Fair waning: I wrote this when I was still in high school. The style of my writing has gone through a lot of changes since then.
ONE
LAURENT, 18.
A rough shove to the chest, body pinned, then a hand snarled around the throat. There was a ringing in his ears, he had knocked his skull on the edge of his writing desk. His breath came in short pathetic gasps, father grunted and held his son down with a menacing squeeze around the neck. He remembered thinking, in that instance before he thought all air had left him: father forgive me, please please please
Father, as if hearing his plea, shouted in rage and with belligerent precision, unclenched the words right by his ear. Words he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
“If I see him anywhere near our house again, I will kill him.” The last word was a slur, intended to humiliate his son, it was whispered with a lilt of perverse satisfaction. Father uncurled his grip around Laurent’s reddening throat. He was so relieved of the air rushing into his lungs that he did not anticipate the slap coming.
“No!” Laurent was smacked awake by the thundering sound of violence, clutching his cheeks as though it happened just the very second before. In truth, it had been weeks since. He drew his comforter tighter around his body and burrowed deep within it, his hand feeling for the phone on the nightstand.
He dialed the number of the only boy in this universe that would understand this private war he was forced to participate every night.
“Laurent?” Wylan’s voice, although muted by sleep, eased his frenzied heartbeats. It did not matter however many times he had put himself through it, the horror was just as fresh.
“I’m sorry for calling.” Laurent murmured, biting his lip from the sob that threatened to shatter the stillness of the night. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling to hold in the tears and focus on his breathing.
A forlorn pause, then the sound of Wylan struggling to sit up in bed. “Hey, Lo, you know I don’t mind.” His voice so saddeningly sweet Laurent had to grip the phone tighter to keep his hand from shaking.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“You mean the nightmare, or tomorrow?”
Laurent heard a quiet chuckle from Wylan. “Both. You know, we haven’t talked of tomorrow enough, haven’t seen you since — I don’t know —”
“What is to be of us after tomorrow?” A stray tear slid down Laurent’s left cheek.
“Yeah.” The response was so soft he almost did not hear it.
________
The bruises lasted for a fortnight, he had to bear the sting of them and the conspiratorial glances spared his way everywhere he went. As if the ones living outside of his body knew of something he himself was not aware of, what a bunch of sickening cowards. They knew what his father was doing to him, but none of them thought it alarming enough to do something. Not surprising, the first impression this neighborhood gave him was a glazed vibe of dispassionate lethargy.
His rage was murderous, Laurent remembered the flare of something ferocious in Wylan’s eyes the morning he showed up outside his house bearing the appearance of a bruising, wounded beast. He took the older boy’s arm to halt his impulsion and told him of his plan. There was a stretch of silence after his words ceased.
“You’re leaving, then?” Wylan asked finally.
Laurent held the gaze of his only solace, his only friend and confidante.
“Yes.”
Wylan stood still for several seconds. “Good,” he nodded, eyes lowering, sounding a little mournful, a little relieved. “Good, you do that Laurent.” He tried a smile, wobbly and unconvincing.
“You deserve so much better than this.” Wylan croaked into the space between them. This meant working two part-time jobs to scrape up enough money for his own living expenses, this meant arriving home late into the night after work to be jeered and beaten by a drunken father. “You have a wonderful life out there, yeah? For me.”
Laurent ran into the arms of his only comfort, his favorite one yet. They stayed standing in the middle of the living room, with the fan whirring approvingly above. A tangled of limbs, trying to merge their souls into one.
I want to carry you with me, to the next journey I will embark on. And the next and the next.
________
“I need to get out of here, Wy.” Laurent’s voice cracked, there was no holding back now. He let out silent sobs and watched as a gathering of shadows performed a dance of sorrow above him on the white canvas.
“I know, that’s why you’re doing it tomorrow, love.” He could hear the smile in Wylan’s words, a small but tugging warmth spread from his chest despite the weariness weighing him down. “That’s why you are saving yourself, that’s why you are going, somewhere far far away, to find something more than this.”
“I wish I could take you with me,” Laurent whispered. “you’re the only one who listens.”
“Carry on without me, Laurent. Carry on.” Devastation flecked the tone of his mumble but Laurent knew Wylan wanted him to go, he had to be. “My journey with you stops here.”
________
TOMORROW, 7.05 A.M.
In the end, he did not weep nor hesitate at all. Laurent simply shouldered on his bags and took hold of his rusting suitcase and made his way out of the house without a single glance back into the room he had spent eighteen years in.
Father was passed out, in the expected fashion, on their green, detestable couch with emptied liquor bottles strewn hazardously on the floor. In spite of the rather prominent noise the suitcase made as Laurent dragged it through the house and out the door, father did not so much as stir.
One day, he decided, he will return to this sorry town, this unforgiving place he once called ‘home’. When he had blossomed and thrived into a man of adequate fortune and ambition, he would return. Nevertheless, for now, he had a promise to keep —
goodbye.
TWO
DEIMOS, 22.
“Do you think it is the right choice?” A grown man of twenty two, jiggling his legs, consulted his sister of eighteen in a fearful, troubled tone. The siblings were preached at a rather inconveniently positioned table in Subway. It was the most tumultuous hour of the day, the clamor of loud conversation and intercepting bodies passing by them begged the man to raise his voice a notch.
Before him, the girl gave a sympathetic sigh. “Deimos, I will ask you this one last time,” she enunciated the words with careful precision. “If you could still be what you had wanted to be, what you said you were, would you take the chance?”
