LIFE ELEVATED

"Go on. Do it, Brian. You know you want to."

   "Not gonna happen, Sunshine."

   "C'mon, don't be such an ass." You look over, see the teasing smile in those wide eyes, that particular tilt of blonde head, and know you've lost. Again. "Something you shoulda done years ago and you know it."

   You lean your head back, baring the long lines of your neck in utter defeat. "How the hell do you get me to do these things?"

   Justin laughs. The full, throaty laugh that had always left you feeling as if you'd just toppled over that first sharp drop on the roller coaster.  Or won the lottery. "It's a finely developed talent," he states. You feel a light quickening in your gut as Justin passes by and whispers against your ear, "I'm on to you, Brian."

   And you can't deny the truth of that. He always had been.

::

   "Okay," you begin. "If this is gonna happen, it's gonna happen my way."

   "Is there any other way?"

   "Plane, train or automobile?" You screw up your face as you try to refold the map you've just marked up with indelible red ink, pretending you haven't heard Justin. Pretending your voice and your life didn't just break with the first word of that rhetorical question. "I choose... automobile," you crow in mock triumph, knowing the marked up map had already given you away.

   Blue eyes blink slowly and he smiles that smile. "So... does this mean I get to drive once in a while?"

   "Dream on," you whisper around your smirk.

   "Yeah."  

::

   You were six - maybe seven - the first time you thought about it. Back in what had been, for you, the golden age of television. It was one of the few pleasures you'd been able to secure in Jack and Joan's household. Every Thursday evening you glued yourself for thirty minutes to a ten-inch square of worn carpet, soaking in the exotic beauty of a world beyond the confines of Jack's house - a world you'd just begun to read about in books, to imagine in dreams. It was merely luck that your beloved travelogue aired on the same night Jack spent playing poker at the Union Hall, and there had been precious little good luck in your young life.

   On that particular Thursday, you'd been captured by the reds and browns and swirling, beautiful barrenness of the location. To a bright, culturally stifled little boy it was Mars and the moon and the sun all at once. It was a place flush with untold stories of cowboys and astronauts, of Conestogas and lunar landers. It was canyons and mesas and snaking rivers... It was Utah.

   You mulled it over in your head. You poured over pictures from library books. You dreamed and you hoped.

   With a guffaw and a slap and a ‘fucking Utah?' from Jack, you moved the burgeoning idea to the back of the closet you kept in your head, a closet that was already beginning to bulge with unfulfilled dreams and quashed hopes.

::

   Justin decrees the journey should begin on your anniversary.

   You'd chosen to celebrate your relationship - you were long beyond denying the reality of that word and all it occasioned - on the anniversary of The Prom. Of all the significant days you'd considered - the day you met, the day Justin returned from that fucker-who-shall-not-be-named, the day you voluntarily said The Words for the first time, the day Justin came back to Pittsburgh for the final time - you decided that The Prom had been the single most important catalyst for the rest of your lives. It was, like the two of you, dichotomous. A moment in time steeped with the imagery of your tumultuous history. The best and the worst. Bright and dark. Good and bad. Love and pain. You chose to celebrate the wonder of the date and reclaim the power that the day's hatred had stolen from you both. So you re-crafted its meaning as you necessarily re-crafted your relationship. It became your private anniversary.

   All of that makes it perfect, Justin argues. It will be a declaration, a final fuck you and farewell to the lingering apparitions of your childhood. An affirmation intended to dissipate the shadows.    

::

   You never really saw yourself as the crazy type. You'd always measured and metered out your life in exact increments. Parceled and compartmentalized. Regulated and restricted. It had been... necessary. But, then again, everything about you screamed crazy at one point or another. You took risks no sane man would really take. The indiscriminate sex, the drugs. You'd pushed the envelope on your life on so many different occasions you'd actually lost track somewhere along the line as to whether you still existed at all.

