the beauty of yours

Steve Morrison lives in one of the buildings near the busiest streets of their city; the building, though, is painted in cheerful colours of orange and green, they don’t emit the sort of cheerfulness. It’s dull; the people living in and around it are rowdy, obnoxious, and rude to their veins. Steve has gotten used to their uncanny presence, and so finds some strange sort of comfort in it. The life though still is insipid there, but there is life, and Steve finds a home in it. His apartment, on the fourth floor, is nothing to be proud of; it is painted in dull colours of black and grey from the outside, and from the inside the walls are white; the furniture are old, though some of them are new—only months old; and the house in a general mess of clothes and unwashed utensils of the last time he used them. His apartment is rather big for one person though, however ugly it is, he cannot deny it is too big to be comfortable for someone as lonely as him; there are two bedrooms, a guest bedroom, a kitchen, a tiny balcony, a living room, and one bathroom. His bedroom has too big a bed for him, even though by no means he is small made; his frame is burly, muscled enough that he can hog the entire bed for himself, and yet the bed is too big for someone built like him; the clothes are strewn all the floor, and he pushes them aside when he walks past time, too tired to make the effort to help them in their rightful places. The TV blares off some music and it sooths his nerves even though he can no more understand the words, he increases the volume and wonders if Danny, his neighbour, would come barging in demanding him to turn down the volume, again. He does not dare turn it down even then; Danny can come and fight all he wants. There are dead plants in the corners of the living room; he had them placed there with a hope that they would help him cheer up—they haven’t, of course, and that’s why they’re dead just like him. There’s only one plant, placed in the balcony that is well, alive, and green; the only one he has taken care of after all this while. He looks at it, and sighs, and thinks, That apartment is too big for someone like him; someone who has struggled living in all these years, and who has been alone for so long he thinks relationships are disgusting; he does not necessarily feels so, but there’s nothing to deny that either. He stands uptight in the balcony, head held high, and his eyes fixed on the starless sky. That’s all he has been doing after coming from the office in the evenings in the past few... he doesn’t remember anymore. He just knows it has been too long since he started this—whatever this is. With his shoulders straight, and ringing ears, and hands clutched tight on the railings, he looks down at the busy streets. The winds move past him; cool, and almost heartless in their liveliness. When Steve first read about it, it said that winters are fixed for particularly two kinds of feelings or emotions: sadness, and loneliness, so it makes sense if he says that he doesn’t feel high in his spirits. However, his ways of feeling such way has been common and repetitive for a long time, and so the low spirits, sadness, and loneliness do not belong just to this season. They’re divided, and every single season takes its chance to further ruin him, more than he already is. The biting cold of January seeps through his skin and into his veins and mixes with his blood fast enough that he feels colder than he did just few seconds earlier. He brings his hands back from where they clutched the railings, and rubs them up and down his frame before pushing them in his trousers’ pockets. He fists them, feels cold in the wind and the snow that might fall anytime soon, but remains stubbornly standing still right where he is. His feet feel cold, for he has not worn any socks, and so does his bare neck and face, and he realises with a slow startle that this winter is more vicious than the previous one. He looks down, and keeps his eyes trained on the tiny frames of the people walking by the roads, and the rushing cars, and the smaller buildings pretty and alight with how bright their lights are. Perhaps if he keeps looking, the cold won’t bother him much. Sometimes he asks himself what he is doing with his life, and most of the times he is left bereft of a satisfactory answer—which happens more than often. His head is never clear, there’s always something going on in there, even if he tries to push it in the back of his mind, it persists against all odds, and remains there, fixed and tattooed, and reminds him of things that he is not yet he feels like he is. It has been going for a long time—this battle within himself, against himself, and against all odds even though all the odds that he has found until is himself. It’s a complicated mess of feelings and emotions that he denies himself, and of the truth and the lies he tells himself; the awareness is sharp enough that he knows exactly what is a lie and what is a truth, what he needs and what he doesn’t, and yet, he often forces himself into a deep abyss of this struggle that barely allows him to fight anymore. He feels restless, anxious, and bereft of anything resembling remotely alive and life. Steve is lost, and he knows it well enough to know that he can’t do anything about it. He needs to learn to live with