MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 12
detriment, some older hearts too, though perhaps in those cases ‘cruel’ is a more
suitable word than selfish. And perhaps you loved me, though you never said as such,
but I do recall catching you a handful of times watching me when we were surrounded
by people who could not know of us, a softness in your eyes that blew across my skin
like a warm summer breeze, before you, seeing me see you, would look quickly away;
when I would ask you, later when we were alone, finally alone, why you looked away,
you would tell me that if I saw you others might see you too, and then you would say no
more about it and I would not ask again until the next time, anger once more bubbling
inside me that you were so embarrassed at the thought of others knowing of us even as I
knew the reasons why you did not want anyone to have that knowledge.
Perhaps you could not love me, could not allow yourself to love me, knowing that the
decades between us were a shadow that fell across us, a shadow with a weight that
increased with every month that passed, every week, day, a shadow that probably would
not have been present, or present to such a degree, if I had been older, or you younger;
we were a secret that could never be revealed for reasons to do with your position in the
building we worked in, compared with my position many levels below yours, though I
would sometimes joke that one of these days I would kiss you in front of everyone and
you would look at me with a hardness in your eyes that I had only ever seen in my
father’s eyes as I spoke against him and he was deciding whether or not to strike me,
which, of course, made me speak against him even more, just as the look in your eyes
made me even more eager to kiss you in front of your peers. Or, the possibility exists –
and this possibility slices a thin cut in my heart even after all these years, while also
making almost perfect sense - you could not love me simply because I was not worth
wasting love on, the pleasure of body against body all that you sought for the short time
we had, and I no longer exist in your memory, and have not in many years, while you
occupy my wandering mind from time to time, especially now as I watch my father being
systematically erased by dementia, all the names he once knew, including his own, lost
to him; his anger is gone now too and he seems deflated more by its absence than he
does by old age and dementia, though that may be just my imagination fueled by an
echo of fear I cannot help but feel inside me in his presence during my once a month
visit, a visit I do not want to make but feel I should as I am the only family he has left,
while any friends he might have once had are long dead or have been pushed away by
his anger.
I wish the man I am now, the man who has taught his heart to not be selfish, to not be
rash, was the boy I was then, or, at the very least, the knowledge I have now, the
knowledge I have learned through decades of trial and error, could be given to that boy,
and that boy, not yet a man, might have treated you better than he did when it came to
our end, saying goodbye without saying goodbye when I found a heart as young as my
own. You did not deserve such a goodbye, not when, as well as the education you began
in me sooner than I would have known it if I had never met you, you also allowed me to
speak for the first time of my fear of my father, of the bruises long faded that were still
visible to my eyes, and of my own anger which sometimes felt like a poison within the
very marrow of my bones, an anger which I feared would turn me into a facsimile of my
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