I Was Young (1/1)

They said he was dangerous. That he wasn’t worth my time nor attention, because people like him only left a trail of disappointment and most of all; pain. They pushed you away, they damaged you because they were too obsessed being inside their own walls that they couldn’t step out of them, nor could they let anyone in. “He is a troubled boy, you can’t help him,” one girl in my chemistry class told me, but for what reason I don’t remember.Maybe I was staring.I was just looking at his jacket.All of the other school uniform’s jackets were painted in white; to symbolize cleanliness and order, brightness and brilliance, basically what the school wanted us students to be. We were all in some way forced to appear like the other, the need of personality and individuality seemingly not accepted here.We were all dressed the same.But his uniform was black.Like a black dot in the middle of a white page. He was a spot that was out of the ordinary, but he was too small and too invisible to be noticed. He probably brought as much attention as what a falling pen would do in the midst of a loud room. At least that was as much attention he was given to by the other students. He was just a small, mere dot in the midst of multiple layers of white that would lay itself upon it.He was a black dot in the middle of a white paper that people tended to ignore.For me, that made him stand out even more.In the midst of all the brightness there was a shadow, a black shadow in its same place, lost in a mysterious world only he knew about.He was also intelligent.Actually, he was beyond that.His grades and ranking at school said it all; they were the obvious pointers towards his intellectual status. However there would be times when we would have writing sessions in literature, a subject I was more or less forced into, that one would see his really deep side, the words in his works all set together until they were nothing more than haunting.How I, and probably the rest in class knew, was mostly because our teacher would always through every class praise a certain text that was done better than others, that stood out more than others and most of all just amazed her. It would always be his, even if she announced it or not.From those works, whether it was a poem, a story or an analysis, he would always impress someone with his thoughts, his words and his quotes. He was like an author, a living book with a story no one could ever be tired of. Truth be told, everyone loved his works, but never the author himself. They never spared him a second glance when he passed by them in the halls, nor when he sat alone by the window in the cafeteria, eyes always facing the other side.He never looked back at them either.He wasn’t what one would consider normal, but he wasn’t as abnormal as they said either. At least, he didn’t appear like that in my eyes. In my eyes he just looked done. As if he was done with everything. Done with acting through a façade most go through every day that everything is perfectly fine, that there’s no worries and he didn’t seem like that person who would want to fake it. In a way he just seemed pretty honest about how he was, how he felt.But rather than troubled I’d say he must have been empty.Not that I knew much about him at all. Actually I knew practically nothing about him, except for that he was the boy who sat alone at all times. In class he always sat by the corner in the back, and no one sat down on the wooden desk beside him. They didn’t work with him when we had to go in pairs of two. The teacher scolded us at first, but as time progressed they stopped commenting it all together, letting the black-dressed student among the white-clad ones, be alone.We never spoke to each other before, even if we went to the same school and the same classes. Even if I saw him during lunch or breaks, we would never speak a word to each other. He was always the dark dressed boy sitting alone staring into space, or reading, whilst I was like everyone else in the crowd, who never caught much attention, but still had my fair share of friends and admirers.We never spoke to each other before our junior year, when I bumped into someone in the library, and up from the floor I saw black. I knew who it was without even looking at his face or anything really, only noticing the equally as black hair on his head that was also on the floor.What can I say?The hit was hard.“Sorry,” I muttered to him before getting up to dust off my then filthy uniform, marks and spots of dirt lingering throughout the white material. I sighed by my appearance, but offered a hand towards the dark haired boy on the floor anyway. His eyes simply looked at my hand, not doing anything, before silently getting up without my help as my arm was still stretched out. I withdrew it to my side again, and I coughed to ease the sudden awkwardness in the air.“Aren’t you in literature class?” I asked him after just standing there for a while. He simply looked at me, but didn’t meet my eyes, focused on the air in front of me. He nodded once, twice, before his head stilled and then nothing.I didn’t know what to say anymore at the time, so instead of saying more I bent down to pick up the books that fell from my hands. I expected him to leave, but instead he bent down in the same position and handed me the book I was supposed to read for our project in literature, ironically enough.He looked at the cover for a while, before I took it out of his hands, and before anything else happened he stood up and went somewhere. My eyes looked after his retreating silhouette, the black dot through the crowd of white-dressed students. I looked down at the book again, at the white cover.But it wasn’t white anymore.It was black.People found it a miracle that I spoke to him. They kept whispering, wondering why the class jokester communicated with someone who had such a clashing personality. Even if it was indeed one-sided, they found it incredibly interesting and fascinating. It was the talk of the school for a whole day.I found it ridiculous.Had it literally been anybody else they wouldn’t even bat an eyelash towards it.I think a week passed after that, before out of nowhere he suddenly appeared again. It was in the school library one afternoon after classes had ended for the day. My eyes had curiously observed the room from behind a bookshelf, until they landed on a dark figure situated by a table next to the window. It was him just reading, like he usually did at the time, but I couldn’t find myself to look away.I didn’t know for how long I watched him, nor do I remember when he caught me staring, but in the midst of the silence from the pretty vacant library, his voice spoke out towards me.