it would’ve been you
march 2022
this is a bit of a weird one. i wrote it two and a half years ago about my then-alive neighbour who i really really wanted to be in love with (he was perfect, it would’ve been so perfect, but i was gay, which obviously threw a bit of a spanner in those works) but i never posted it because he used to read my website all the time and i knew that if i put this up then he would see it. and probably realise that it was about him. maybe. i don’t know. we were only fifteen.
the awful, sickening news is that i guess i can post it now. because he’s dead. he’ll never read it. frank — i’m sorry. i would’ve told you all of these things if i was a braver person. i would’ve loved you out loud if i was a better friend. did you know i first built this website on the 23rd of april, 2020, and then you died on that exact day three years later? and you were always my keenest critic. i don’t know. i built a website and your heart stopped on its third anniversary. maybe that means it’s my fault. maybe there was never any saving you.
i love you, by the way. just as much as i did when i wrote this. that hasn’t changed.
There is a brand of intimacy that comes with this act that the girl cannot prise apart for the life of her. She works at it like the skin on her lips, picking at every discoverable option until the decision starts to bleed—this is not love. The closest word she can find is redemption, except God is not here to forgive and the next best thing might still be the thrum of another heartbeat. The closest word she can find is redemption but when she closes her eyes she sees the rapture instead. It takes the form of this boy’s half-smile and the strange tuft of hair on the left side of his head and the cotton-tail birthmark on his elbow and she very suddenly wants to bolt upright and clock him in the jaw.
I thought I was in love with you, she says, and she feels the flutter of his eyelashes against her collarbone as he blinks. Oh, is all he responds with for a minute, except they’ve lived a life together and she knows this isn’t all he has to say. Feels it like a weight on her own tongue, wants to prise his ribs apart one by one and find in his heart which string was snapped by this burden. He breaks away without a warning and she feels more than sees the barbecue-smoke sunlight flood its way back between them. There is a solid mark etched into the flesh of her shoulder where his forehead was resting, and she feels the ache of it draw slowly down into her chest. It’s damp—the air and the grass, and the sky, and even the clouds look heavy with the weight of it.
Thought, he asks, past tense? She stares at the sun until it burns.
She returns: past tense.
He looks at her, now, for the first time since the start of things. She is looking back with an expression like molten glass, and he very nearly starts to cry. Instead: he scuffs a trainer into the ground and lets the sound answer for him. Were you ever, he manages, finally. You know, in love with me. Was there ever a time?
She blinks. I wanted to be. I really really wanted to be.
Shit, he says. Guess I wanted that too.
He doesn’t lie. She’s not sure he knows how to, and here they both are, drenched in the sunlight that scalds them both.
Did you ever love me?
She’s cruel, so cruel to even be asking this. Because she knows. Of course she knows. She reaches for his hand and gets so close that she feels the way his shadow cools her skin before he arcs away. Graceful, as always. He moves like a Spartan—impossible and wounded.
I did, he says. Blinks. Seems to fold into himself a little—the word she finds is surrender. He backs away from this war with a shattered sword and a shield in splinters, and the air seems to card around him as though to shelter him from this gaping wound. I did. A breath. She finds the heartstring, and he looks up, animal. I do.
She’s not shocked by this information. A sparrow flitters through the view above him and that’s all she can really look at, now, until it arches under the sun and her eyes sting with the heat of it. Redemption. The word strikes her again—redemption, except there is nothing here to save, because his lips are saying one thing and his eyes are saying could you? Could you love me too?
She reaches for his hand again, and he doesn’t even try to move this time. There’s a restrained twitch in the muscle of his wrist but he does not flinch away, and the hole in her stomach gapes out further, pressing up into her abdomen, down into her guts. There are no words—the world pools thick and damp around them and she can barely move for fear of tearing the fabric of it.
I love you, she murmurs, and he shakes his head so vigorously that the stray tuft of hair slips back into the rest of the carnage.
You can’t say that.
You know I do, though, and it comes out as a battered half-whisper. Like a soldier. Like a missing limb.
He draws his eyes gently back to her, stacks up around them a shelter from this storm. Of course I know, he says, though everything unspoken etches itself into the grass, so blatantly visible: not like he wants her to. Not like this.
There is, at least, no anger here. Not even a trace of the boy-bred desire to rear a hand towards the sky in fury—towards her—and instead he just wilts, bleeds out entirely until the roots of this wound have curled through the soil and stranded him here. The sun has wrung him utterly dry, and the girl can only watch as the courage leaks out through the curve of his spine.
Okay, he says. It’s all he’s got.
Okay, she returns—hands it over like a gift-wrapped parcel for him to hold. He nods, once, and then settles her with a look that she can tell is the end of this: he is memorising her, not roving, not stopping in any one place longer than he needs to. She watches as it happens, wonders briefly which parts of her he is taking the time to learn. There is nothing else, after this. He nods, as if to confirm to himself the memory, and then he is turning around and leaving without another word for the first time in both their lives.
I am not, she whispers, but the words won’t come. I am not—
The words won’t come.
He turns, catches her in the hook of his gaze. Eyes searching. Searching.
It would’ve been you, she chokes, this guilt like acid as she tips it back. If things were different. If I was different. I would’ve wanted it to be you.
She feels the absence of him like a shadow curled tight within her, stares only at the imprint of his footprints in the grass as he walks away. Soft, holes left in the dirt that look a little as if God has pressed his thumbs there, reserving a space for the eighth day.
He’s gone by the time she blinks again. The ground springs back up from the indent of him like he was never even here at all.
