✎ two years since the night Leon left you, and today is Leon’s 23rd birthday (yes yes yes!! part two of bye bye baby blue <3)
cw: emotional hurt / comfort, angst, grief, second chances, hallucinations, post-traumatic stress, unreliable narrator, and one more chapter to go!
word count: 2.5k
You have been, for a while, in the habit of mingling with the gloom and the rain – either your ally or your persistent nemesis.
Ever since the night of September 30th, you’ve been suspended in an ambivalent state. Insomnia and carmine question marks prowled in the depths of mind.
The trouble is that your memory, like your very dreams, has grown weary of storing the minute remnants of Leon.
So long has it been since you’d last seen or heard from him that sometimes, even when all alone – or in the midst of friends and interim ‘lovers’ – you’d find yourself searching for him in the measly details of your apartment.
It was a big, bare space.
The bedroom had become a strange void. The lonely, withered corner of the mattress felt too wide on its own. You were very little in that perfect bed, and yet so enormous – like some foolish victim of Procrustes, who should have been cut and reshaped to fit, just to feel whole again.
There were certain days when you’d find yourself evading people’s and coworkers’ probing questions as though skirting bullets.
Queries about the boy you were once engaged to, back in your hometown, would venture into your private matters like razor-edged knives through gauze. Mercifully, the silence that followed a lethargic ‘we broke up’ – spoken to eyes dilating with anticipation – came as ephemeral as the flight of a butterfly.
Friends, relatives, and colleagues soon learned how to retreat into the safety of their own routines, folding away their curiosity like a letter that needn’t be read in the first place.
Many more years rolled by, yet not once did he answer the letters of penitence you sent.
Time only ever flies, and all you ever do is wander through the decays of memory.
There begins the first stage of separation, ringing your doorbell.
Recognizing his absence, you suffer the lesions and tears of a once-treasured love, now gathering only grayish dust. A proper heartache for the sake of long years, followed by sundry seasons of solitude.
Nightmares precede a mosaic of nights and intricate dreams that can no longer be manually captured.
Phase two comes out of the blue.
You sell the house the very next morning. Donate what little remains of his belongings to a local orphanage, pawn the ring that once mattered, cut your hair shorter than ever before, and leave the shelter with a cat.
So, it happens. Leon is no more.
Blessed by the passage of seasons, you grow inured to this new state of reality.
April arrives bearing its recognizable heat.
It’s a crisp morning with the aroma of damp earth and tentative blossoms. The cemetery is deserted, save for the distant whistling of the brisk wind through the rows and lines of stonework.
There are very many names written over the tombstones.
A bouquet of lazuli-pigmented forget-me-nots in your hand, the petals evanish glum beneath your grip. Always the same flowers. He would’ve liked them, you suppose. A pretty blue had always been his hue.
You once read it with a lump lodged in your chest: the contents of a frosty letter sent by the department. At the bottom, a single signature. No words of clarification. No remission.
Nothing but a grave and a date: September 30th, 1998. The date of the ice-cold night he stormed out of the house you two nursed.
Your fingers splay out to touch the name carved in stone.
Crouching next to the epitaph, you sow your flowers beside him, ritualistically so.
“Happy birthday,” you whisper aloud, although you’re not sure if your hushing has even left your throat. It’s all a misguided venture as it is.
Two whole years. So easy to count. So hard to go through.
And yet, for some odd reason, you never believed that he was truly gone. Not ever, not so much for the sensitive elements of a moment in space.
It may be your mechanism that’s playing a backstage trick on you. Perhaps science has another name for it: a molecular aversion for recognition, a chemical romance with escape.
Does it matter, and to whom?
Such is the viscosity of your staircase of thought that you barely register the voice beside you, even the second time it demands attention.
“Dying. It’s so strange,” the voice intones, neutral and dry.
What an absurd observation. Who even says that?
Why should anyone seek a stranger’s take on the great hard knocks?
Much as this puts you in a tailspin, you decide not to look up and face the man talking to you. There are weeds growing underneath Leon’s tombstone, and you pluck them out in lieu of bothering.