  You'd eventually gleaned everything you'd admit to wanting out of life. Money. Success. Desirability. Even grudging respect. You'd made yourself. But in the process you'd set aside the spark of wonder you'd begun life with - tightly wrapped it up with a twine string and placed it inconspicuously behind wishes and dreams in a virtual cryostasis. Gave up on childhood dreams in deference to more adult accountabilities.

   And then there came Justin, thawing that shit out.

   A boy. A mere twig of a man-yet-to-be stepped up one night and unwittingly made it his life's mission to unravel the conundrum that was Brian Kinney. A skinny little virgin, so naïve there was still moisture behind his ears. And he was a visionary fighter. Met you thrust for parry, push for shove, heart ache for heartbreak. He didn't see your soul as the dark place you knew it had become, but as a house of brilliant light. He unsophisticatedly wormed his way inside and flipped on all the switches you had turned off, struck matches and lit the candles you had hidden away. He reached into the dark recesses of your private pain and pulled out happy.

   And it scared the shit out of you because you didn't know what the fuck to do with happy anymore. If you ever did.

   And you tried your asshole best to push the magic boy away.

   How the hell does one explain that? 

   Yeah, you're the crazy type.

::  

   "Take the boots. Take the leather. Leave the suits at home, Brian," Justin chuckles out from his perch on the breakfast bar. "Trust me on this... you won't need them." He's been watching you try to pack for the last two hours. "You're living out a childhood dream, Brian, so live it... back away from the Armani."

   "The Armani is who I am," you retort with a huff, knowing he knows this.

   "The Armani was your armor. But your skin is stronger now." The words soft and glowing, like him. Maybe he knows more than you ever imagined.

::

   You ask him offhandedly if he knows exactly how long it's going to take to get to your destination once you begin and you think you notice a flicker of sadness cross his eyes when he responds that you're already almost there.

   "Even you can't make me instantly traverse space and time, Sunshine," you huff out with an awkward grin. "There's still the loft door to negotiate."

   "Think... bigger," he breathes out. And before you turn to see him, you already know he is standing with the large window to his back, his arms out wide in invitation. Suddenly the glow from his smile and the light from his eyes are almost too much. Too much. You clutch the marked up map and the old duffle in your hands a little tighter as he says, "Much... bigger."

   It has taken you weeks to get to this point, to be able to even think about ‘negotiating the loft door', to once again think ‘bigger'. And he was your only touchstone, the lone witness to your withdrawal from everything. From everyone. Since the night you'd re-crafted your relationship, rescaled your future, redesigned reality. Since the night you realized you were, indeed, the crazy type.

   "They'll understand eventually, you know. They aren't perfect, but they'll understand." As always, he reads your mind better than you do.

  "They can't understand this, Justin."

   "No. Probably not this," he agrees with a muted laugh. "But they'll understand grief."

   "Is that what you are? My grief?" You see him shimmer in the light from the window and wonder if it's him or the tears you still haven't been able to unleash.

   "Partly, I think. But mostly I'm your dreams."

   "More dreams deferred? Denied and unrealized? Again?" You realize you're shouting and it startles you. You'd forgotten what it felt like to feel. To emote. It almost makes you smile. But you don't. It just seems wrong under the circumstances.

   "You're allowed to feel it, Brian," he almost whispers and you do smile then. He's on to you. Still. "You are tenacious in holding your dreams to you like a hair shirt, wearing their denial like a badge of honor. Don't."

  "And how the fuck should I wear them? Hmm?" The sudden anger feels good. So damned good.

   "Just what do you think all your fancy clothing is, Brian?"

   "I thought you said it was my armor, Sunshine."

   "Jesus, Brian! God, you're so determined to be miserable!" He runs his hands over his face, resting his fingers on his cheeks. "Armor. Hair shirts. Those are just different ways of saying protection, Brian." You watch him walk toward you, his whole being begging you to understand. To get it. "You don't need that protection anymore."

   And you want to touch him, to pull him to you again. To lose yourself in his body, in his very soul. But instead you whisper, "Yeah, I do. Because you died."