“Broken vows are like broken mirrors. They leave those who held to them bleeding and staring at fractured images of themselves,” he said softly, but loud enough for my ears to hear as I stood there, not knowing what to say towards the seemingly random quote. Actually, I barely understood what he meant by it. He stayed silent for another moment, turning the page of his book.“You’re still staring,” he said, something I actually understood for once. I tried to kill the embarrassment that crept up on my face as the boy sat there almost unaffected. It was the first time I heard him speak, and his voice was as deep as I thought it was, but not as rough or as cold as I imagined it. It was just monotonous and calm, but still it sounded so different in so many ways. I swallowed hard by that, before I tore my gaze away to look down at the books in front of me.When time had passed I tried to gain confidence, courage, and when I managed to gain some I slowly started walking in the same direction as the table he sat in. I took a seat so I was facing him, whose eyes were still focused on the book. I could hear people starting to talk again, wondering why I was sitting with the weird boy. His eyes were still on his book, almost as if he didn’t hear the gossiping from every corner by now about him. He seemed as unfazed as he usually did.At least he seemed unfazed by the naked eye.His facial expression was neutral and passive, but I saw it. I saw the light flicker in his eyes, even when they weren’t looking at mine. The light flickered of doubt, insecurity and most of all care. For a moment it seemed like he cared, but the emotion vanished just as rapidly as it appeared, the disinterested look came back again.I couldn’t avoid saying anything, no matter how much I wanted to keep quiet. It wasn’t my business, not my concern for how he reacted or acted. Of course, like everything else about me back then, I didn’t think about it though. I just spoke because in a way, I wanted to become closer to him.“Why don’t you ever say anything?” I asked the boy in front of me, sounding steadier than what I thought I would. I praised myself for that. “You know, try to hold your ground?” I continued a whole less confident and casual than before, but still it was passable. I watched as his pale fingers turned the page again, eyes reading but not focusing. I could notice that much. When I took one, two breaths, he finally let his dark eyes up from the words on the paper and looked at me, really looked at me, chapped up lips parted to speak.“How can you hold your ground, if everyone around you wants to bury you beneath it?” he told me, his voice hoarse, hollow. His eyes weren’t any different, piercing through mine with a certain coldness that sent shivers down my spine. He just looked at me like that, and usually I am good at reading people, knowing what to say and how to say it.He acted indifferently.But he felt like he was everything but passive.I have always been able to know how to respond, but for once I really don’t know what to say anymore, the resonating words lingering through my head even to this date. His melancholy stare did nothing to ease my mind at all.He looked down to read his book again. I looked out the window to avoid his presence, but instead I did the opposite, and kept on staring at his reflection. The beating through my chest was louder, stronger by just looking at him, my stomach making odd knots and my breath hitched up like my lips would never let out another exhale.At the time I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad, but I didn’t hate it, nor did it scare me like others said it would. For once in my life I was not only attracted to someone, but drawn into them in a deeper level, my mind constantly on replay with the same dark haired boy who barely spoke, but when he did, he sounded like a poet.His eyes met mine from the reflection of the class, the instant symptoms of whatever was wrong with me appearing again, stronger, harder. With the deafening ticking clock that stroke once, twice, he still didn’t let his gaze falter. It didn’t stop until twenty ticks later, as I looked away and left the room.I could still feel him staring at me, the average student lost in the crowd with all of his counterparts. I wondered what he was thinking about. That was a lie.I was wondering if he felt the same like I did just now.Society frowns upon many. They judge you even more. That was something I learned the hard way to put it the least.I always knew that homosexuality was one of those top do not’s of our society, something that should have never been talked about and of course never have been shown. Love was always between a man and a woman, husband and wife, Adam and Eve. That was all there was to it.“It’s a disease, it’s a sin… they are born sick.”At the age of eleven I heard that from my father the moment we both saw two men holding hands. I thought it was interesting, out of the ordinary but never wrong. My parents did though, teaching me that love as always is only between a male and a female.I agreed with them.But really; I didn’t.

