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“I’m going home.”
Spongebob pokes his head from the kitchen while Danny turns his head from the couch. Their gazes weigh heavy on Timmy, confused and concerned.
“So soon?” Danny frowns, his tone clipped and cautionary. Short, like a line thrown by a particularly unconfident fisherman in a shallow pond. “Did something come up?”
“I know I said I’d be free, but Jimmy’s been busy lately. He said he’d be free tonight, so I was just hoping…”
“Aw Timmy, don’t worry about it!” Cheers Spongebob, who reaches over from the countertop to pinch Timmy’s cheeks. “If it’s for that, we don’t mind!”
Danny nods in agreement, “You’ve been here since two anyways. He reaches over to ruffle Timmy’s hair. “Besides, I was just starting to get sick of you.”
“You’re getting sick? I already was an hour ago.” Timmy shoves Danny’s hand away from his hair, now all mussed and springy. “Ugh.”
“Let me,” Spongebob reaches a hand over and combs through it, the wetness taming the unruliness out of Timmy’s hair.
He shudders, mostly from the cold of it though and partially from his question of where the water came from. “Thanks Spongey.” Timmy thinks he’s going to ignore that question for now, at least for his own sanity.
Spongebob raises a bag, “You could say thank you by taking these leftovers home.”
“Tell Jimmy we said hello,” Danny, now leaning on the doorway, pauses. He worries his cheek between his teeth, a pensive expression on his face. “And that we miss him.”
“Definitely,” Timmy takes the bag of leftovers and raises them in goodbye. “Catch you soon?”
“Catch you soon.”
Timmy smiles, before exiting the house.
The walk home is cold and lonely.
Timmy is all too familiar with the coldness he feels at his side, the silence that seems to follow him wherever he goes.
The bag of warm food is a poor replacement for Jimmy’s arm looped around his. The weight is all wrong, the crinkling of paper barely replaces conversation. Even if he closes his eyes, Timmy still can’t think of it as Jimmy.
If it was Jimmy, he would have babbled about whatever he planned to do tomorrow. Perhaps he would’ve leaned in and whispered sweet nothings in Timmy’s ear before tilting back, a twinkle in his eye and a tease in a smile. Or it would’ve been nothing at all, just a shared sense of contentment filling in the silence where conversation lay. A decisive consensus to sit back and enjoy , to both feel the snow crunching beneath their feet, the cold biting their faces, the warmth of each other pressed in their sides.
More definitively it would have been neither of these options as well. More accurately, they would have stood a respectable distance apart, more befitting of acquaintances than lovers. It would’ve been silent, at least outside of his head. Within Timmy’s mind, it would’ve been louder than a street in rush hour with how fast his thoughts would’ve raced.
But it’s none of those things.
The truth stands that it’s only Timmy that walks home alone in the cold tonight. That it was only Timmy that accepted the invitation to the Christmas eve party tonight. That it was only Timmy that was still digging his heels in, trying to anchor something that’s already been lost.
Cold kisses the cheeks of his face, flushing them pink from exposure. The frost cups his face like an invisible lover, caring and cold but all the same anyways.
Timmy remembers a time when Jimmy’s lips did that to him. When they were years younger, all gangly and awkward as teenagers tend to be in the blurred lines of childhood to adulthood. When his fingers used to wrap around his, his arm a steady loop around his, his weight a familiar warmth around his.
Everything was more than exciting back then.
Back then, all Jimmy had to do was smile for Timmy to have his heart stumbling, trying and failing miserably to put itself back together. The flutter of his heart had been near second nature. The rush of euphoria he felt everyday was a comfortable rhythm he fell headfirst into.
And fell headfirst he did.
Eventually, that initial spark had faded into something more steady. Less like the excitable erratic bursts of fireworks on a hot July night, more like the comforting warmth of a candle in the evening. Fortunately, Timmy found himself enjoying this development just as much as the first stage.
He had settled at the hole he dove willingly into. Let himself bury himself to the neck in its liquid warmth. Timmy had reveled in it, curled into its heat and let it penetrate deep through his skin to his heart where it stayed, stubborn and resolute.
And he let it.
It was not an overnight development, more like the creeping frost as summer bled into autumn then winter. Perhaps it was always on the horizon, always inevitable. Perhaps Timmy had been the fool all along, wishing for summer rain during winter snow. Regardless, Jimmy had turned cold.
And in the hole Timmy had made his home in, his sanctuary became his prison.
Fun fact: Extremely hot things can feel cold and vice versa. Extremely cold things can feel hot. Under extreme cold conditions, both cold and heat sensing cells can trigger at the same time. Since two contradictory signals are being sent to the brain, it confuses the body. As a result, it makes the person feel hot in cold weather.