   He spreads his arms wide again, smiling softly, and holds your gaze. "Think... bigger." He points to a photograph you had framed a while ago. Someone had snapped it in Deb's back yard on some easily forgotten occasion. You were both laughing, your arms around him holding his back to your chest. "You don't need it because we lived that."

::

   You knew before the phone calls began. Justin had already told you, though the fact that he was there to tell you was message enough. It had only been a few hours since he'd left. Long enough for his plane to not quite land in New York. Almost everyone survived. Justin wasn't one of them.

   You were sitting on the bed smoking, trying not to think of ‘or never again' when you heard him. "It's nothing like we've been told, Brian. Nothing." When you raised your eyes and saw him, more beautiful than he'd ever been, a euphoric smile on his face, you knew. It was the first time you'd ever wanted to let him see you really cry.

::

   "So you go to Utah. You live out your dreams one by one. You make your life, your soul, yours again."

   That's how the plan began.

   Justin stayed. Never passed on into that white light or whatever shit he's supposed to do. He never did what he was supposed to do. That's a given. And you're more grateful than he could ever know that he doesn't.

   "And just what am I supposed to do in Utah, Justin?"

   "Whatever you want. Fly a kite in the desert. Paint your face in red earth. Photograph yourself into a new career. Whatever you want." was his easy reply. "You told me once that it was the one place you've always wanted to go. Make it the first of your deferred dreams to accomplish. Easier than the rock star thing." He smirked.  

   "You come with me?"

   "I always came with you," he teased. You could feel the diversion like ice in your blood.

::

   As you pass through the loft door, close it and lock it one last time, you are both aware of the reason you'd not left your home since the day Justin returned. It was the reason your soul feels crushed right now - the reason your heart is being wrenched out of your chest and you are forgetting to breathe.

   "You have to let go of the ghosts now, Brian. All of the shadows. All of them. It's time."

   "No." You barely hear yourself say the word. "Just... no."

   "Yes. You're alive, Brian. So fucking alive! And you'll never know how happy that makes me." He looks at you with eyes a little too bright. A little too blue. "Live. From this day on, you fucking live. Live the rest of your life like you lived us. With everything you have."  

   "I never wanted to love you, you know?" It's all you can think of to say. You won't say goodbye. You can't.

   "I know," he smiles faintly and blinks slowly. "I'm glad that's one thing you wanted that you didn't get."

   "Yeah. Me too."

   "Loving you is the best thing I could ever had done in my life. You know that, right?"

   "Yeah," you laugh lightly. "Me too." He grins and you feel it wrap around you like his arms used to do. Like he held you in the middle of the night. Like he loved you. Loves you.

   "Live and be happy. I hope I gave you that - how to be happy. No more armor. No more hair shirts. Just... be happy." Justin's voice breaks and it sounds like your heart. "I'll always wait for you. It really is only time, Brian. Go..."

  The faint noise of his disappearing sounded like "Later..."

::   

   You glance down at the well-worn photo - tan and hazel wrapped around alabaster and blond, around bright blue and smiles. Place it back in your wallet. Place that in the inside upper pocket of your jacket and pat your hand over the spot just left of center on your chest. Over the spot where his heart now beats. You hold it there for the space of a memory.

   You tilt your head back and raise your face to the sky, hoping maybe - just maybe - you can finally see one little break in the cloud cover. One more little bit of Sunshine. You pull your lips in between your teeth and let your eyes drift closed for a moment and feel his smile. Trying to let yourself justlive it.

  You run your hands across the fabric of the battered duffle tucked into the small space behind you - the same duffle that carried Justin's life and dreams every time he came and went. Now it carries your life and your dreams. Your hands tremble slightly as you turn the key in the ignition and nod a wistful smile at the memory pressed into the leather of the seat beside you. You know, somehow, he's given you everything. Everything you need to let you know you will be okay. And with his whole life beating a rhythm in your chest and your future firmly in your own hands, you point yourself toward Utah.