I noticed that the whole world goes on and on about love; people searched for it, they found it, and sometimes they lost it. They believed that love was the answer to anything, that it cured almost everything. You saw poets and authors write about love, and you saw singers sing about love. But that love wasn’t the same when you mentioned two men or two women.Suddenly they forgot about their own definition.And they replaced it with disgust.I didn’t know what my sexuality was at the time, but I never had the time to think over it because there were more important things to contemplate on. The only clue I had was that I never had been attracted to a girl, but then again, I hadn’t been attracted to a boy.He wasn’t my friend, nor was he a stranger. At the time we were stuck in a spot in between. He only spoke to me for the most part. I don’t think I even recalled him speaking that much to anybody else, but then again I never really knew.He opened up to me on a spring morning.“I was born sick,” he told me once when we sat on a white bench, the green leaves hanging above us on the trees, the grass filled with flowers awakening up from the winter’s harsh weather. More and more students came out to the school garden to eat their lunch or spend time together, but none of them sat down on that particular spot.Even if the bench was white like them it was tainted.I found it funny how they laughed at him for being different and for I being stupid enough to ruin my reputation, when they were all the same, and they had probably done worse than I ever had.“Sick?” I asked him with a lot of worry, because I honestly thought he was, well, sick. He stayed quiet with his eyes down on another book with a dark cover. He always read books in dark colors, no matter what, I always remembered that. And he nodded after a while, but still did not say a thing.My eyes studied him curiously, wondering what he was talking about, but at the same time my mind had oddly enough started to rewind towards the image of two men holding hands, and my father scolding them from afar.I never got an answer to it.I didn’t need it.He looked up at me, and I figured it out.I was never attracted to a girl whose skin was soft and pale, who had a small frame and an innocent appearance wrapped up with perfection. But after time I learned that I was attracted to a certain black dot in the middle of a white page, whose eyes were almost as dark as the night sky, and his hands were rough.Whenever I came to the realization that he might have felt the same was many, many weeks later at the end of spring and towards summer vacation. Whatever relationship I had to him I didn’t know, but I suppose the closest we were at that time was friends. We spent time in the library or in the school garden in the sun, in the overly clouded weather, in the rain.I never thought I’d see him during that summer, but like everything else, I was wrong.The first time we didn’t plan it, but the pure coincidence led us to cross paths one late summer afternoon. I thought he would just pass me, and I thought I would just walk on by and act as if nothing happened. But instead I smiled, and he nodded in acknowledgement, and before I knew it we were sitting on a rock by the beach, toes in the sand, talking about everything and nothing, and arms slightly bumping into each other from time to time, but nothing more.The second time was more or less planned. He told me he liked taking pictures near the park. I went there one day and acted as if I didn’t know he would be there. He asked what I was doing there, and I smiled, shrugged and said I was just aimlessly walking around. Of course I didn’t, I just needed an excuse to see him.Then we met on our own terms when we wanted to, whatever relationship we had growing closer, deeper, faster than before, and I learned another thing about this boy. That he had walls, that he didn’t want to let people in nor did he want to step out, but when I came along I thought I was different. I noticed I never broke down his walls; I just extended them enough to fit another person. It didn’t mean I entered into his side either, it rather meant that I made my own personal spot there, where the room was built to fit two persons, where in a way I became closer towards him, yet we were separated by a line.On my side the walls were covered in black.His were in white.I used to compare us to Yin and Yang, where I was the white dot in the black whilst he was the black dot in the white. Maybe I was the bad in the good, or he was the bad in the good, or maybe we were just conveniently placed there.It kept us balanced.It made sense like that.If I remembered correctly, the first time I ever kissed someone was with him on the beach. It was a midsummer’s night, and it was chilly, but we still walked around with our shoes discarded somewhere in the sand and the hem of our jeans rolled up to our ankles.“Why?” he once asked in the middle of the beach somewhere, or at the end, I didn’t remember. His eyes weren’t on me, but I knew the question was meant about me and my sudden company, my sudden invasion into his world, probably puzzling him. He didn’t say it out loud because he couldn’t find the words, so he asked a simple question instead.“I don’t know,” I replied truthfully, because I didn’t.He stood out, he was that black mark that no one but I noticed, but other than that I didn’t know why I decided to talk to him. I just did. Maybe it was his eyes, or his black jacket, or his alluring voice whenever he spoke. Maybe it was the fact that despite not knowing me for long he still silently let me in, slowly until my presence was accepted.I felt like I knew him, even if I didn’t.I expected him to either stay quiet or talk about something else after that. We had stopped walking by then I believe. What I didn’t expect was for him to ask me that question.

