The Ship Sails
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He’d applied to the scholarship not having the least hope of being accepted. But he was. And he was leaving. I look into his face searching for the irony but there was none. My fears have all come to life. I try to reconcile between reality and bad dreams, but no escape was before me. Inevitable truth stared me in the eye, and the sky laughed in mockery at my foolish heart.
We break up, to say it bluntly. He was to leave to California God knows when, and I was to stay alone.
“No one will know, not tonight,” I tell him. My friends’ knowledge of the break-up would ruin the night. He agrees. And we are to spend our last day as boyfriends.
We walk in silence. My heart forbidding a thousand tears.
We are given our last day, and my every breath ticks away seconds that shred a love that is not meant to be into pieces of elapsed time. I am losing the sense of belonging to a world I’ve grown attached to—a world I have built with my own hands.
I try to shake the thoughts away, but the more I chase them, the more I find them haunting my every move. Every step I make in this park is to lead to a final moment: a moment—I realize and shake with fear—of goodbye.
I begin to feel it with its cutting edge, thrusting my heart with poisonous stabs. I look at him. So silent and calm, the sadness in his eyes takes me to a heaven I no longer want, a heaven I wish to burn.
We go to Faraya. No one knows. Harry and I kiss and we hug, and pretend to be happy. We drink, we dance, we sing Happy Birthday to Jad who’s just turned 22. It was indeed a night to remember.
In my heart I begin to hope that yesterday might have been a dream. We fit so well. I kiss him in front of everyone, and it comes so naturally, like back in the days when his lips were moist, burning with passion and desire.
The night passes. And we are to bed together. And I wonder… does love still wait in Faraya?
I sleep by his side, facing him. I kiss him, and I know he smells the alcohol on my breath. He kisses me back. It was the first time we share a bed… and my hoping heart believes it would not be the last. I reach for his body as we kiss. And I slowly undress him as we both burn. He undresses me. We kiss. We are set on fire to the sound of rain strumming the window panes. He goes on top of me, touching my skin with both his hands. And we start making love.
But before we both reach our climax, he stops. I look him in the eye. He turns away.
“I can’t,” he says
“Can’t what? What’s wrong?” I plead.
“I just can’t.”
He turns his back and goes to sleep.
I remain looking at the celing, filled with an emptiness I’d never in my life suffered. My tears come flowing, and I remember the clouds we watched. I turn my back on him, sobbing. I fall asleep, a hole in my chest eating my core.
Love waits in Faraya… It waits, still, and waits for lovers that are never to be.
We wake up the next day. I can no longer hide my feelings. I tell Jad what has happened, and his concern kills me furthermore. I tell him I wish not to speak of it. And the subject is closed.
We pack our things, Harry and I avoiding each other’s eyes. Our talks are limited to little chit chat. We don’t address each other unless urgently. The end has come. My heart knows it. And all hope is gone.
Everyone leaves to their cars. Harry and I are left alone. I stand before him, stiff to the bone. The moment must pass. The tear must go away taking with it the last of the words spoken. But as one tear comes down, more appear: floods and springs that wash my heart into mortal agony. I am lost in yesterdays of memories, and a strip of moments lived comes before my eyes. This cannot be. It has been too good, too good to end. But maybe it was too good to last.
Those two months had been one long dream from which I found myself awoken with the first dawn of November. They had been filled with memories, bittersweet and painfully soothing. The dream came unexpected, and unaware, I found myself confound in its fabric. Living one fantasy moment after the other, not knowing that one day I will wake up, and all of it will shatter to pieces of broken memories.
The day came when all I’d built was dispersed into oblivion. And my heart began its fall into eternal abyss.
Harry came, and Harry left. Easily and undisturbed, he left. Just like a knife that cuts through you, smoothly it caresses your skin and goes into your flesh licking your blood, taking away your life.
Harry is gone now, and so is the dream. The realm I’d built crashed from where it floated, up on cloud nine. My bliss was ephemeral, and just like a ship, my heart now sails in the same tempest-stricken waters I’ve drifted in for years, where love is nothing but another ghost in the fog, looking for that light at the end of the world to find itself a new dock.
~ The End ~
Read previous chapters of Living Gay, written by theRibz here
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