I found him in the summer.

And he’s always sworn it mattered more than just a night.
That there were a million moments, all built up in him and me.
It was like every star was made for us, just for that night.
That’s what I felt, in the subsequent weeks and months. I found paradise, never even having known it was lost.

There were so many people, dancing in the streets, and they were all so pretty.

He shone best of all.
The way we met, moving like the sands of time into each other, knowing that this was it, we were together. It was from that moment to this, we belonged to one another- me to him and him to me.
I would never stoop so low as to call it love, but it was a million things. Lust and need, want. Adventure, more than I knew at that point.
The eyes I still crave every day.


And everything that’s anything and nothing like love.

He was mine.
I was his.
And then he left.

Taken by monsters I had known of, but never seen. The creatures that ate away at his soul, and my mind. They came in liquids, powders and fumes, too dangerous to touch for me, but he stayed enticed. His ever-glassy eyes would apologize to mine, and yet I would see the bruises on his arm’s crease, never giving him a moment of peace.
The monsters took him, let him leave me for hotels and dirty streets. He was lost to me, held in the comfort of drugs that loved him in a way I never could.
And so he was gone away, stolen in the night by this gypsy of seduction, her foul fingers offering peace and comfort, if only for a few hours.

I lost him in autumn.

This was the Abyss.
A hole so deep, even looking at it, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. Those moments, infinite in their own time, were ripped away, made mortal by the loss of something surreal and wonderful.
There was no movement in the beginning. I was in motion, but still. I went through my days, tense, quiet.
I ate nothing and refused sleep’s many offers to take me away.

I was simply still.
And he was lost.

My stillness was to be a silent plea, one he may feel in the miles that separated us.
He didn’t.
The next month I spent in grief. This was arduous grief. It ate away at the nothing I was becoming. It festered, impossible to ignore. I slept, smoked, and sipped away the reminders of him that existed everywhere, even in my own breaths.

I was dry, yet I cried.
I lost him.


And yet, I lived. It’s not strange that I did such a thing, looking back on it now. Back then, though, it was a battle each day. Somehow, I managed to survive, and move on.
But with the loss of him, came a loss of some piece of me. It was intangible, at first. Later, I noticed the way I moved in a different way. My breathing took a new note. The way I thought was foreign to my former self.

The change had set in, and I looked through new lenses at a world in which I learned to find beauty again.
Moving on, or the ability to, was within me again. I wasn’t whole, but I had learned how to pretend. I threw on a mask, hiding the pain, tucking it away to secret place I could ignore until the night came and I was alone enough to break open.

I forgot him in winter.

I let myself get on with life. I let myself try meeting new people, but didn’t ever let it work out. I was still searching for him in every way I could, without showing how much I was. I blocked him, let myself see other boys, see other ways to live. I never let myself fall again. I held onto the dimmest of ghosts of who he had become.
I grew into the chasm he left, fixing and situating myself around the spaces left behind. It worked better than the grief, the searching.

I learned to be okay.
I remembered how to move with another, in perfect sync.

It was a rebirth of sorts. I had new losses, new gains. I was able to look into the world of other’s. Though haunted by dreams of monster sin the night, of his becoming one, of the Abyss, they were merely dreams, nothing more. Reality and daybreak began to come more quickly, as seasons continued move. My limbs could move and it was an easier life.

And then he returned.

I found him in the spring.

Shining again, with newly set eyes and a sadness he had once been able to hide. I saw him, and I was lost to his beauty once more. In all truth, I probably always had been, always will be.

There he was, walking towards me and it was perfect. I lost the new rhythm I had developed in my lungs, the thoughts I had carefully cultivated to ignore him. He was there, near me again, and all we could do was show our teeth and blink in wonder.
He wasn’t forgiven, just as he had never been forgotten.
The monsters who had tried to crush him were lost, and I felt whole.

He had come home.
And the nightmares were gone.