“Strange or not, it’s the most real thing there is,” you mouth all the while.
“No kidding,” the man carries a glimmer of suspense to his phrasing.
Quietness creeps in between you. The April chill mingles with drifting dust motes from spring blossoms. The stranger, patient and hollow-eyed, waits for you to finish tending the grave.
“Who is this Leon guy again?”
Why prod, and to what end?
It’s his words, his calm, his stillness – all coalesce into one terminal voltage, a shock so searing that it rends your very composure.
You turn, face twisted into the sourish form it identifies itself with.
He looks back at you. An unfazed kind of smile touches his lips.
It could be right then – that moment when your world collapses in on itself. Your knees give a gross shake. The reflection of the man in your eyes dilates your pupils enormously.
“Hi, love,” he greets heartily, and you blink at the dead.
No dream has ever felt as visceral on the skin as it does now. No dream until today: the middle of April, the twentieth of the month. Leon’s 23rd birthday.
Tearful, as if betraying your brain, which signals your twitching lower lip to halt. A blue color rudely paints the flesh as you worry it.
Love? What love? How come love?
Leon holds out his hand, but you don’t so much as flinch.
He stands there, breathless and tall, as if Hades had granted a day-pass for the dead men.
You’re still falling – not in love, no, but through the dented tunnel of disbelief.
“You’re dead,” you lock your jaw.
His helping hand comes to naught. On your own, you get back on your feet.
“I’ve got no time for this anyway.” You wear an overly stern expression and gesticulate awkwardly to be entirely convincing. Cast out the unwanted from your vision.
Leon sighs in the wake of this. His brows crease with something sedated, whilst the downward curve of his mouth speaks of a telltale concern.
His clothes (all dark and ink blue, tailored well to his physique) are disheveled and distinctly perfumed with the pleasant tang of his cologne in the breezy, pollen-laden air around him.
“Maybe I was dead,” there’s a bounce in his voice.
Does he ever hear the things he speaks? How completely impertinent can he be?
“Don’t give me that shit,” you blurt out the first thing that lights up in your thoughts.
“What shit, exactly?” Leon asks.
“This. Shit. This and that.”
Your gaze wanders to him. The patches of the past on his skin remind you of young bruises: yellow, pallid, and rimmed with green.
He’s as in your sleepless visions: cynical and, above all, blinkered. Maybe if you looked at him from a good angle, you could feasibly see the riverscapes of the things he had been up to. Pity you can’t do such a trick in a million dreams.
“Hmm,” is the most Leon says.
Hot reds pump through your veins. You tell yourself that if you only close your eyes, all should be well.
So, you close your eyes, reopen them, hoping to be taken all the way back to the earthly population of your dull, mean world.
“That won’t be at all necessary, sweetheart.” Endearment escapes him through a habitual slip of the tongue.
“No, it’s absolutely necessary,” you counter sharply.
“Why don’t you shut the hell up?”
In that little snippet of the reunion scenario, the cooling affection of his hand falls from your shoulder and lingers in the palm of your hand.
“Can’t,” Leon says calmly. “I found you once against all odds. I’m not just going to leave you. Not like this.”
Your lover assumes the shape of your vision the minute you blink into existence. A larger Leon, with a face marred by the lines of tiredness. Longer hair that has faded to a shade of silken gold. Mocha once fondled his crown, but no longer.
What your eyes behold is not the sum of what your heart already knows.
“Bullshit,” your teeth kiss the bottom of your lip; Leon curls his fingers about yours, as if you might slip away from his hold.
“You can’t be real,” you breathe in deeply, “this has happened before. Happens all the time. You just walk in, piss me off, and walk out.”
I’m here anyway,” he returns in a controlled intonation, lest he wake the world around you.
“I had to come back for you.”
He brings your hand to the right side of his face. No other layer of skin has felt so genuine since flesh forgot tenderness and, instead, digested the mechanics of sex after he left you.
Cautiously, you take a small step. The gravel underfoot crunches listlessly away.
“This is a hallucination. That’s all it is. Side effect.” You shake off a chill first.
“The doctor told me,” you go quiet then.
