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The summer months call to my memory of Oliver like a moth to flame.
It’s been three years since I’ve traded my orange jumpsuit for a tweed jacket, three years since I’ve stained the letter Oliver left for me with angry tears, and three years I’ve been searching for an answer I’m terrified of and desperate for in tandem. In true Shakespearean fashion, Oliver has existed with me every day since then: He sits with me on the train, his slender frame bent to observe me and be observed in return until his seat is filled by a less interesting character. He stands just over my shoulder as I wade through my kitchen in the morning, amusement obvious as I scowl down at my second cup of coffee. He curls up beside me in bed on the nights my shoulders wrack with sobs, the ghost of his hand gently placing itself on my side.
I think of Oliver with every inhale, and with every exhale, my memory stretches its muscles. The obvious tumult weighs on my mind like lead, the two-dimensional anvil built to squash the life out of whichever cartoon character is most likely to make the audience laugh the most – but the pain isn’t what I think of any longer. I don’t think of sword fights and sharp screams, of barbed words and bloody hands. I don’t think about the terror in Oliver’s eyes as he tells me the dreaded truth, or the tears in my own as I hear it. I don’t think about Richard’s chokehold on the both of us, stamping his handprint bruises on our lives the same way he did with Meredith’s pale skin. I don’t think about prison, or college, or even Shakespeare.
When I think of Oliver in the summer months, I think of falling in love. I think of his grin, sharp as any rapier and twice as fast. I think of the swaths of starlight skin shining under moonlit skies, each glimpse a slice of heaven on the nights we snuck out to the lake for a smoke and a swim. I think of his breathy snores, each exhale slightly muffled by whatever pillow he’d stuffed his face into for the night. Hindsight isn’t so much twenty-twenty vision as it is a rising elevator in a glass building; every year that ascends further from the ground floor of my prison sentence, I see how well and truly cooked my goose had been for him. Loving him then had come in the form of oblivious pining, unaware the knot that sat heavy in my chest was rampant, unchecked affection. I’d never made much of my own sexuality; even at Dellecher, sex and romance typically took the expected shape in the nineties. Who was I to assume I could have been any different? I thought of Oliver even then – thoughts I suppressed for the good of the group, lest the change shifted the dynamic into a territory too uncomfortable for everyone else.
More specifically, though, when I think of Oliver in these recent summer months, I think of our last night at Dellecher as third-years. We were on top of the world, brushing our fingers against the underside of the cloud lines as though there was nowhere to go but upward. We were rising to Olympus, academic heroes reaching to achieve fourth-year privileges alongside the eventual Shakespearian godhood. With the new millennium imminent and the world our oyster as life after college began to take form, it felt like anything was possible. I fell for him that fateful night, an Icarian turn of gratefulness toward the sun before the fall that would be my undoing.
It took place, as all important things did, on the dock.
The night of celebratory partying to conclude the semester’s final play ended in the typical fashion: Oliver and I drunkenly stumbling up to the tower with our arms around one another, following behind the rest of our still-whole family. Richard led the way as he always did, with Meredith’s slender arm looped around the crook of his elbow. Behind them, Wren’s chittering words elicited laughter from Pip and louder defense from Alexander, likely due to the wry grin flitting across Wren’s lips. Something about the scene lay sprawling in my mind, our little group trailing underneath the yawning night while the smoke from the spliff between my lips twisted up toward the glittering stars. Oliver’s hand was a steady anchor against the small of my back as it tended to be on nights like those – a touch I always leaned into, comfort and trust and contentment a lethal combination for my intoxicated self. Yet, for the first time that night, he faltered as we shuffled along. When the hitch of his breath hit my neck, I knew it was serious.
“Wait– James, wait,” Oliver slurred, and the sudden tremor in his voice was enough to cause immediate obedience. “I’m not ready to go back.”
Arching a curious brow, my footsteps halted. I took the spliff from my mouth. “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. We’re old men now. We have a bus to catch in the morning.”
Oliver’s response was immediate, as though he could fight it off no longer. “If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last.”
The switch from Merchant to sonnet was unexpected, but even while inebriated, the rest of the lines sprung to mind: When other petty griefs have done their spite/But in the onset come: so shall I taste/At first the very worst of fortune’s might/And other strains of woe, which now seem woe/Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so. My lips twisted, and even before instinctual reassurance spilled from them, I nodded. Of course, I would wait for him. Of course. It feels natural to see from my place in the glass elevator of hindsight that the lurch in my stomach wasn’t a bout of nausea, but a flutter of butterflies. My past self would have laughed at the notion. I didn’t, then; instead my gaze flicked between the rest of the group and the path we’d trailed along, shifting my weight between my feet. Surely a little longer outside couldn’t hurt. I would pay for it the next day with another shitty cup of coffee, but it was worth it.
“Dock?”