When Timmy woke one day, he mistook Jimmy’s gradual coldness as love. Love, in the purest form his parents ever gave him: Neglect.
When your hand is under cold water, you may feel hot if your hot-sensing cells send stronger signals to your brain, causing you to think the water is hot. But eventually as your hand stays in the cold water, you will eventually feel that it is in fact cold.
Eventually, Timmy had looked down at himself and finally saw the frostburns around his heart. The way his fingers had turned blue with his grief, stiff and cracking with movement. How his eyelashes had been coated in white frost, blinding his vision.
Jimmy had turned cold and Timmy had been none the wiser.
Sometime in the middle of his thoughts, Timmy’s feet had taken him to their shared home. Though the night is young, there are no lights in the window. Not since Timmy left anyways.
Timmy places one hand on the doorknob of their home, sucks in a cold breath and exhales cool vapor, and prepares to face the frost.
Silence has never been louder.
Timmy can hear himself distinctly. The rustle of his coat as he shrugs it off, the stray snowflakes that he dusts off his person, the jingle of his keys as he hangs them next to Jimmy. If you were to look closer, you could see the dust settled on each of Jimmy’s keys.
He reaches over and rubs away the gray powder with his fingers.
Dinner is cold on the table, still in its place where Timmy had left it in the afternoon. The sinks stay drying where he washed them this morning. The blankets where he had folded them last night, the presents unopened though the day is almost over.
All lights are off including the lights on the Christmas tree he decorated alone. No one had bothered to turn it on when the day had faded into night.
Timmy doesn’t make a move to flick it on. Instead, he packs the dishes on the table into the fridge where they’ll hopefully be eaten another day. He takes out the leftovers Spongebob gave him, and piles them all into one plate. Timmy hopes it’s presentable enough for Jimmy, but he’s a bit too worn out to care.
As he rummages through the drawers for a clean knife and fork, Timmy sees their car’s windshield had frosted over. More so than in the morning, he can’t recall the last time it’s been defrosted since the snow began to fall.
When Timmy had first moved to Retroville, two years after they'd finally gotten their act together and began calling each other “boyfriend”, he had his first winter morning.
Having grown up in California in a town so painfully banal the only weather it ever experienced was lukewarm sunniness and half-hearted rain, Timmy had been horribly inexperienced in all things properly “winter.”
He never had the pleasure of all things white and powdery. Never had the pleasure of seeing the perfect powder of snow on the roofs of houses, the joy of canceled school days, sleigh rides down the hills, or icicles frozen leaking off trees.
Likewise, Timmy was also ill experienced in the sheer inconvenience of winter. The ice on the roads, the mornings spent layering layer after layer, the snow packed in your driveway-
Horrible, absolutely horrible.
So, when Timmy was asked to “defrost” the car by Jimmy, you could imagine the surprise he felt when he saw the windshield had frozen over. Of course they do that, Timmy understands the science behind it at least. But it was never really a thing that ever occurred to him.
And Jimmy did say “defrost”… So obviously, Timmy’s solution was to take a pot of boiling hot water over the windshield to “defrost” the glass.
And that’s how Timmy spent his first winter morning staring in disbelief at a windshield, with cracks blossoming in spirals like snowflakes right in the center.
When Jimmy had come out, he stood in silence. To Timmy, the quiet had been loaded with an unbelievably heavy tension as he waited for the inevitable harsh pelt of words-
But to his surprise, Jimmy had burst out laughing, A beautiful twinkling little sound, brighter than the way the sun sparkles off the snow, clearer than the melted drops from icicles in the bright afternoon, sweeter than the hot chocolate they shared the night before, warmer than the kiss they had after it.
Timmy was lost in the way the skin crinkled in the corner of Jimmy’s eyes. The wrinkle of his nose as he devolved into snorts, the graceful lift of his hand as he hid his smile, dangerous to the world and especially to Timmy.
Yet still, Timmy’s whole being twitching to lean over and tug his hand away, unleashing the full devastation of Jimmy’s smile to the world.
“I meant turn on the defrost setting in the car, not literal defrosting Turner.” Jimmy chokes between laughs before he comes to wrap an arm around Timmy. “Don’t worry, I’ve got just the thing to fix it.”
And he did, with some molecular atom binder that could weave broken items back together. Truth be told, Timmy glazed over Jimmy’s initial explanation, only registering some gibberish about cold and hot cell sensors that confuse your brain. Instead, having found himself lost again in the curl of his voice. The way his voice twisted itself over syllables, striding over sentences.
(Moments like those were few and far to come by these days. Timmy’s heart broke all the more with their absence.