“What happens when people open up?” he asked with the same voice, his eyes were still focused on the horizon in front of him, and mine were on him. I shrugged, even if he didn’t see it. And we started walking again. Slow steps throughout the cool sand, traces of our footsteps left behind, washed away by the waves.His biggest concern was that he wanted to, but didn’t know how to cross that line.I pushed him to cross that line.“I heard they get better, in many ways,” I replied. He stayed quiet and so did I. The wind hit our faces, and it was chilly and cold but it still felt good on my skin. I didn’t know why I felt so warm inside at the time.“But it also makes them vulnerable,” he said throughout the silence of the vacant beach. We stopped and went closer to the shore, the waves crashing on our bare feet as we stood there for a while. I inhaled, exhaled, and then looked up at the darkening sky.“Vulnerability is expected. We’re all fragile, we just are in different ways,” I told him and wondered whenever I was this deep, but from hanging around with him for a long time, I supposed the poet in me awoke by his presence.“I was born sick,” he told me again like he did earlier in the spring, the moon rising with the sun setting, the stars more apparent and clear. My eyes wandered towards him again. He was still looking up at the sky.“Why?”I sensed the déjà vu in my head that moment we spoke like that, almost as if we were back towards the day in the school garden. I didn’t need an answer at that time, but I needed one now. With a light flicker in his eyes, the vulnerability appeared and seeped through those dark orbs. I waited until he started speaking. His voice was voice soft, yet loud enough to my ears.“Society deemed me so.”The air chilled again, but my insides still felt warm, almost hot. I didn’t even know why anymore. I inhaled, and exhaled, once, twice. That was all it took for him to speak again. “I’m going to sound fucking insane right now,” he warned later.Of course I didn’t care.Weren’t we all insane?“But there are literally voices in my head who tells me that every day; in the voice of my father: even if he doesn’t know.”He ended it there. I looked at him for a while, and as he turned to face me, I felt it again. The loud pounding in my chest, the awkwardly pleasant knots in my stomach and my breath hitched. That stare was directed at me again, as if he wanted to say more, but seemed scared of my reaction.