it, for as long as he allows himself to live that is. If someone asks Steve when he first started feeling like this, so utterly lost in his own lonely and miserable life, he would not be able to give a proper and satisfactorily answer, because he doesn’t know either. All that he knows and is sure of is one simple thing: he has always wanted to leave. To where? He does not know either, but he has always wanted to leave. When he was but a child, it was an innocent desire to hide somewhere where he could no more find his family, and remain hidden there until the day passed, and everyone went back to sleep; in the beginning, he just wanted to avoid talking to anyone, much less his distanced relatives, with whose stories he could barely relate and understand, and find amusement in. He hid, most of the times were successful, and in the silenced days he would promise himself that he would change himself when he gets old. That’s all he dreamt of: becoming someone who’s better at communication and someone who can attract the attention and enjoy it as well. Well, it of course did not go as planned. In fact, he curled more and more into himself, and remained hidden from the rest of the world whenever possible. Teenage came, and so did the adulthood, and yet the habit of wanting the attention off him did not subside; he still cringed at it, and he still hated humans beings and their jumbled mess of stories that made little to no sense to him, and for what he couldn’t care any less. The result of his own nature is what he is now; alone, miserable, and in a desperate need of help that he knows will never come his way because no one knows him; even those who claim to know him well don’t know him; heck, he doesn’t know himself; he does not understand what he wants and what he does not, what he is waiting for and what he is not, his thoughts are such a jumbled mess in his head that he barely thinks straight anymore. What he feels does not matter, because he does not feel anything. The thoughts of leaving, the thoughts which are not so innocent anymore, started somewhere after his twenty-sixth birthday (which was celebrated by none, because no one remembered; he himself did not), and have not stopped since. It’s not like he tries to stop them even, he has found himself too comfortable around such thoughts for so long that separating from them sounds like some sort of injustice to him, to what he is and what he has been for all these years, and what he has believed in all his twenty-nine years of life. He tells himself he cannot do injustice to himself, yet that’s exactly what he has been doing all these years—its intensity of which has gotten out of point after a certain someone left him in the harrowing abyss that is his life, that sucks the life out of him, sucks everything out, but gives nothing it return because that is its nature. When he looks down at his arms, now bare as he pulls the sleeves up, he sees nothing but self made scares marring several inches of his brawny, pale arms. These were made when he did not think of hiding them, when he innocently believed that people would not pay attention to them; the ones on his feet, the palms of his hands and his legs are a different story. They were made when he realised that he needed to hide lest someone sees what he does not want them to. They are hidden beneath his clothes for none but himself to see. He sighs and looks up, and does not allow the cold of the month to waver him from any of his thoughts this time. His neighbour is holding a party, and they are loud. He closes his eyes, and wonders if he can go there and complain about it, and then wonders if they would care about him complaining at all. In all the years that they have lived side by side, his neighbour has always wanted to be heard. He has never wanted to hear. Perhaps that is why he feels so hopeless; his neighbour, as rowdy and rude as he is, is almost like life of the party; he is boisterous, and he has a happy life with a loving girlfriend of five years. He has everything that Steve does not have. He is neither jealous of him nor he envies him. He just wishes he had the same to be happy about, too. The sky, devoid of any stars, remains daunting. It is oddly reflective... a natural reflection of what he is from inside; a sky (his abyss) without any stars (his hopes). He sighs, and sighs some more. When the doorbell rings all of a sudden, he tells himself it has been either pressed on the wrong apartment or that the people next door are trying to find ways to entertain themselves, one of is it to play with him. He thinks of that, and so ignores the ringing bell for the next several minutes. He hears no one laughing, yet he believes others just as much as does himself: naught. He tells himself that the ringing bell would soon stop, however it does not stop at all. In fact, it gets insistent, and although he has always believed that no one can convey their anxiousness through ringing a bell, he feels as though there’s some anxiousness behind the door. Or perhaps he is yet again over thinking. Lost without a logical explanation, he remains where he is. The bell rings over and over again. He plans to not open it at all, however, when it remains so for a very long time, so long that the crowd of people have disappeared a lot in the busy streets of their city, he sighs, turns