Some days remind me of him more than others. The rain brings him back especially but I don’t know why. I have no memory of us in the rain, of even staying in bed all day with the sound of rain filtering through the walls and ceiling. The rain brings untold mysteries with it. A promise of new life, that’s what the smell is. How everything smells a certain way in the rain, even flowers and people, that scent of rain permeates and lives in everything. And then the smell of impending rain, too, unmistakable. Rain itself is no great secret, how and why it happens, but the way it shrouds the world, makes it darker, closes everything in only to breed with the earth and give new life.
The boundary between worlds, that’s what rain is. Ghosts fill the streets and cover the walls in the rain. It reminds them of something, probably, something they left behind. They feel rain, or so I’ve been told. It’s their last grip on the real world, on this side of the boundary between living and not. They leave echoes behind then, little traces of themselves. That tenuous grasp they have on this world, they take advantage of it, consciously or not, and mark places the way a dog marks territory. And the only way for them to do that is to leave their sounds behind, echoes, tiny memories of their life.
Maybe that’s why some ghosts hate. They left too much behind and now they’re just an empty collection of memories that recognizes us and hates us for what we have and what they lost. Even here now, while writing this, I feel them, the spines on my back raised, the hairs on my arms reaching out to touch the skin they should have but don’t. The smell, like I said, though, is how I know them, mostly. Funny how they don’t leave smell behind the way animals do but instead leave sounds, audiomemories. Incidentally, dogs don’t like me because of the ghosts. Most pets, really.
But the rain, I keep waiting for him to come back on one of these storm clouds that passes over the ocean. If the rain really is the boundary then this is when it should be easiest for him. I think that’s why I miss him so much in the rain, because I know he can find me.
The ocean of the past, I still hide from so much of it and rely on all that I don’t run from. Everything before him, I waited for the nightmare to end, and it did when he accepted me into his arms. It was a new birth, a new life, but it flashed too briefly and left me with only these rabid bits of time that eat me, these memories that haunt me, but he, the ghost I need, remains lost.
Some days I pray for rain, for thunder and lightning. Standing on the rooftop with an iron cross around my neck begging for lightning to strike me because maybe he’ll come with it or maybe it’ll take me, throw me in the ocean with the other lost ghosts, and reunite us, my Sebastian and me.
Not everything was perfect between us. I loved him fully but he loved me hesitantly. Part of him was ashamed, in despair over it, afraid that he’d be punished for me.
‘I can’t face you today,’ his back turned, feet hanging off the bed, head in his hands. ‘If I take you, there’ll be no relief.’
I put my hand on his shoulder, ‘We’ll escape.’
He shrugged me off, ‘I’m ruining you. I’m an awful man for what I’m doing to you.’
‘I need you.’
He turned to me, bags heavy under his redeyes, ‘You don’t. You really don’t. If you leave me you’ll find your proper life, relief, escape. There’s a world out there for you and you’re wasting away with me in this coffin of a house. It’s too much for me to bear, to know what I’m doing to you.’
‘I found you.’
‘And I should’ve ran. I should have never touched you the way I did.’
‘I touched you,’ my hand crawled across space and touched his on the bed.
He took my hand, linked fingers, and stared. ‘There will be no end to this if I don’t make you go. You’ll rot your life away before it’s begun. I’m to blame.’ He raised his head and looked me in the eyes. So sad and alone. I could tell how it hurt him so to say it because he had nothing left. There was only me and before me he was festering here, waiting to die. ‘You gave me new life. You brought me back. Running through meadows, that’s how this has all been for me. Birds singing and sunshine. I’m old enough to be your grandfather.’
‘I don’t care,’ crawled on my knees to him, taking his head in my arms, ‘I don’t care. We’ll run forever, through fields and mountains, just keep running.’ Face to face, his head in my hands, his face was a mountain crumbling, a sunset bleeding, a heartache putrefying. ‘I need you and you need me.’
His hands took me, those soft delicate hands, right below the armpits and laid me down on the bed and he walked out the room, slowly, me calling his name after him.
We sat on opposite sides of the door he locked for hours.
‘You’re only sixteen,’ his voice heavy, weighed by regret. It hurt me, the way he suffered, how I knew he wanted me still, but couldn’t accept it, couldn’t live with me.
‘I love you,’ my voice may have died at the door, so weak was it mumbled into my knees, swimming through my tears. ‘I love you.’
For a long time we said nothing but we knew the other sat there inches away, waiting. Waiting for what? So much of my life spent waiting for an indescribable moment off in the future. Waiting to wake from the nightmare of life, waiting for the ghost of the man I love, waiting for him to open the door and take me in his arms.
After that we spent hours in bed exploring one another with new vigor but nothing was resolved.
‘You need to promise me something,’ the light was dim and he stroked my head, ran his fingers up and down my back.
My head was on his chest, eye closed, playing with his stomach hair.
‘You need to promise me that you won’t stay too long.’
The tears welled in my eyes again though I thought I had none left. ‘Don’t leave me.’
‘You need to begin your life.’
‘You are my life.’
His chest inflated and deflated, a huge breath. ‘I’ve spent many years waiting for you. I’ve waited for you since before you were born. You lived in my dreams that I was caught in, afraid to let go of. I gave you the moon then, gave you everything for saving me, bringing me back to life. You’re my Orpheus that travelled through a lifetime of hell just to save a pitiful old man. But I can’t have you, can’t keep you. You belong to the world and I to death.’
He felt my tears on his stomach, I know he did from the way he gripped my shoulder. ‘All my life has been a nightmare till now.’ My sobs that I tried to hide shattered my voice. ‘Because of you I’m still alive, still able to go on living.’ I turned to him, whispered, hoping the words wouldn’t flounder before they reached him, ‘Don’t you love me?’
His hand on my cheek, I closed my eyes and leant into it, the softness of skin, the smell of sweat, my orgasm still on the hand that held me, and that moldmusk surrounding us. ‘My dear, one day you’ll meet a man, a man your own age. He’ll give you everything that I never could. If I saved your life, he will make your survival worthwhile. He’ll expel the ghosts that haunt you the way I can’t. I’m too old to give you anything but what little is left of my heart. It’s not enough and you deserve so much more.’
‘So alone without you,’ my chest heaved, gasped, my throat raw, the snot dribbling from my nose and mouth but he didn’t care. ‘All my life, a cage without a window, but you you you you,’ I broke off, unable to continue.
He wiped my mouth, my nose with his hand, pulled me close to him and kissed my eyes, wiped away the tears and whispered, the tears heavy in his voice, ‘Please, go on living.’
So many times in my life spent drowning. The rain crashed through the broken sundown, blinding, the walls crumbled, and I yearned, my heart bursting, the past bleeding from me, flesh on flesh like flowers drifting downstream. I was in a dream, all my life, a nightmare I couldn’t wake from, flooding my lungs and veins, then electric bright fireworks flashed and the nightmare turned to ecstatic visions, the sky from grey to blue because of a first kiss, the days with silent heartache but fiery unfettered love, the memories I mourn now like Gorecki’s singer swept up in her sorrow and loneliness, and the thought came, the beauty of a new dawn, so I promised to keep it sacred, and I pray my way through the rain, the flood, the drowning gasped breaths waiting for those happy days promised me in my youth, the sunrise without remorse.
How long until I see you, till the sun comes shining through? Back when we were so new, so young and old, and you promised, and I promised, I’ll never forget you.