‹ Prequel: On the Roof
On a Flying Carpet
On a Flying Carpet
It got proven once again that things are easier said than done. Nothing had changed about my life since that rooftop experience. Nothing except my composure, that is.
I was no longer the happy to-be husband. I didn’t even ask my girlfriend yet. That ring, I still had it, and sometimes I’d let Paul wear it. But my girlfriend didn’t know I had the intention to ask her to marry me. So she also didn’t know I was losing that intention slowly.
And Paul didn’t care.
He had fun writing random quotes on his wrist. Today it was something about beauty again. With Helen’s ring on his finger, he was holding a black marker and drawing lines of letters across his white skin.
“If you want a tattoo, I can pay you one,” I said, chewing my lunch slowly.
He looked at me for a moment, and then went back to work. The sun was shining from right behind him, and into my face. I had to close one eye and narrow the other one to be able to look at him glowing in the centre of the sunlight. “I don’t want a tattoo,” he said.
“Then why are you doing this?”
The fine curve of his nose and the richness of his lips reminded me of my girlfriend. He shrugged. “I like the quote.”
“Why don’t you get it tattooed then?” I teased more. I took my soda and drank from it.
He laughed lightly and rolled his eyes. Sooner than I could say ‘you’re beautiful’, he was in my lap, holding my soda and drinking from it thirstily. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and his eyes smiled at me. They looked like a kaleidoscope; I could see all colors of rainbow in them, in detail.
“Because my body is nature. If I got a tattoo, I would fuck it up. Like when you cut down a forest or build a facility for tourists there. I don’t want people to travel inside me through words on my skin, thank you very much,” he laughed. Sometimes he looked even younger than he was, especially when he was so sure about his truth. In his age you doubt a lot, but you also remain the kid who knows everything. “I prefer if you get there this way,” he smirked, and pressed his forehead to mine, so that our eyes were so close I couldn’t see anything else.
I froze. It was as if I was holding the sun. The real sun you see on the sky every day – in my arms now. He was that radiant. But I didn’t touch him, I let him burn around me. His smile was red-hot, and his eyes were making fun of me and giving me many, many questions no human being would be able to answer.
I had one question on the tip of my tongue myself. I wanted to ask him if he was sure there was really no better way I could get inside him. I’ve never craved him, any male for that matter, like that before. So I didn’t ask.
“How is having a tourist visit a forest a wrong thing?” I spoke up to keep us going.
He smirked, and started to pull away. He was still my student, and if someone came up on the roof this would still be a problem. But I quickly moved after him and crashed our foreheads back together. He hissed when my forehead hit his.
“They get addicted,” he muttered. I didn’t quite get his answer.
“Explain that to me, Paul.”
He didn’t.
I cupped his cheek, and his eyes widened slightly in protest. We hadn’t kissed since the day we talked here for the first time. I’d been thinking about that one kiss every day but he never initiated another. I didn’t initiate another either; I felt I’d be rejected. Paul was easy to read, but very difficult to understand.
“You wrote on your skin now anyway.”
“It’s not the same. This is just temporary. I can get rid off of it in few seconds if I wish. I’m in control. And,” he escaped my hand easily, smiling as he pulled away from my lap completely, “I can write whatever I feel, without being restricted by what I felt.”
“You like being up-to-date, I see.”
He continued writing then. Today it was ‘Beauty lies in the eye of beholder’, yesterday Emma Goldmein’s ‘Art is part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfilled desires’. He liked writing about beauty on his skin. He used the quote from Velvet Goldmine, which went ‘Beauty expresses everything because it reveals nothing’. Other times, when he felt down, he wrote something like Einstein’s ‘Everybody is a genius’, going into ‘but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it’s stupid’ in big, black letters, covering all of his left forearm.
His skin was his rebellion against the beauty-suckers of the world. He showed them middle finger by writing “I’m your walking mirror, ugly” on his cheek so that whoever would want to look in his eyes had to see that before. He wouldn’t wash it even after I told him so, or other teachers told him so. He often ended in the headmaster’s office.
And that was the problem which appeared after our first encounter on the roof. Paul turned from a straight A, quiet student to a rascal who didn’t care about anything but his revolution. And about me, sometimes. He was angry, I could tell, angry and impatient. He wanted us to fly away finally, as I promised we would. Not in the literal sense, though. He wanted me to leave my boundaries and step out of them as if they were a disgusting piece of old skin.
Down there, I was still his teacher, and he was a student rebelling hard against everything. Whenever we met up here during lunch breaks secretly, he was my ticket to insanity.