Rubbing his chin with a gloved hand, Leon adopts the barest of attitudes.
“If I were your imagination, I would have a better way in. And what doctor are you—”
“Stop talking. This isn’t funny.”
The admonition strikes a jarring chord. A privilege, even after all these years, to have known him well enough to catch that flicker of mortification sparking briefly across his face.
This sting – not so readily trivialized. It hurts still.
He needs to see what an impossibly starless path you’ve meandered since his omission.
“They said you were dead. You were buried,” you broach the matter. He’s already marrow-deep in your gaze.
The buried aren’t meant to return, and it’s to the banshee’s dismay that the living should witness what has already died. It’s the rule, is it not?
Leon’s stare glaciates to shades of electric blues.
“You think I wanted this?” His question is fractured like the snap of a twig at his feet.
Impulsively, he closes in on you, one more step into your orbit. That’s his vivid tint shimmering in your irises.
“I was protecting you,” he talks trash under his breath.
“No,” he rasps, “by staying dead.”
“Oh, my God! Of course you did. Played the hero as always. Well, Clark Kent, where might your glasses be?” Sarcasm gushes from your tongue, and with good reason.
How utterly vulgar you can be when you want to be.
Leon pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Is it really that damn hard to put your trust in me?” he gnashes his teeth.
“Funny how you gladly dumped me that night.”
“That’s the part you know!”
“And that’s more than enough to hate you!”
Leon teeters and flutters an eyelid, gobsmacked in the most graphic condition possible.
It all makes little sense, and you have no understanding of it.
The air chokes the soul. Pinpricks of raindrops flutter and splatter in the heart of a moment of whirlwind daze. Dappled on his shoulders and dripping on his face, a drizzle catches on his lashes like the dew on cast iron.
Leon’s everything aches: his cadence, his posture. His hand twitches in an attempt to gloss something indecipherable and unspeakable. You no longer listen to him.
Against all sense, you come one step to the fore. You desperately need to be sure he’s the genuine article.
Halfway through his sentence – “If I had stayed, they would’ve—” your mouth collides with his. Teeth knock.
There’s no precision to it. No poetry written into the pell-mell kisses. No. It’s rather an open wound under the gelid water.
His lips are mist-tinged and piteous, but just a touch belated. Yet as your hands reach for his collar and fist the sodden fabric, something inside him gives way. His breath betrays him. Mouth softens, and the kiss burrows deeper with a distant clap of thunder in the sky.
His fingers clamber up to frame your mizzle-kissed face. Flesh and heat and bone.
He feels it all in the precious jostle of a millisecond into the present.
At last, the skin honors the color of his touch.
“I fucked up real bad. Shit, sweetheart. I lost you.” He leans close to you then, severing the kiss.
His eyes twinkle like they’ve been washed in the storm and then reddened in the incandescent flames.
You trace a cool hand along the faint arch of his jawline, newly chiseled since the last time your lips connected with his.
To draw him closer to you is to abrogate every wound that is still healing.
To pull away would be to abandon the part of you that has never stopped waiting.
Oh, but this is no fantasy; gone is the brutal game born from the illicit marriage of chimera and sorrow.
What a way to get a hit in. What a kiss.
Like the first breath after drowning, it’s a lovely but cold blue sinkhole. Takes much to last.
“Oh, God,” you breathe through lips bitten raw. “The letters… they… God. No way.”
A shallow draft of wind punches through your lungs. You come to a stop.
“They said… ‘Leon was like this and that. Very brave, and sooo— Uhh.”
Beautiful cursive on blank paper – robotic condolences from men and women in polished shoes – flare up behind your eyes like credits ticking down within the frame of a movie’s swan song.
“Sweetheart, I can’t really understand you when you’re like this.”
“Do you feel the ground moving, or is it just—”
Your knees give out as if you’re an archaic scaffold. A marionette whose cords have been snapped.
Leon catches you in the nick of time – but only just.
Your sepia-tinted filter, already bleeding at the margins, begins to blur his features.
Leon’s flustered shock hangs above until his visage is brush-stroked in a moonless black.
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