He tilted his head, the affirmative hum enough for me to twist our heavy legs back in the direction they’d been walking from. I called out to Pip to tell her where we were headed, and once she’d waved us off with one of her sly smirks, we sauntered toward the vague direction of the dock. It took us twice as long as usual to make it between the piss break for myself and the slow movements from Oliver to stop from rolling his ankle over the gnarled roots jutting up from the ground. Once we arrived, we all but tripped over ourselves to sink to the wooden slats. I could see, peripherally, Oliver’s melancholy expression: it was something so unfamiliar it caused a sense of wrongness to zap through the air, so similar to the scent of ozone in a lightning storm I fought to not lift my gaze to the sky. Instead, a yawn escaped as I lifted my arms in a stretch, the anxious kind you huff out when there’s a stint of silence you’re not sure how to break. The vodka-scented air pooled past my lips in a puff, and as I turned away from it to look at him, the world slowed to a halt.
Oh, I remember thinking. Oh.
In the moonlight, I could see the unshed tears swimming in his eyes; not just of sadness, but as the result of a well of emotion finally overflowing. It’d been months since I’d seen Oliver cry offstage, and the surprise of it damn near sobered me instantly, any previous mirth from the party dying instantly. I found myself leaning forward, that same moth fluttering toward the captivating flicker of fire that sticks with me today. Only now do I realize the crackle of light I had seen a glimpse of that night was the outskirts of the roaring bonfire of my Oliver-shaped obsession. He mirrored my action, body leaning forward as his legs crossed. He looked anxious, and when a tear finally spilled onto his cheek, he swept it away on the back of his hand with ruthless efficiency.
“We are such stuff what dreams are made on, and our little life is round with sleep,” Oliver murmured, eyes finally casting downward to stare at his hands, “Things are going to be different next semester.”
I blinked, not fully understanding. Was this really what he brought me out here to talk about? “Things are different every semester. Aren’t they? That’s what makes it the same– One man in his time plays many parts,” I sputtered out, relying on another man’s words when my own refused to form. “We’re almost there. To freedom.” Right?
“We’ll be fourth-years,” Oliver insisted, pushing forward as though my words had no effect on him, a hopeless parry against an oncoming flurry of jabs, “There’s the future to think about next year, outside Dellecher. We’ll leave. Richard to Broadway or London, Meredith to the West End or California. God knows where Alexander will go. We’ll be different people, and we’ll separate, and–” His words cut off with a frustrated sigh, a scowl plastering itself to Oliver’s face as though he’d decided self-flagellation for his thoughts was more appropriate than continuing them.
“And that will be that?” I finished the thought for him, breaking the seal as gently as I could. I suppose all of us had been concentrating on the optimism of the future up until that point, rather than the practicality of it. As always, Oliver was the one who took the first step into territory the rest of us avoided. When he nodded, eyes screwing shut to steel himself, I could hear him thinking, Courage man, the hurt cannot be much. Or maybe it was my own self thinking that as I traded places with him to venture into the unknown: I reached out to wrap my arm around his shoulder, dragging him flush against my side, and the swoop of nerves in my stomach was only momentarily stilled by the marijuana in my lungs. He seemed just as shocked by the rare moment of genuine affection as I was, and while the urge was there to break the initial awkwardness and pull away, neither of us did.
“Let’s stick together. Promise me we will.” Oliver’s words were muffled by the side of my T-shirt, sticky with alcohol and the humid sweat of the summer air. He pulled away to repeat the words when I didn’t immediately respond. “I don’t want any of us to leave, James, but you–" He breathed in. Frowned. "And other strains of woe, which now seem woe/Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.”
It was then that I could feel the fissures in my heart deepen. Years of brotherhood and kinship, of bold words and brash laughter, of earnest emotion and sharp devotion, slowly culminating into an unbreakable string that even the Fates’ scissors couldn’t fully snip. We were Achilles and Patroclus. We were Alexander and Hephaestion. We were Antonio and Sebastian. I didn’t realize until years later that I loved Oliver – but it was in that moment, drunkenly crushed against one another underneath the vast night sky, that I could see a life with him in it forever, and that it would be better than any life I lived without him.
I don’t regret making that promise to him, nor do I regret the year of tragedy afterward. It feels frivolous to wish away something so fundamentally life-changing, to wonder about a path so wholly different that it seems unreasonable to imagine. I regret the needless hurt I caused Meredith, and the cruelty I exhibited to Oliver. I regret the brashness with which I responded to Alexander’s suffering, and the cowardice I allowed myself in the face of Richard. But not the play as a whole, and certainly not the journey it set me on. For a fleeting moment, while sitting on the dock with Oliver, it felt as though the universe orbited around us. He was an exploding neutron star of sublime, enrapturing light that had not yet remembered its weight. He was the beauty before the black hole, and I was only a planet, helpless in my trajectory toward him. I would be swallowed whole – it would only be a matter of time.
