumped down my throat.
I had woken with a headache behind my eyes, lingering from the night before, and Timmy’s side of the bed was cold. Trembling in the noontime air, but still managing to drag myself to the kitchen to put the kettle on, I noticed that upon the kitchen table, a vase sat with a cluster of dead paper-white narcissus falling around the sides. I had felt the strongest sense of loneliness and despair, looking on them, and I reached out to change them to something alive, but the vase slipped from my hand and smashed against the floor. The tiny shards of glass, scattered so carelessly over the tiles, was like a punch in the trachea and I was angry, all of a sudden; desperate and confused and longing for something to feel like it had done, something other than this abysmal black that knitted its fingers through my own. So, I punched the wall above the sink, and rejoiced in the cry that left my lips; on the blood colouring my knuckles; on the sensation, such violence had caused.
And afterwards, when I was discharged by the doctors, Timmy shouted at me; told me that I was reckless and unthinking—
“What if you decided that breaking your hand wasn’t enough?” he said, “what if you —“ he stopped, stared at me as if I’d hallowed out his soul and stuffed it full of poisonous mushrooms.
“What if I what?
Timmy’s voice was like a harp; sad and delicate and full of fear: “What if you had died.” he whispered, coming to the end of his fuse and I realised, succumbing to the more rational part of my mind, that I was no longer alone. Timmy was here for me and if I continued on in the way I had been, I would hurt him and when the hurting became too much, he would surely leave.
The notion of which was as crushing as the summer heat and I knelt at his feet and kissed his hips, his hands and loved, with words like a cello suite, “you will not lose me”.
-
By January, and on the day we went down to the beaches to collect our stars, which sat against the sand as if giant pearls, we were met with the first difficulty.
The head of the Artists Guild, a short, oblivious man called Stephen Bishop, came to me with the sickening news that if I were to continue on in my inappropriate affair with Timmy, he would call it the attention of the boy's parents—
“You know very well that they would not approve. It would worry them,” he said, feigning indifference in the hopes that he didn’t seem unneighbourly.
“I believe they know,” I said in return, watching from the corner of my eye Dr Harris who had been overlooking all my appointments since December when I had broken down so fitfully.
Bishop started a little; “and they do not worry?” he was incredulous.
“About what?” I asked; though it was really more of a challenge than a query.
“That you’ll get Timothée sick, of course.”
I wanted to scoff but instead, I pulled my lips into a line and said, most agreeably, “with all the time we’ve spent together since April, you would think that he would have caught melancholia by now. Perhaps,” and this I said with great caution, “it isn’t contagious.”
Since I was seven, hands sticky from jam on toast and knees brown with dusty dirt in July, my mother had known that I was wrong. Then, it had been accepted that I was the odd child belonging to the family from far off south, where a great fire had been raging for five months, and that if I were peculiar more often than not, well, that was purely because I had hailed from some other place where perhaps my behaviour was perfectly ordinary. My mother, though, who had never loved me as much as one would think mothers ought to love their children, was convinced that I was sick. If we had been anywhere else, then I would have merely been proclaimed sad, but here, where tulips spoke in whispers about the meaning of their succinct deaths and the birds danced rather than flew; where people were happy except for when it made sense for them not to be, and nothing was inexplicable, sickness was the most afeared off all the wonders of the universe. Here, sickness was closer to hell than death and at once, when my mother sighed one grey afternoon that ‘something is terribly wrong with my boy; I think he is unwell’ the doctors had taken me from her, and kept me in a room alone, testing me and I had known, from the moment she was reported dead five weeks later, that I would not have seen her anyway, even if she had lived to see the doctor’s outcome.
I had been thought of as a risk for seventeen years and the mere notion that I was not, well, it hadn’t crossed the minds of experts, so it certainly would seem unfathomable to anyone else.
“Not contagious?” he said, eyes darting from my face to the people over my shoulder, as if they would proclaim him unwell too, just by uttering the words.
“Perhaps not,”
Bishop was incredulous; his face was purple and his eyes were grey and the confidence that I had built, seething and unused for the better half of twenty years, leapt up from depths previously unexplored and left him standing there, trying to understand what it was that I had said. But as I walked away, I found myself to be completely drained; never had I spoken up about my health before to someone other than Timmy and, on one occasion not too long ago, to Greta and Saoirse as we went over for afternoon tea; a luxury I had not previously known until my steady integration into Timmy’s life outside the confines of my former near-reclusiveness.