Don’t be shy, just tell me.“I’m sick…” he didn’t continue as his eyes were only on me. I tried to think clearly with that heavy stare, and I tried to open my mouth and speak, but I couldn’t. I just stayed still because my brain didn’t know what to say anymore.The silence dragged on, but then my mouth had a mind on its own.I continued without missing a beat afterwards.“You’re not sick; you’re feeling something,” I said even softer than what he did as the waves covered our feet in cool water, before they suddenly disappeared from our skin, and turned into foam. He stayed silent, his lips didn’t say a word, but his eyes did.He doubted it.He was listening to the voices in his head, whatever they were saying were probably affecting him, and his stare was a mixture between focused and unfocused, all at the same time. I thought of it as if the real him was disappearing and reappearing all at once.I had only known him, really known him for a span of two months. I may not have known him for my whole life, or on really close terms, but I could read him like an open book. I knew what he was thinking.He was stuck between giving in and giving up.“Forget what your head says,” my voice rose in volume, my words were frustrated and angry, but most of all I had a purpose. A purpose for him to cross that goddamned line, because he took me in closer and closer until there almost wasn’t any space left, but he was too scared, too frightened to take that last step.“Forget what your father says, what society says, what anyone says, and just realize that you feel something, somewhere deep inside,” I think my voice broke when I told him that, suppressed emotions lingering and wavering inside of my throat, stinging my like needles and attempting to rip my heart wide open, the time passing by too unbearable.I just stopped talking; not because he didn’t pay attention, nor because I was done with my point. He didn’t stare, he didn’t comment upon anything.He kissed me.He kissed me with dry and chapped up lips and a harsh grasp on my t-shirt, with his pale fingers clutched onto the fabric tightly. And he nearly touched my chest and tugged me closer. He kissed me hard, with a burning passion I thought only existed in fiction or movies; that type of desire that one could never describe but would still know the exact feeling.I kissed him harder, and leaned in closer, and tangled my fingers in his dark hair, the thought of even being caught or noticed just vanished as if it never appeared in my head at all. The only thing I had in mind was that this mysterious, dark haired boy was in front of me, kissing me as if his life depended on it, and for whatever reason I didn’t know at the time.But I loved it.All from his grip on my shirt to the way his scent lingered on me afterwards, towards the taste, the sensation, the emotions that had me so whirled up that I could only feel him and think of him.It was sudden, it was impulsive, but I felt as if I had been waiting for it either way, for a long, long time.We parted because of the lack of oxygen, but we stayed close still, the skin of our foreheads meeting each other, his hands still on my shirt and mine in his dark locks, moving down to either side of his face, before cupping his jaw.And with a smile I thought I’d never see he leaned in closer again, with another kiss that left me breathless. He stepped out of his white box and I stepped out of the black one, and now it was all molded into one and there was no line, no mark that separated us anymore.Society looked down upon us.We knew even if they didn’t know about us.No one was aware of the fact that the loner boy was indeed involved with me, whoever I was according to people at that time, and they didn’t know about what happened behind closed doors. They didn’t know, even if many people saw us together, even if we were close.We acted indifferently in public.We made out when no one was around.I didn’t break the walls that surrounded him. I made my own space, and in some twisted way we became one. Where the shadows of the darkness molded into one with the brightness, but whatever the combination was I couldn’t phantom. I was too busy loving him in all ways.We kissed and held each other. We shared parts about our lives, about ourselves that just came out as naturally as breathing. I felt as if I had known him all my life, even if I haven’t. He was like a song I'd heard once in small fragments but had been singing in my mind forever. In a way I learned that love doesn’t depend on the time.It depends on character.At the peak of the summer heat, on a casual and totally random car trip on the road, across the coastline and with a destination unknown, we parked in an abandoned parking lot somewhere up a hill, where the sun set and the sky darkened.I saw the glimpse of one star in the air, and then he took my hand. It was always warm and rough to the touch, but it was never uncomfortable. We stayed quiet for a long time, indulged in a relaxed silence, his hand upon mine. He spoke about a minute later.