you live and you learn

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

Niall couldn't look at all of the horrible things Ruben does and say, yeah obviously I still want him in my life hes my brother. If you love a man as more than a friend he has to be family. There's not another option. Its 1987, the middle of the aids crisis, and as not politically correct as it is now the public view WAS that it was different for men than it was for lesbians. that's part of why Niall is so freaked out bc what is wrong with him that he doesn't just like men, he likes Ruben, who's violent and temperamental and often cruel. If liking someone as clean cut and sweet as Alby is shameful, then what the fuck is Ruben supposed to be? And Ruben has been to jail. Hes a boxer. He knows by now what happens if you like men more than you should, and hes been surrounded by toxic masculinity day after day. If he wants Niall to be his anything, or to be Niall's anything, it has to be his brother because its the only thing bigger than friends that isn't lovers. They be weirdly close, they can sleep in the same bed, they can even claim each other's last names if they really want to and it is all mostly hidden by the only family dynamic two boys of the same age are allowed to have.