I was afraid that when Bishop told Dr Harris what I had said, there would be disastrous repercussions. I had been right to be so afraid.
-
“You’re not to spend any more time with him, Mr Hammer,” Dr Harris said, her brown eyes suddenly cold so that looking at her made me shiver.
“But—“
“No. Don’t argue. I hate to do this, Mr Hammer, for it is not the right of anyone to get in between two people who are in love, and if this were about any two other people, there would be no question of my congratulating you on your finding your other half, but after consulting for days now, a decision has been made.”
“Mr Chalamet’s health cannot be compromised by your lackadaisical attitude towards your condition. We feel it would be too much strain on his poor family: imagine that, Mr Hammer, your own child sleeping with someone who might cause them harm? We have always believed melancholia to be spread by overexposure and if one is being as intimate as sharing a bed with another, then there is no question of their overexposure. Do you see why we must separate you, now, Mr Hammer?”
“And if we do not do as you have asked?”
Dr Harris smiled, sympathetically and yet with some measure of sterile irritation, “Then Mr Chalamet will be made to give up his place at the House and in the Artists Guild, too. Harsh, I know, and it would be a shame for he is very well accomplished, but we feel that if the consequences aren’t harsh, then what would be the point of all this? You would surely just ignore us.”
She paused, leant back in her forest green chair as if trying to exude some extra level of power and intimidation.
“So, I ask again: do you see why we must separate you, Mr Hammer?” she said.
I nodded, though I disagreed. “I do.”
“Well then, let’s have no more fuss. I’m sure, once enough time has passed and Mr Chalamet has moved forward from such rebellious infatuation that the two of you can perhaps be friends again.”
I was upset by her nonchalance; by her piss-poor attempt at trying to console me. This lack of care for another’s suffering was not common among the villagers but I knew, in the recess of my mangled mind, that I did not register as one of them on their radars. I was some sort of hybrid: born elsewhere but raised here and most shockingly, perpetually unwell.
“Perhaps,” I replied, “good day.”
I realised, as I left her office and trotted down the stairs, that she had not offered her hand to me in greeting, that neither had Bishop and somewhere ugly and cold, my paranoia woke and screamed they’re trying to get rid of you!
-
Timmy was standing by the fountain outside the doctors as I closed the door behind me; he was cold, I could tell, and when he spotted me coming across the square, he called out:
“Armie!”
I stopped and looked down at him: he had been crying.
“What did they say?” Timmy asked, pleading with me though I had not yet denied him anything.
“That we aren’t to see each other anymore. They can’t run the risk of you getting sick,”
“And what did you say to that?” his nose was red like he’d put blush all over the tip, and his eyes swam before me, threatening me with rain.
“That I would stay away. But you knew that.”
“I don’t care—“ his voice was louder now, angrier, “—I don’t care that they’ll kick me out of school or the Guild, Armie. I love you; I want to be with you.”
I wanted desperately to reply that I was the same; that I loved him and wanted to be with him, too, but I didn’t. Instead, I told him that that was no longer on the table; as if our affection for each other was a business offer.
“I’m sorry, Timmy. You could achieve so much, throughout all the world, and it would be a shame to waste such talent on—“
“It wouldn’t be a waste!” Timmy shouted, his fingers made a fist and I could see the whiteness of his palms were the nails dug in.
“No? Enlighten me please, because all I can think is that no matter how much you love me, after a while all that potential; all that skill and fervour would begin to grow untempered within you and you’ll get bored—I know it—you’ll get bored and resentful. And who could blame you? Just think about it, Timothée, helping me in the garden or stable? shoeing horses every now and then? would not that make you mad? Everyone’s got to make compromises, but that doesn’t mean you give up your career—your passion—for me. Let me be the compromise, Timmy. Just, let me give you this. Or rather, give this to yourself.”
If I was shadowed by sadness, then he was shadowed by despair and I could see that he was confused by the feeling; the twisting in the chest; the pain of feeling as if all the world is hopeless and within such hopelessness, one lies, a slave to the incessant twisting under the ribcage which isn't merely uncomfortable but pulls forward from the forgotten places in one's mind everything that makes one wish one couldn't think, because how could anyone stand the noise of grief; the noise of sorrow?