“I love you.”It came out as a statement. He wasn’t unsure, he didn’t stumble upon his words; he just said it because he meant it. I knew. The grip on my hand tightened, and I tore my gaze from the sky and towards him, whose eyes were now locked on me.He said it again.I said that I knew, and that I loved him too.And then it was silent. Until I leaned closer, closer, until I could feel those all too familiar lips back on mine again, drowning in the sensation and the pleasure. We kissed like we always did; hard and heated, rough with tight grips and bites. The gentleness of light touches didn’t come before much later.We always kissed, but we never did anything more up until that point.And I was waiting for that moment for too long.Say there something you wanted, something you really, really wanted. And this thing seemed more important than everything and anything, because you had been waiting for it for such a long time. You waited because it would turn you into something else, into something better. And most of all you waited because you had to find the right person.You waited because it would turn you into a different person.You would lose your innocence.In his car in the middle of nowhere, underneath the night sky, we touched in ways we hadn’t been before. It was foreign and it was new, but it wasn’t awkward or out of place. It felt right in a way. We touched each other with skin upon skin, but we also really, really stepped into each other in a way that bared not only our bodies, but a personal space we always had just for us.We bared our souls in the same way that summer night as we bared our bodies.It wasn’t perfect, but at the time it was everything we needed.“Young love is a flame; very pretty, often fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep, burning, unquenchable,” he told me in the stuffy, hot summer’s night air, the windows of his car tainted with fog.With a strong arm draped over my body, the ferocious heat on my skin still apparent, and his touch which still lingered on the places where his hands, his lips traced my body. I tried to think clearly and my eyes still tried to stay focused again as my voice was hoarse.“Our bodies and mind may be young, but for all we know our souls might have lived a thousand years,” I replied when my lungs could function properly, when the excitement and tingles died down into the state of aftermath, the post-sex feeling vanishing with the previous desire.“A thousand years is still short compared to time,” his voice said through the air, probably parched and dry. His lips ended up on the base between my neck and shoulder, and lingered there as if to make his mark, gently nibbling on my skin, but instead he removed them and cold air seeped through the empty space. “I know,” I said whilst I was looking at the stars above us from the car window, which were shining brighter than they ever would in the polluted air in the city.“But why do I feel like this love is somewhere in between…Where the flame burns out too fast, but the coal survives for too long?” I said these words in my head but they never left my lips. My eyes were still focused on the small parts of the sky that I could see from the window, where the roof wouldn’t block the view. My lips were shut but my mind ran free. He didn’t say anything more, but again his lips somehow managed to find mine, and the decreasing hotness of the air suddenly returned into the same passion and desire. We went into another world were we just entered, which we just found, yet it felt like we didn’t want to leave.We lost our innocence.But there was no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin.Maybe our minds weren’t functioning properly at the time when we spoke; as if we had lived long enough to even have a clue. Maybe we were literally out of our minds when we started at it again in his car parked in the middle of nowhere, the stars spread like a huge blanket upon us.But then again we were never what society deemed as ordinary; but we were deemed as young lovers. We were lovers who were sick with the type of love that was so intense, so mind blowing and so deep that you could do nothing but hold on too tight, and then feel it slip away in the end.You let it slip away because it was your first real feelings, and you loved, you cared too much for your own good. You let it slip away because you didn’t know how to hold on long enough, and you actually believed that it wasn’t over. But it was.Maybe that is why the ending of first loves hurt more than the ones that come after.But then again maybe it hurt because we had to fight more than any other pair we knew of, and it was too tough to quit it.He promised me forever a month after that in his now messy room, where I stayed over multiple times, in where we shared our deepest thoughts and secrets. Where we made out or where we got reacquainted again with our bodies whilst his parents were away, or they thought I was helping him with whatever, or they believed we were just hanging out.They never knew.I thought they never would.And the thrill of being like this always managed to make me squirm, to make my body shiver in such a pleasant way that I thought I never would know better. With every touch, kiss, saying… it didn’t feel like that passing, fleeting love that I thought would grow old and expired.He loved me and promised me forever.He came to break that promise, but he didn’t know it at the time.I did; his real- self faltered and the voices came back into his head when he told me.“Young love is a flame; very pretty, often fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep, burning, unquenchable.”In a way I discovered that he was wrong, but at the same time I wasn’t correct either. I found out that our love was neither a flame, and nor was it like coal. It was something in between, just like I thought from that hot summer night in his car. Because our love did last as long as a flickering candle; short and intense, but it was still as deep, burning, as profound as if he had left a mark that would never be erased.He promised me forever.I found him a month later with blood on his wrists and prominent scars on his body, the steady beats against his chest were still, and his stare was lifeless.He took his life before forever could even happen. “The only heaven I’ll be sent to is when I’m alone with you,” I heard him whisper one night, when the window was open and the curtains fluttered with the midnight air, and ran down our bare skin. I was barely awake and my body was close to his. I