That stardust kiss I pressed to his cheek that night, disguised as the intoxicated affection of a friend, was the closest I had ever been to him. His freckled skin was soft, smooth from that morning’s shave and flushed with heat from hours of partying. There was a pregnant pause before he responded, a quirk of his lips and a flash of doe eyes that flicked up to meet mine with a question neither of us knew how to vocalize. It startled something inside me, and the words I blurted out felt nearly desperate.
“Shut up,” I insisted, turning away to resolutely stare out at the lake. “Don’t look at me like that.”
The sharp words startled a croak of weak laughter out of Oliver. “Never said anything.”
“Yeah, well, keep it that way.”
“And thereby hangs a tale.” Even while blinking away the emotion that had filled so close to the brim, Oliver’s tongue was quick. It was yet another reason Gwendolyn and Frederick chose him for the sharp, competent characters, the ones who could push past the sludge of their own humanity and into their status as a force of nature. I’d always admired him for it, even when it was used against me. I wrinkled my nose at him, lifting the hand draped across his shoulder to tug at a lock of his hair. The act was petty enough, childish enough, that it caused a watery smile to bubble out of Oliver. When he moved to swat my hand away, I blocked it.
“Dumbass. You learn that from your sisters?”
“Dipshit,” I shot back, a wry grin twisting my lips. “Ease up, Oliver. You’re stuck with me – God knows I’m stuck with you. It’s our last night. End it on a good note, huh?”
We did. Conversation eased into amicable bickering, and as the night sky turned above us, my arm didn’t leave his shoulder. We talked about our future: Where he wanted to go, and what plans he could cook up to drag me along with him, and how my sister was doing, and the straining tension between my father and I, and how terribly I needed to be away from my family once our chapter on school had come to a close. We smoked the rest of the spliff that’d somehow made it that long without being stamped out, and once the Atlassian weight of the world started to feel a little lighter, Oliver tipped his head onto my shoulder. The tips of our fingers brushed, the pads of his ghosting over the long, knobby tops of mine. When they settled there, unwilling to move any further, I couldn’t smother the smile that wrestled its way to the surface.
We never spoke of it again. Nor did we speak of the way he and I finally wobbled back to the Tower in the cool light of the moon, our hands and arms tangled together under the guise of keeping one another upright while the shy expression he wore hinted at something altogether different. Nor did we speak of the way I tumbled into bed alongside him, too exhausted to drag myself from his mattress to mine after making our way up the endless stairs and stuffing him under the marshmallow white covers of his comforter.
We never spoke of the way I fell asleep: in the crook of Oliver’s arm, face buried against his chest and under his haphazardly draped arm. I certainly never told him it’d been one of the best nights’ sleep I’d ever had at Dellecher, and that for once, the hands ghosting over my cheeks in my dreams took the shape of ones I’d held for the first time that night, freckled and thick and absurdly kind.
We never spoke of it – but I think of that summer night often and how the turn of the stars above our lonely little dock orbited far too fast for my comfort. I’d have stopped time if I could, determined to soak up every ounce of Oliver’s honesty and the courage he’d shown to give me something as perfectly simple as a touch of his fingers against my own. Looking back on it, I often wonder whether or not he’d been trying to tell me what took me years to realize on my own, or if it’d been nothing more than the kind touch of a friend; no matter his answer, it’s a memory I treasure, a dragon’s horde of gold guarded close to my heart. It kept me company in prison; a lonely man’s dream of company, impossible to say how solitude and guilt warped its reality, yet critical to an interminable time without that same love.
To finally write this down feels surreal. It’s the right thing to do, especially as I get closer to discovering the meaning of Oliver’s last letter to me. I know now what I didn’t before: I love Oliver Marks, and there is no amount of impossible pining or fear of the unknown that could ever change that. To love with such ferocity is to create a new law of physics – it is as certain as gravity, as light, as my pathetic little orbit to the overwhelming pull of his neutron star. The letter I read to myself, scrawled in his loopy handwriting, tells me in words not his own the same words I am desperate to hear. I’m afraid to speak them aloud – those words we rely on when our own won’t do the trick – but I think them to myself with every beat of my heart.
Colborne had asked me, once upon a time, if I’d loved Oliver. I hadn’t given him the whole truth – I won’t be so foolish ever again. Summer after Summer, the blooming in my heart grows faster than the gush of blood from a bullet wound; I am careening off the precipice of sanity and diving headfirst into the understanding that my idiot self has loved this man with the force of a thousand tearing gunshots for as long as I can remember. I tell myself this with the same certainty I tell myself his letter to me cannot be the end: He is alive, I whisper to myself in the dead of night, the same time blinking out on the alarm clock beside my bed that we had stumbled down to the dock so long ago, He is alive, he is alive, he is alive. Oliver Marks is alive, and I know that I will see him smile at me again – I know that I will tell him to his neutron-star face the whole truth.