Decay

When I met him, it was winter.

A glittering sheen of ice blanketed the tree branches like hot wax, sunlight dancing across its surface with a glare so bright that it burned. Winter was a dream; winter was a fucking nightmare. The birds were silent, the sky was painted a beautiful grey, and the squirrel tracks ended with a smear of blood and fur marring the pure white silence of the snow. He belonged out there, silhouetted against the golden pale dawn horizon, his breath clouding the crystal air, bony hands buried deep in the torn pockets of his ratty corduroy coat, cheeks brushed white and red with the bitter wind. The smoke from his cigarettes made his icy blue eyes tear, tears that froze into diamonds on his porcelain cheeks and shattered against the pavement. The savage winter air was his breath, and we would run laughing wildly through the woods, branches tearing at our clothes, two boys with no future except together, until his cracked lips finally shattered into a smile, collapsing next to me on the snowy ground. He told me that he loved me with the crimson juice from the frost-bitten wild cranberries still spilling over his lips, and I laced my numb fingers with his, trembling in the snow beside his mannequin stillness, chilled all the way to the bone. When he kissed me, his mouth was so cold that my lips felt blue, and I pressed them back against his harder, harder, desperate to make him feel something. He told me that I was beautiful, and all I pictured was frost. Did he want me to fade into the snow like a ghost, into a world where we would slowly stop breathing and stand empty as echoes, made of sugar and lace? I envied him his stillness, his silence- my insecurities came spilling from my throat like a waterfall or flowing blood; he never said a word about the tearing ache; just lay still as a corpse, frozen like the forest; numb like Novocain. It was only if I begged that he would splinter, shatter into fragments sharp-edged as icicles. “I love you, I love you, I love you;” the wind ripped the words away and it made me sick not to believe them, so I grabbed miserably for every icy syllable. Winter was everything he was inside; deadly and beautiful, and caustic and cold… The heater in my car was broken, and when we drove all night, pretending that we were running away, the wind-swept pavement of the highway was deadly with blowing snow and black ice. It didn’t take long for my fingers to fade from red to blue, and when my shaking started to scare him, he parked by the side of the road and held me close until my pathetic whimpers stopped. When I opened my eyes, I was curled in his bed, hugging his empty jacket to my chest, left alone to decide what was real and what was just a methamphetamine dream. At night next to me, his fragile skin shone translucent in the moonlight, and when I traced his pale shoulder blades with my hands, I was afraid that my fingers would cut right through his phantom body and hit the mattress. Our lips still met in the cold air, wandering hands connecting our bodies beneath the ratty comforter of the bed, but the distance between us was only growing as the icicles hanging from the eaves of the rotting house slowly began to drip, pounding the racing rhythm of our heartbeats onto the mildewed wood of the front porch. The ice blanketing the pavement and the warped windows began to crack into a spider web of brittle lines, and the howling wind that haunted me at night faded to a gentle caress. I could smell spring, but his lips remained as cold as ever. In the glow from the window, moonlight pouring onto his naked silhouette in ribbons, he still looked like a statue. When I pleaded, he bent and broke like the ice encasing the trees, but nothing warmed his ghostly skin. The winter whisperland that had made his blue eyes look so alive had become a fucking poison, and I wasn’t ever going to be enough to save him.

When we began to decay, it was spring.

Almost before I could gasp for breath, I realized that the ache that had been lodged like a cold metal stake in my heart for so long was finally fading… but so was he. I ignored it at first, told myself that the tears running down his cheeks only scared me because they refused to freeze; that winter would always come back. But he slept on the couch now; told me it was cooler there, and his screams at night scared me more than the danger of the cold ever had. I pushed the nausea away and picked hopeless daisies that wilted the instant I brought them into the house. His cheeks were still bone-white now, but with no wind to sear them scarlet, and when I first found him passed out in the backyard, mouth and hands painted a sickly violet-red with juice from the rotten cranberries, the sharp pain that signaled bruises gathering on my heart started coming back, sending familiar chills through me. The ‘I love yous’ were fainter now, and they stung me like dying flowers because I knew he was forcing out the words. He finally came to me for help one silent two a.m., shaking and spitting blood, admitting almost incoherently that he loved me, hated me, wanted me, needed a drink, was really f-fucking sick... I found a thermometer and Nyquil in the unused bathroom cabinet, and when I realized that his fever was high enough to be bordering on dangerous, my hands started shaking too. That night was longer than any of the cold evenings I had spent curled beside his frozen body, waiting for the shivers to stop so that I could close my eyes. He clung to me like a broken doll, all sweat and tremors and whimpers, holding his head and moaning about the heat. I told him over and over that he would be okay; told myself over and over that this wasn’t my fault. He made it through just like always, muttering the next morning that the Nyquil made him sick. I just watched him most days, wilting flowers limp in my hands. By giving in to our bad habits, we were slowly melting into everything we loathed: he wrote poetry and curses on his walls in marker, spilling his guts at last; I stayed silent as death; thankful that the cold was gone, but shivering anyways. The blues and whites of winter were gone too, but I realized the colors which replaced them sickened me even more. The flowers he put in the freezer turned black as death; decay, and the blood from his sliced wrists was lurid scarlet as it ran down the drain in streaks. I couldn’t believe that what we’d had was really dying, ending like this, but my heart broke a little more every hopeless minute, and when I found him sitting outside on the matted grass, knees tucked up to his thin chest, fingernails caked with mud and weeds, I knew what I was losing. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot, cheeks streaked with dirt and tears, bony fingers shaking violently around the cigarette he was holding between his pale lips. “I p-picked you flowers,” he whispered brokenly, tearing my bloody heart from my chest as he held up the bruised daisies he had ripped out by the roots. I told him I loved him, and when he reached out for me, pulling me down into his arms, his cut lips tasted like alcohol, death, and just the slightest whisper of winter. “I’m sorry,” I told him, desperate to make him stay. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” My tears tasted salty between us. He shattered like he had so many times before, promising to try harder, to stop whining, to sleep next to me again. But his whimpers at night were so loud that I could no longer sleep, only shake, caught in a hell that was worse than winter had ever been. Before long, he was sleeping in the car again, air conditioning on all night but never really curing the pain. He was rotting from the inside out.

Before the summer came he was gone.

I actually slept that night, the first in a long time, and when he came in to kiss me goodbye, I reached out clumsily for him, trying desperately to pull him into bed with me so that we could keep up our dirty habit, fucking the pain away, but he just shook his head no and kissed me, softly at first but getting more desperate as I wrapped my arms around his neck, tugging at his unbuttoned collar, eyes squeezed shut, breathing in the scent of him; cold and cigarettes and sugar, just like it had used to be. But he pulled away from me before I could decide whether it was just my imagination or something more; turned away and lit another cigarette, thin body silhouetted for one perfect moment in the doorway, and left the bedroom. Forever. The next morning, the house was silent. There was no blood staining the bathroom counter. The vase of daisies I had put on the countertop was still alive. My heart shattered like glass because I knew. Minutes later, I found his body curled on the cool tile floor of the kitchen, empty bottle of sleep pills lying on its side beside him, mascara-blackened eyelashes casting spiky shadows across his alabaster face. My hands didn’t shake as I knelt beside him, brushing his bangs from his forehead and kissing him lightly on the cheek. His skin felt so cold…

Cold as death.

Cold as winter.