autumn, better known as fall
Once upon a time, there were two boys, who each desperately wanted something they couldn’t have.
I don’t remember when we met, or how we met. That is the one thing I never needed to know about us. We were just us for as long as I can remember. We were one and the same. We were inseparable. Julian and Oli, Oli and Julian.
And that was enough for me.
But it clearly wasn’t for him.
It was autumn. September, to be exact.
Everything was yellow. The quiet kind, the warm kind, the kind that leaves stains all over the kitchen counter. The kind that runs with you into your dreams, the kind that leaves footprints in your footprints, the kind that lingers at your door uncomfortably before leaving. The kind that insists, with an undeniable urgency, however gently, for you to die with it.
And I see him thrive in the yellow, in the glow, in the autumn. It puts a bounce in his step, scaring me into believing he may take off at any moment. It puts a glow into his eyes when he speaks, lighting up his face with something other than the fluorescent lights of the bowling alley across the street. It puts a smile onto his face, and I notice the look of surprise before he gives in to it every time. What has made you surprised to be happy? What turned your story into a tragedy?
Then, yellow turns to orange turns to red turns to black, and the leaves are flames that flicker weakly in the wind, the air snuffing out any chances of revival. A faint melody travels down the street and wraps itself around the lampposts. The only thing left standing are the lifeless pillars, the view oddly reminiscent of the Tower of Babel —— man’s futile attempt to reach God.
The world around us falls apart and he’s smiling in the midst of it.
He was happier when it was fall. He was happier when it had fallen.
Julian lived on 34th street. I didn’t.
That’s why, we would always separate on the intersection between my street and his.
“See you tomorrow,” he would say, same smile on his face every day. And I’d watch helplessly, as he drifted further and further away, blending into the horizon. I raised my hand in farewell every day, sending him one last wave.
He never turned around.
There’s a tinge of sadness that ran through everything he did, every action he took, every word he breathed. It pervaded the air around him, like a cloud of miasma he couldn’t seem to rid himself of, no matter how hard he scrubbed.
I know it’s there, because I know him. I knew him before he knew the sadness.
But I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when his eyes became so hollow. When they began to bore into my skull instead of looking straight at me. When they began to focus on something far away instead of me, standing right in front of him. When they began to blur and fade into the fissures of the in-betweens.
And then the shadows under his eyes grew a little longer, and the light in his face grew a little dimmer, and the halo over his hair grew a little darker.
He didn’t hide it, the sadness — he does nothing of the sort. It simply lingers, so that if the world blinked out of existence for a second, all he would be made up of is sadness. (Sometimes it reaches up to whisper something in his ear. Sometimes he ignores what it says.)
I’ve told him before that he smelled like mints. And when he didn’t smell like mints, he smelled like smoke. And before he got drunk on the feeling of killing himself slowly, he smelled like freshly washed bed sheets with a hint of pine. But under all that, under his addiction, under what he covered up his addiction with, under the guise of domesticity, I knew he smelled like sadness.
Nothing he said was inherently sad, but I can hear it (because I know him). Through the short breath of air he exhales after speaking, almost as if he was relieved for saying what he said. Let me give you an example: “It’s my birthday today,” he would say. But “Did you remember? Am I important enough for you to remember? Please remember me.” is what I would hear.
It’s okay, I don’t want to be forgotten either.
But I wish he had given himself a chance to be happy to begin with.
It was an ordinary day, or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the birds chirped a little louder. Maybe the road was a little warmer. Maybe the wind blew southeast instead of southwest.
I wouldn’t have known. All I saw was him.
We stopped at the intersection, like always. Turning to him, I waited for the familiar “see you tomorrow” to slip out of his mouth with a smile, however faint. I waited for my cue to send him a short wave, then continue down the main road. But, that’s not what happened.
“I don’t want to go home,” is what he said.
“Okay. Where do you want to go?” I replied, without missing a beat.
“Wherever you feel safe. Wherever you want to be right now.”
His request was out of the blue, but still, I knew exactly where I wanted to take him. There was only one place I felt safe. With his hand in mine, I hummed a familiar tune I heard on television, and led him towards the destination.
And that’s how it began, the saga of our never-ending “saving”.
I’ll save him, and whisk him away, however temporarily. Then next time, he’ll do the same for me. No questions asked. Because we only ever had each other.
“Welcome to the hanging tree.” I said, with a dramatic flourish of my arm.
“Why is it the hanging tree?”
“I don’t know. The name just suited it.”
It was like any other tree, but crooked. In fact, it looked more like the remains of an old man who sat on a stump for so long, he melded into the tree. It smelled like decay, and tasted like death. Anything that grew on it was black as the Styx. Creatures avoided it like the plague, maybe because it was the plague. Its shadow stretched far beyond where it should reach, and continued to grow, infinitely, constantly, towards the end of the world. The darkness it emitted never stopped crawling towards the horizon.
But it made me feel safe.
(Maybe it’s because it reminded me that there are beings that are worse than me in this world.)
“You’re right. Its name suits it.”
It’s strange. I don’t know what brought me to bring him here. I promised I would never show anyone this place, yet I had no qualms against him seeing it. You could open me up and see every part of me if you wanted.
“Stay as long as you want.”
And so we did.
———
“Where do you want to go?”
“Wherever you feel safe.”
Every time I asked, he’d give the same answer; so I took him to the same place every time.