Timmy would like to ask if Jimmy could invent a machine, any kind, that could fill the growing pit of dread in his stomach. Help him forget the twitch in his fingers as he longs to hold hands once again. Smooth and buff the sharp corners of his heart where pieces had chipped away.
A human soul and a windshield were two very different things, but broken was broken and anybody would like both to be made new once again.
But these days, it’s a bit hard to ask anything of Jimmy these days.)
Timmy feels vaguely like an intruder in Jimmy’s lab. The warm magenta of his clothes are a stark contrast against the glow of cold cyan from Jimmy’s machines, robots, technology.
Once, it felt like a second bedroom for the two of them. But then the work started piling and Timmy had become too much of a distraction and before he knew it, it had been days, weeks, months since he had stepped foot in the room for longer than a few minutes.
Despite practically being Jimmy’s life for the past few months, there are hardly any traces of life beyond the desk. Only a half-hearted cot in the corner with a saggy pillow and ratty blankets.
Jimmy’s hair floats like a halo where it splays itself on his desk, brown stained blue by the light from his computer. The man himself sits at an awkward angle, the office chair dangerously close to letting Jimmy faceplant himself on the floor. Timmy half wonders how Jimmy fell asleep in such an uncomfortable position.
Timmy places his foot behind Jimmy’s chair, to prevent it from rolling back, and reaches forward to touch his mouse. He cages Jimmy underneath his body, Timmy hopes the lack of light will make a more comforting sleep. With careful precision, Timmy skims through Jimmy’s millions of open tabs. Deleting the miscellaneous and saving the important before shutting the computer off, plunging them both into darkness.
If Jimmy’s form tenses ever so slightly at the loss of light, Timmy pretends not to notice.
Instead, he leans back and scoops Jimmy in a hold after placing the plate of food down. The rough denim of Jimmy’s pants scratch Timmy’s arms where they’ve been tucked underneath his knees. The wavy mess of Jimmy’s hair tickles Timmy’s nose where Jimmy leans into Timmy’s chest.
He walks, Jimmy in his arms, towards the cot. As Timmy begins to set Jimmy down, his breath hitches for a moment. He freezes, thinking Jimmy had woken up but his breathing evens out and Timmy sets Jimmy down to the cot.
He tries to make Jimmy comfortable as best as he can. Timmy straightens out crooked limbs, massages the knots in his back, fluffs his pillow, tucks him into bed.
Normally, Jimmy would still be awake at this hour. If anything, Timmy would be the one heading to bed. But things haven’t been very normal lately.
If they were normal, they’d both be brushing their teeth together now after opening presents in the morning together, preparing food for their get-together together, going back to their bedrooms upstairs together.
Instead, Timmy looms over Jimmy in his lab where there’s no room for him to join Jimmy.
Still, Timmy takes a seat and tucks his legs underneath him. He sidles his face on the edge of the cot, cold metal bars digging in his cheek, but he barely notices it. From this angle, Jimmy looks much more tired than from above when Timmy held him in his arms, his face pressed into his chest. Jimmy’s eyebags are much more pronounced, as if a particularly peevish sprite had decided to draw circles from soot beneath his eyes.
Still, it doesn’t change the way light manages to hit Jimmy from the most devastating angles, highlighting the subtle curvature of his cheek, his thick eyelashes, and his sleek hair. Though it’s been years, Timmy still finds Jimmy gorgeous. More than that really.
Jimmy was never one of the thousands of the same faces you’d find scrolling online. He was the type of beauty you’d find immortalized in museums. Engraved with love to stone. Recreated with care in oil paints.
A view like this was one Timmy held close to his heart, forever embedded into his deep memory for the rest of his life.
Quietly, he sits up, reaching a hand towards Jimmy’s face, pausing right before he makes contact. He wonders if he’s still allowed to touch him so gently, so intimately. If any of the quiet moments they’ve had before mattered now, if they ever did.
They know too much about each other to be strangers. Timmy feels too much vitriol to ever be acquaintances, nevermind friends again.
And yet, they’re too distant to properly be lovers.
Timmy is suddenly gripped by the desire to shake Jimmy awake, force him back to the land of the living to demand answers. If this is how he expected to end up. If any of their time together mattered now. If he still cared the same way he used to. If this is what they would ever be. Could ever be.
But his heart is louder than his brain. He wants to brush the hair out of Jimmy’s face, so that’s what Timmy does instead.
Timmy used to do this all the time, before they slept and stayed up at night whispering sweet nothings. The motion is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, like muscle memory kicking in after a long absence of motion.