around, and heads for the main door. He pulls his sleeves down before opening the front door. Although he was expecting no one in particular, the presence on the other side still takes him by surprise enough that he staggers in his steps, and barely feels the steady heartbeats in his chest. As cliché as it sounds, Steve finds that the world has stopped for a while, for him if not for the person on the other side. The person remains cherry, a baby in his arms, and a smile that Steve told himself a long time ago he would not a pleasure in. In front of him, on the other side of the door, stands his best friend; make that ex-best friend, the one who left him lost three years ago for a man none of them knew well; the ‘certain someone’ that left him when he needed him the most for a man he claimed to love. His best friend has a baby in his arms, and although his eyes speak volumes of guilt, the smile on his face remains genuine and kind, and that which Steve knows does things to his heart strings. Yet, seeing him after all these years, he finds that anger brewing all over again which he believed until now he had stomped a long time ago. He scowls. His best friend’s smile falters. “What are you here for?” His best friend shifts on his feet, the baby in his arms a bubbling mess of excitement. “Hi, Steve,” he says instead, softly as his voice has always been like. He has always been a soft spoken man, kind and generous in ways that Steve knows he can never be. Yet, he had been the utmost kind to Steve all those years back. “What are you doing here, Jonathan?” He repeats, firmer this time. “What do you want?” “I have been looking for you,” Jonathan says, and swallows. His face flushes red, and Steve remembers the same expression he wore on his when he had been in a frantic search for a best friend who had left on his own. He used to believe Jonathan had been coaxed to run away, he was not that brave; “and found you here. Besides,” he says, voice a little high pitched, “it’s your birthday! You forgot again, did you not?” “Does that matter to you?” Jonathan swallows. “It does,” he answers bravely, “that’s why I am here.” “You were not here for three years though. Am I supposed to forget about your absence?” “Steve,” Jonathan says and looks down at the baby in his arms, “this is Gabriel,” he introduces instead; “my baby,” he adds, and looks up at him through his lashes. Steve does not understand how he should react to what’s happening. He remains silent, stubbornly and painfully silent. He needs to hear it, the apologies and the explanations, and yet not. He wants to hear nothing but. Jonathan shifts the baby in his arms when he tries to grab onto Steve. He smiles at him, as if hoping that he would get the signal. Even though Steve does, he remains standing where he is. His heart wavers slightly (a lot) at the slobbering and giggling baby, but he tells himself he wants to feel nothing at all for anything that belongs to his best friend. It’s hard (and he fails) yet he remains stoic from the outside. “We bought you your favourite chocolate pie as well,” Jonathan tries again. Steve notices the heavy bag in his ex-best friend’s hand only then. He frowns. “It is no more my favourite,” he sighs, “I have long stopped loving what I once loved.” “Oh,” Jonathan says, disappointed probably, “well, what do you like then? I can go and buy it for you; it’s your birthday after all.” “Why are you here, Jonathan?” Though the question has been repeated several times by now, it has still not been answered. He does not exactly need an answer either, he just wants to... he does not know anymore. He just wants to keep looking at Jonathan for a while; he wants to take everything that he has missed and more. He wants to look at the baby who does not resemble his ex-best friend in appearance but does in his habits. He remains stoic from the outside, but from the inside he is anything but steady, unwavering, and calm. “I have missed you, Steve,” Jonathan answers, head hung low, “and also,” he swallows as red creeps his puffed cheeks, “I don’t have anywhere to live.” He sounds embarrassed, sure, but there’s a kind of tiredness in his voice, his appearance, and his words that he finds in his own. “What do you mean you don’t have?” He frowns further, “where is—” he stops and bites the inside of his cheek, even thinking about that particular name makes him want to vomit—“where is Garner?” Jonathan ducks his head further. The baby, Gabriel, whines at him. He kisses the baby on his cheek. “He does not matter anymore.” “Where is he, Jonathan?” Though he hated Garner to the last of his cell for taking away Jonathan, and Jonathan for leaving so easily, he can still find that son-of-a-b***h and ruin his face if he has so much as done something stupid to Jonathan and the baby. The emotion, so sudden, surprises him enough that he has to shake himself out of it. The intensity of the anger must be high, because he feels the nervous ticking that he often feels, that leaves his body shivering and wavering as if it has not eaten anything in more than a year. He clutches the door harder, if he does anymore, he would break the wood. The thought satisfies him. “He’s an abusive bastard,” Jonathan answers, a disappointed lit on his lips, but his eyes scream fire. Steve tells himself that is why he allows his ex-best friend inside.