counted the seconds in my head, as I drew circles on his back. It soothed him when I did that.I fell asleep a good while later.I would’ve stayed up all night had I known it would be our last.His parents found out about us the day after, and with screeches and curses they yelled and threw glass after us. I stood backed up against the wall with a pounding in my chest. He earned an intense punch on his face, and nearly passed out.I was prohibited to ever step into that house again. And he wasn’t allowed to see me anymore. They told him that he had to choose; to come back clean as a human again or live in his filthy ways.Either way he couldn’t; he could never disobey his parents, who he owed them his whole life. He didn’t have a choice, because as their only son they decided for him. I knew that his head chose them over me, even if his heart didn’t. It was enough for me to know, but it still slowly, painfully and agonizingly killed me inside with each passing day where I never heard from him again.I saw him at school again after a while. And we never spoke. We passed each other in the halls as if we were mere strangers, people who never talked to each other or had a connection like ours. It was as if we started from square one.Except that his eyes were covered in fear, and his body in cuts and bruises.I knew even if I didn’t see them.He wrote me a final note which I found tucked in the pocket of my white school blazer, where the writing on the front was scribbled messily and the paper was wrinkled badly.I stood outside in the late spring air on the beach, my toes in the sand, the waves crashing upon my bare feet. It was colder than what was comfortable, and school had ended several hours ago, but I didn’t go home.I wasn’t welcomed there anyway.“I was taught that the love between two people should always be between a man and a woman. If it was otherwise, that if you didn’t fall into that category, then you were wrong, unwanted like a malfunctioned robot because of the damage.I knew I was broken from a young age. I just didn’t have the evidence, until I fell for a boy in the sea of white clad uniforms. He noticed the person who always sat alone, surrounded by his own walls, in total isolation. He always thought of me as a black dot in the middle of a white page. I found him insane, but then again, I bet he found me just as insane.I knew that our type of love would never be accepted; neither by society or people who I thought was close to me. My hands never killed, they were never stained in another person’s blood, and they never harmed anyone in brutal ways.My hands touched and caressed a man.They didn’t like that. In fact I bet they hated it. They forced us apart, just like I thought they would.We were born sick, you heard them say it.I never said anything spiteful to hurt them, or abuse them. My mouth was mostly shut because I was raised to only speak when spoken to, and maybe I took it a bit too seriously. I never insulted anyone or took their pride away from them.My lips kissed a man, and told him that I loved him.I was born sick, but I love it.And I love you.”And just like that it ended just like it started; slowly, like building a house, until it stood there tall and proud. But as the storm hits, the house falls apart—as slowly as you built it, then all at once.And if the pain of not seeing him as often as I could hurt me, then the pain knowing that I would never see him again tore me apart. It ripped my heart wide open until I almost felt as if I didn’t have one anymore, until I could barely breathe.One moment he was there.The next he was gone.I was young.I didn’t know better.Someone should have told me to capture every second, every kiss & every night I had with him before they disappeared, before they vanished into thin air. I should’ve had a picture, a video, a mark left anywhere, but I didn’t. The only thing I had were his last words before he took his last breath.He was there in my arms and the next moment he was gone, off to somewhere I didn’t even know.The dark shadows from the men who belonged down below took him away from me.Or maybe it was the sinners disguised as saints, dressed in white, standing by heaven’s gates.

I’m sitting in a bright room where the window is open and the curtains are white. Where my eyes are facing the window; looking up at the blazing sun and the blue sky.

Time has passed.My age has passed the state of youth, passed the early and clumsy stages of my life. My skin has worn out and my limbs are sore after living a long life, and my hair has whitened during these years. The young boy I once was, was now lost in time and in the past.I am sitting in a bright room where people are looking at me; looking at the white spot in the midst of all the other equally as bright ones. We were all clad in white, forced to resemble each other in a way, in a color that represented cleanliness and the fact that we were soon spirits.We all look the same.But my uniform isn’t white.It’s in a dull shade of gray, washed out with the darker shades of black. And I was gray because he left his mark on me, which lingered somewhere in my mind, somewhere in my eyes and maybe even as deep as in my soul. The black shadows of his presence were still following me, were still there for me, even if he wasn’t anymore.Our love was absurd, just like a giggle in a funeral; we were everybody’s disapproval, but we still stayed together until fate happened. And in this madness we loved, we learned, we fought and we made up over and over again, a cycle that barely lasted for half a year and should have lasted for many more.With every kiss, touch and whisper, I didn’t feel like this flame would just burn off.

It felt real.I was too young to know what love was.I’m older now.I still haven’t felt the same.