Timmy’s so nostalgic, he thinks he might just burst into tears. He’s glad that Jimmy’s asleep, because he has no idea what he would do if Jimmy saw him shrinking into himself.
Everyone says that between the two of them, Timmy was always the go getter. The one that never looked behind. The one that kept their feet moving, his eyes forward, and his chin up. Timmy guesses a part of himself believed that too.
But if Timmy were really any of that, he would’ve already picked himself up and left. See, the truth is that Timmy’s heart was always a bleeding one. Soft to the touch, damaged at the slightest provocation, and all too easy to squeeze in the palm of your hand.
For the past nine years, Jimmy had him in a death grip, firm and unyielding. It was delicate, gentle at first, soft in its touch and careful in its grip.
Then, Jimmy had gone cold and it had frozen over, leaving Timmy gasping for air.
In the past, Timmy wouldn’t have even tried to escape if the option was available to him. He would’ve served his own heart on a silver platter to Jimmy. If asked to jump out a window, it was never a question of “why,” only backwards or forwards.
But now, Timmy wants to be happy.
Happiness used to be wrapped in the man in front of him, embedded in his smiles and tangible in his laughs. The feeling wound itself into the moments where Timmy tucked the strands of Jimmy’s hair, the late night conversations together, their shared excitement of everything and anything. Once upon a time, the idea of happiness and Jimmy were indistinguishable. But now?
If you had told him just a year ago that they would come to this, Timmy would have laughed in your face. The concept of being apart from Jimmy, after thirteen years of knowing each other, is alien to Timmy.
The man in front of him is more of a stranger than when he first met him, thirteen years ago.
But still, Timmy craves his warmth, his lips against his skin, his arms around his back, his hair flowing through Timmy’s fingers. Jimmy’s nights and his mornings, his laughs and his smiles, the ups and the downs. Timmy still wants it all. Still wants him.
But he knows now not to spend time chasing a pipe dream.
With shaky hands, he lifts Jimmy’s hand to his, pressing his face into his boyfriend’s palm. His fingers are cold, but his palm is familiarly warm. Still, Timmy winds his fingers in the gaps of Jimmy’s hands, his palm placed on top of his as he presses Jimmy’s hand closer to his face.
After a few minutes of silence, Timmy pulls away with hesitation.
When he was younger, perhaps just a small child, Timmy used to crawl into his parent’s bedroom and then onto their bed where they slept. His room had been big, wide, and far too scary for someone so young. Anytime he got overwhelmed by the lurking darkness, he’d crawl into their room and nestle himself between them.
He kept doing it, pressing himself against their turned backs, desperate for the slightest bit of warmth. At the time, Timmy figured they must have not minded so much, even if his parents never really mentioned it.
But then they started locking the door, and Timmy found himself alone in his bedroom once again.
And here Timmy is again. Even though he’s taller, stronger, and much more fearless than the small child he once was, Timmy remains painfully the same.
He lifts Jimmy’s hand up, turning it carefully in his hand before kissing the back of it. The knuckles, the space between his fingers, his joints, the scar on his pinky from an experiment gone south, his blunt nails, the calloused skin of his fingers, everything. Timmy is a thief that steals affection from a man long gone.
And well, Timmy was not exactly well-known for his foresight.
Sometime in the silence, Jimmy’s breathing had stopped. Timmy abruptly looks up, and finds that he does as well. Now, nothing but the oppressing tick of a clock fills the space between them. The quiet is heavy, a weight on his shoulders that seems to drag Timmy more and more down than ever before.
It’s choking him, filling the room thick with tension you could cut with a knife.
So, he opens his mouth and speaks, hoping to break at least some of it.
“Danny and Spongebob missed you.”
A beat. Silence. Then, something more vulnerable and small crawls out of Timmy’s mouth.
“…I miss you.”
More silence.
Timmy doesn’t even know why he even bothered.
He rises from his place next to the cot, placing Jimmy’s hand by his side as he watches the man’s breathing even out once again. Turning to Jimmy’s desk, he picks up the plate of food, now cold, and starts for the door.
Before he exits, Timmy meanders by the door, turning his face towards Jimmy. At some point, Jimmy had turned on his side, his back towards Timmy as he breathes more shallow than before.
Then, Timmy finally leaves, closing the door behind him with a quiet click.
Timmy eats his dinner alone. He does the dishes alone. He brushes his teeth alone. Then he gets in bed,
Alone.
He can’t sleep. Timmy lies awake staring at the ceiling, watching the minutes creep by the clock on the wall. The ticks are a metronome, steady against his own racing thoughts. His body is tired, but his mind can’t quite settle down.