Deimos nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. Of course!” He readjusted his comportment with the reply and his eyes darted around the room, afraid to have articulated his speech too loudly. When no one bothered in their general direction, he exhaled heavily, “I’m sorry.”
He was doing it again, getting anxious about inconsequential matters. The speakers over the store waltzed in the language of white noise. The sound unsettled him greatly.
“Deimos, don’t you dare apologize for something you did not ask for.” Florence demanded. His attention snapped back to his sister and among the deafening thoughts spiralling in his head, attempted to interpret the words what she had just said.
Once deciphered, he unfurled his frown and chuckled drily.
“Mum and dad do not think so.”
________
“He is having an anxiety attack, mom! He did not ask for this!” Flo screamed at their mother who stood a few feet away from her children, aghast and appalled. “He is crying because you refuse to believe him, because you don’t believe in such a thing as mental illness!”
Deimos heaved a lungful of air and tried to speak, “Flo…” He felt humiliated, he could not bear to imagine the sight of him: head between his knees and quivering excessively. How ashamed his mother must have felt, beholding the piteous condition his son has somehow, contracted.
His heart was hyperventilating in his rib cage, the beats too fast, his breathing jagged and askew. His chest was throbbing. Deimos squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears against the words hurling between mother and Flo.
“It’s unreasonable, how could someone be afraid of driving lessons? And to a degree like this?” Mother waved a hand and covered her mouth.
“Mental illness isn’t supposed to make sense, ma.” Flo spit her answer out angrily. She had an arm around his brother and was rubbing reassuringly his arm.
Mother clenched her jaw and fixed her gaze on her daughter then — only a mere second — her ailing son. What had she done wrong? She had given all that she had to her beloved children, this was not fair of them.
“Mental illness in an eighteen-year-old?” Mother scoffed. “What had he been through that was traumatic enough to warrant such a disease?”
________
Dinner was a solemn affair. No one was willing to exchange a penny for their private thoughts over the delectable courses. Mother was also missing from the table.
Then a frantic torrent of footsteps resounded from the public bathroom upstairs. “Deimos!” his mother beseeched his name as though citing a witch’s prayer.
Her dress bellowed formidably as she descended the stairs, in her palms clutched three orange containers. He recognized what they were the moment mother released her hold and the bottles plummeted to the ground. The sound startling for the stupefied audience.
“You’re taking pills? I told you there’s no such thing as anxiety disorder,” mother seethed, “you disgust me.”
Deimos flinched at the insult but other than that, his heart did not so much as gave an indignant huff. Everyone was waiting for his response.
“Indeed, you have made it quite clear these past years, mother.” He asserted in a steady voice. “I’m sorry I have to take medicine to smother the raucous raving in my head. I’m sorry you think the meds are disintegrating my brain and sculpturing me into someone much lesser than I could have been. I’m sorry that I’m always stricken with anxiety.”
Florence sat in withering silence, mother was grappling between astonishment and repulsion, dad was a tragedy of confusion. The boy wondered if his father cared at all.
Deimos bent and plucked the bottles off the white marble and stared squarely at his own mother. “I will take these pills, because unlike you, I care about myself. Unlike you, I want to save myself from this.” He uttered with an exhausted air of emptiness.
________
Amidst the chaos in Subway, Florence reached across and laid a hand on Deimos’s fist, giving it a firm squeeze. “They have been left behind by time, D. We must move on.”
He shook his head to rid himself of irrelevant melancholia. “I am always afraid of being not enough.” Deimos confessed to his sister, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.
Somewhere to their left a baby’s cry splintered the usual mayhem of lunch hour. He made a note that this sort of place at this sort of hour produced the worst concoction when it came to having a discourse on big decisions.
“Deimos,” Flo called and waited until he tilted his eyes and met her gaze. “you are more than enough.”
“Hey, D!” One of the labourers, Zelma, yelled from where she was buried in customers’ orders behind the counter. “Time’s up, get back here!”
Deimos turned apologetically to his sister who shrugged and made to finish one last bite of her meal. “I assume you have not told them of your plans yet.” she ventured a guess, peering from her drink.
“I’ve given the letter to the manager, she understood, patted me on the shoulder.” he explained. “but no, haven’t said anything to Zelma and the others yet.”
Deimos pursed his lips and admitted that he found it difficult to bid farewell to his co workers, who had been the most splendid of friends. Once Deimos was absent at work because it was one of those days, his whole function afflicted with full blown anxiety the second he woke up. Hurriedly he took his meds and called in sick. Later that evening, the ringing of his doorbell revealed Zelma and M.J from work, each bearing a bag of food and warm tea and tender smiles. Deimos cried on the spot.
Flo reassured her brother with the promise of discovering something more should he accept the journey. The siblings parted after a hug that conveyed ardently their pride and support of each other.
I believe in you, Deimos.
________
TOMORROW, 7.05 A.M.
Dave, a Canadian taxi driver of thirteen years, drew the slip of paper from Deimos and scanned the address written on it. The heavy luggage he had helped install in the bot of the car proposed that the young man was leaving for quite some time.
Dave mused good-naturedly: “Never too old to begin a new chapter, eh?” An anxious laugh erupted from the young man as he passed the note back and swerved the car onto the road.
Deimos smiled lightly and looked out into the sun-drenched streets, reminiscing the encounter with his sister a day ago. “Yes,” he responded, “never too old, never too late.”
The sun championed his notion by lightning his soul with hearty streams of morning rays.