And insanity, when under the impatient stare of Paul’s wild eyes, didn’t appear as a thing to be afraid of at all to me.
I was no longer the happy to-be husband. I didn’t even ask my girlfriend yet. That ring, I still had it, and sometimes I’d let Paul wear it. But my girlfriend didn’t know I had the intention to ask her to marry me. So she also didn’t know I was losing that intention slowly.
And Paul didn’t care.
He had fun writing random quotes on his wrist. Today it was something about beauty again. With Helen’s ring on his finger, he was holding a black marker and drawing lines of letters across his white skin.
“If you want a tattoo, I can pay you one,” I said, chewing my lunch slowly.
He looked at me for a moment, and then went back to work. The sun was shining from right behind him, and into my face. I had to close one eye and narrow the other one to be able to look at him glowing in the centre of the sunlight. “I don’t want a tattoo,” he said.
“Then why are you doing this?”
The fine curve of his nose and the richness of his lips reminded me of my girlfriend. He shrugged. “I like the quote.”
“Why don’t you get it tattooed then?” I teased more. I took my soda and drank from it.
He laughed lightly and rolled his eyes. Sooner than I could say ‘you’re beautiful’, he was in my lap, holding my soda and drinking from it thirstily. When he was done, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and his eyes smiled at me. They looked like a kaleidoscope; I could see all colors of rainbow in them, in detail.
“Because my body is nature. If I got a tattoo, I would fuck it up. Like when you cut down a forest or build a facility for tourists there. I don’t want people to travel inside me through words on my skin, thank you very much,” he laughed. Sometimes he looked even younger than he was, especially when he was so sure about his truth. In his age you doubt a lot, but you also remain the kid who knows everything. “I prefer if you get there this way,” he smirked, and pressed his forehead to mine, so that our eyes were so close I couldn’t see anything else.
I froze. It was as if I was holding the sun. The real sun you see on the sky every day – in my arms now. He was that radiant. But I didn’t touch him, I let him burn around me. His smile was red-hot, and his eyes were making fun of me and giving me many, many questions no human being would be able to answer.
I had one question on the tip of my tongue myself. I wanted to ask him if he was sure there was really no better way I could get inside him. I’ve never craved him, any male for that matter, like that before. So I didn’t ask.
“How is having a tourist visit a forest a wrong thing?” I spoke up to keep us going.
He smirked, and started to pull away. He was still my student, and if someone came up on the roof this would still be a problem. But I quickly moved after him and crashed our foreheads back together. He hissed when my forehead hit his.
“They get addicted,” he muttered. I didn’t quite get his answer.
“Explain that to me, Paul.”
He didn’t.
I cupped his cheek, and his eyes widened slightly in protest. We hadn’t kissed since the day we talked here for the first time. I’d been thinking about that one kiss every day but he never initiated another. I didn’t initiate another either; I felt I’d be rejected. Paul was easy to read, but very difficult to understand.
“You wrote on your skin now anyway.”
“It’s not the same. This is just temporary. I can get rid off of it in few seconds if I wish. I’m in control. And,” he escaped my hand easily, smiling as he pulled away from my lap completely, “I can write whatever I feel, without being restricted by what I felt.”
“You like being up-to-date, I see.”
He continued writing then. Today it was ‘Beauty lies in the eye of beholder’, yesterday Emma Goldmein’s ‘Art is part of the rebellion against the realities of its unfilled desires’. He liked writing about beauty on his skin. He used the quote from Velvet Goldmine, which went ‘Beauty expresses everything because it reveals nothing’. Other times, when he felt down, he wrote something like Einstein’s ‘Everybody is a genius’, going into ‘but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing that it’s stupid’ in big, black letters, covering all of his left forearm.
His skin was his rebellion against the beauty-suckers of the world. He showed them middle finger by writing “I’m your walking mirror, ugly” on his cheek so that whoever would want to look in his eyes had to see that before. He wouldn’t wash it even after I told him so, or other teachers told him so. He often ended in the headmaster’s office.
And that was the problem which appeared after our first encounter on the roof. Paul turned from a straight A, quiet student to a rascal who didn’t care about anything but his revolution. And about me, sometimes. He was angry, I could tell, angry and impatient. He wanted us to fly away finally, as I promised we would. Not in the literal sense, though. He wanted me to leave my boundaries and step out of them as if they were a disgusting piece of old skin.
Down there, I was still his teacher, and he was a student rebelling hard against everything. Whenever we met up here during lunch breaks secretly, he was my ticket to insanity.
And insanity, when under the impatient stare of Paul’s wild eyes, didn’t appear as a thing to be afraid of at all to me.