His full stomach is more of a weight in his body than a drowsy satisfaction. The food was great, but he had hardly tasted it when he sat in the dining room with the lights off. He kind of wishes he never ate in the first place.
He feels warm and very full, but Timmy can’t quite shake the cold in his chest.
Timmy turns his head to the other side of the bed, empty and cold. It’s too big for just him. The past late night conversations echoing a bit too loud to sleep.
He won’t be able to sleep, at least not here.
“Let me under the covers, I’m freezing.’’
“From what?”
“The outside?”
“Figured, your feet are freezing.”
“That tends to happen when you go out in the snow.”
“Oh, haha.”
“Oh, haha?”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I was just thinking.”
“Of?”
“How that all worked.”
“Ooh, another science lesson? I better go get my books. Should I pay you this time?”
“Ugh, you’re such a dork.”
“*You’re* a dork. You wear glasses!”
“That has nothing to do with- Ugh, nevermind.”
“I was being serious though.”
“What?”
“I would like to hear you talk about it.”
“Oh.”
“Oh?”
“No, it’s just nice to hear someone say that. Uhm, let me just-”
“Yeah?”
“Well when you make a hot drink, it’ll gradually cool down as it loses heat. Eventually, it stops cooling down, otherwise it would just reach the impossible temperature of absolute zero.”
“Yeah I hate it when my hot drink cools to the point where it freezes over. Terrible stuff.”
“I’m not done- When two objects or systems have the same temperature, they’re in thermal equilibrium. This means that there will be no net heat transfer between them.”
“No heat transfer?”
“No *net* heat transfer. This means that there is heat transferred, but it’s the amount transferred from system A to B equals to heat transferred from system B to A, so they remain at the same temperatures.”
“I… kind of get it?”
“Basically, it’s an object cooling or heating up to the temperature of its environment. It’s trying to attain thermal equilibrium. Systems tend to reach equilibrium as a result of the second law of thermodynamics, which states that in a closed system, entropy, a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system, tends to increase overtime.”
“So, my body was reaching thermal equilibrium with the environment outside..?”
“Well, factors like the type of material, surface area, and insulation can affect thermal equilibrium by altering the rate of which heat is transferred… But yes. Personally I like to think of it as your little body trying to heat up the whole universe. Exchange of energy and all that.”
“You find that funny?”
“More like… amusing. You’ll never heat up the whole universe, you’ll freeze before you do. But your body is regardless. Isn’t that nice?”
“I never thought I’d hear you say that.”
“Haha, I guess Spongebob is rubbing off of me.”
The couch has a few too many lumps for it to be a comfortable bed, but Timmy makes it work.
Well, sort of.
Timmy’s a couple of inches too tall to lie down. His head hits the armrest uncomfortably, his feet dangle off the edge, and he has to curl himself on his side so he doesn't risk slipping off in the middle of the night.
His blanket is an odd shape, too short on either side to properly cover him but too long and thick to stay on his body. The pillow practically has air for stuffing. The fabric of the couch itches at Timmy’s skin.
Still, it’s better than his empty bed upstairs. Here, Timmy can fall asleep. His eyelids weigh heavy on his face as sleep begins to pull him into dark nothingness.
When he wakes up tomorrow, he will pack all his stuff into his car and erase every trace of himself from this house. He will take the photos off of the wall, his figurines from their bookcases, his shoes from by the door, the clothes in the closet and make sure that if anybody walks in, they’ll never know that Timmy had ever lived here.
He’ll paint over the scuffs on the wall where he’d fallen, paint over the stains he’d never been able to get out, the extra key holder by the door, the novelty mugs with his name on it from roadtrips years back, the trashy chick-flicks he kept underneath the console table. Timmy will take it all back and pack the past ten years with Jimmy into a truck where it’ll take him far far away.
Timmy will meander by the door, the last box of his life with Jimmy in hand, and wait for any sign to come back in. A word, a smile, a look, a glance. Anything to come back and unpack everything in the truck, wave it all off as an excuse to deep clean the house anyways. Drive the truck back to its rental company, say it wasn’t all that needed anyways and resume life as it’s always been, always was.
But there will be nothing.
Between the two of them, Timmy was always the slower one. Always the one to linger and wait, hesitation dripping from every action. Always the last one to realize that it would never come. Always the fool.
Timmy wonders if Jimmy would think of him with the same amusement as back then. A singular person trying to warm up the whole universe by himself. A singular person trying to hold up a dead relationship by himself.
Or, if he would’ve thought nothing at all. Facing Timmy with the same familiar coldness he had grown accustomed to.
Before he drifts off into sleep, Timmy watches the clock slowly tick from 11:59 pm to 12:00 am. Midnight.
Merry Christmas.