I could not. I suspected that he could not, either. And in that moment, which comes to me sometimes in dreams, for I was so afraid, I wondered if perhaps they had been right, and melancholia was contagious.
Timmy fell under the strain of his confusion, his eyes wide with a certain shock of unpleasant realisation, and against the whiteness of the newly fallen snow, he looked particularly vulnerable. Ignoring whatever cautionary restraint I had put in place after spotting Timmy by the fountain minutes earlier, I went to him, mindless of the cold and the wet, and embraced him:
”If this is how you feel, ” he said, ”how can you bare to wake in the morning?”
And beneath the sound of his laboured breathing and soft sobs, I heard him whisper: ”I don't want to feel this way, anymore.”
”I know, my love. I know. And I am sorry.” I replied, and if the world were to end right there, at that moment, I was quite sure that neither of us would have noticed, for we were in each other's arms for what we both had feared would be the last time.
-
You are beautiful. I think thee so,
and the whole world, waking in silence at this time of year,
thinks so, too.
And asleep upon my bed,
you take from me everything.
I whimper at the dawning of this new day
and when it closes, I shake. For I cannot be,
if you are not to curate my being.
I will not live: what point would there be to live
if all I have to offer is such
emptiness?
Could you, who slumbers like the tulip in your garden, as the April breeze rocks it gently,
feed me whatever it is that nourishes you?
I want such purpose,
distilled and pure,
to hover around me as if a glow.
(You glow like the stars we watched falling just last night.)
And if you cannot,
Then will you watch me, gentle as you are,
decay beneath the weight of my unnatural soul?
Will you make me comfortable?
I know you will.
(It takes me, for whom this splendid hour is wretched,
a small moment between words,
to come back to myself. Somehow,
I am distracted by the way you suddenly stir;
undress; take my eyes within the lock of your own and smile:
why so weak? I think I might be brave enough to ask.
I do not.
The look of your skin entices—this you knew, this you exploited—
and so I still, and let myself fall into whatever it is that you wish me to become.)
-
In the days and nights following our separation, I revisited my poetry with a new sense vigour and urgency; shutting myself away and going over each word until it sat right on the page, but even then I felt as if my writing was abysmal.
I found that the poems that left me with the most satisfaction, were the ones I had written before, whilst Timmy had still been my lover; my dearest friend and now, as I watched the words swim before my heavy eyes, like mirages in the quivering heat of a desert horizon, I was struck with a new sort of pain.
It could not be tempered; it could not be reasoned with, and I felt as if everything, little or large, was mocking me, taunting me with visions of his face. And in dreams, rose-tinted and smooth-edged, we were together, sometimes only to talk about small, insignificant things. Sometimes more.
Waking to the bleakness of the world after such dreams, was not only devastating but made me physically sick, too, and my tongue would be rough and white and my head would pound; screaming like a banshee—what it screamed, I could not tell, though it seemed to deafen me.
As January slipped into February, with the gradual cooling of the stars I kept under my kitchen sink, things began to change.
The indigo shadows hid in the corners of the streets and between houses, reminding us that the yesterdays of last year were not merely gone, but unreachable, too, and with this shift, I had also noticed that the villagers treated me with an added level of sympathy; that they'd tread around me with care, not only for their health but for mine, too.
I wasn't sure how they'd found out about what had happened between Timmy and I but I knew that it had not been the doing of Dr Harris nor Stephen Bishop. Meddling such as theirs was uncommon and what people were unfamiliar with, they tended to be unsettled by. But they had found out and I began to receive letters from near strangers, expressing their sorrow. If there was one thing the people of the village could be relied upon to do, it was to seek out love and root for it.
And so, February passed as well, and although I felt the weight of my disposition more now than I had in a while, I lacked the courage to do anything so bold as to speak up, as I had done on the beach. Timmy was gone and with him, my courage.
I was returned to my former self—
—and then it happened.
Across the monument to our founders in the central square, the motto: joy is found when man ceases to look for it but lets it come to him, was crossed out and underneath, it had been rephrased. It said:
Compassion is dead when one man finds joy and lets those without remain so.