Lost

Brendon had barely slept at all the past week. He was scared. He didn’t want to lie alone in the dark. He felt tired and ill as he stepped through the motions of his day, but no matter how badly his head ached or his muscles trembled, he wouldn’t lay his head down on his pillow. It was all because of that fucking dream. The one that he had had as a kid over and over but had somehow found its way back into his mind the past year.

He was outside, it was a forest, but one he didn’t recognize. It was dark and cold and the wind howled through the black trees whose branches hung like thick hair all around him. He was running from something or someone, but he didn’t know what, he could only feel his skin crawling with fear and the adrenaline pumping through his veins as he ran down a path riddled with holes and tree roots trying to drag him down. He stopped when he could no longer breathe and gasped for the air all around him. Once he was able to calm down, he listened to the darkness, to the silence. Whatever he was running from was gone, but it would be back, he could feel it. It had given up the chase, but it would find him again and he would run again.

“Brendon!” The voice danced through the trees, running away with the wind. It was his mother’s voice. She was crying, he could hear it in her trembling words. But she wasn’t in trouble, her voice wasn’t panicked. It wasn’t looking for help; it was simply looking for him. It wasn’t wailing, it wasn’t desperate, it almost seemed mechanical, as though she had been calling out for him for so long that she had given up all hope in ever really finding him.

Brendon could feel himself start to cry because he knew then that he would never be found, he would always be running through this dark forest alone and eventually, everyone would
stop looking.

Brendon always awoke with a jolt, his face covered in a cold sweat, his heart beating in his throat and for a moment after he opened his eyes to a dark room, sometimes, he would think that he was still in that forest.

The dream had plagued him for months when he was younger; nearly every night when he was about fourteen, he would have that dream. But it had gone away and he had forgotten about it. He never told anyone about it, not even his mother. He didn’t want her to worry her. Some nights, though, he would climb into his older sister, Kyla’s room and wiggle himself as close to her as he could until he fell back into a fitful sleep. She never asked questions and even if she wanted to, Brendon was always gone the following morning, sitting at the kitchen table with a wide grin on his face, as though nothing had happened.

He had had it the odd time after that, but it never seemed as frightening as it did when he was a kid. Sometimes, when he woke up the next morning, he would only be able to remember moments of it, photographs, when, as a child, the dream in its entirety seemed so vivid that it nearly choked the breath out of him.

Brendon lay silently in his bed, his jaw clenched and his fingers twisting in his blankets. His eyes were shut as he tried to drive the howling wind and the sweet smell of pine back to the forests where they belonged. Everyone else in the suite was still, the television in the main room had been turned off for hours and even Ryan’s iPod playlist that helped him get to sleep had ended. Brendon was alone again.

He waited until his heart stopped jumping and brought his labored breathing back into routine before he sat up slowly. He could barely make out the objects in his room; they all just looked like shadows. A small amount of light slid from the hallway underneath his door and Brendon felt relieved that somebody had left the bathroom light on; probably Ryan, who probably hated being unable to distinguish reality from illusion in the swallowing darkness just as much as Brendon did.

Like he had as a child, Brendon wrapped his blanket around his shoulders and swung his feet down to the floor and let the large comforter drag behind him like a king’s robe as he went to the door. The hallway outside of his bedroom was small; if he turned left, it led to the main room, but if he went straight, he would pass three doors just like his own. Spencer was at the end of the hallway, Jon on the left, right beside the bathroom and Ryan was on the right. For a moment, he paused before he shuffled towards Ryan’s door, tugging his blanket behind him.

The door was unlocked so Brendon simply walked in, trying to be as quiet as he could. The curtains hung open, allowing moonlight to spill out across the floor. It casted a harsh, sickly shadow against the walls and along Ryan’s sleeping face. Brendon walked to the edge of the bed and watched the boy’s chest rise and fall evenly with his deep, tired breaths. He felt guilty waking him. He outstretched his hand to tap his shoulder, nearly ready to open himself up to Ryan, when suddenly, he just felt silly and childish, standing over a young man, who wasn’t even much older than Brendon himself, asking if he could climb into bed with him, just to sleep because he couldn’t stand the idea of being alone. He let his hand fall to his side and he quickly backed towards the door.

He shuffled into the bathroom, closing the door behind him and stood in front of the mirror. He dropped his blanket, letting it pool around his feet and stared at his own reflection. There were large bags underneath his eyes and his cheeks seemed sunken in. He looked more unlike himself than he felt. He ran the water in the sink and listened to it beat against the white ceramic, before cupping his hands underneath it and dabbing his face with the cold water. It was shocking against his skin, just as he had hoped it would be, so it would fully wake him and he wouldn’t risk returning to that dark forest. After one more glance at himself, he turned off the tap, gathered up his blanket and opened the door.

Ryan stood in his bedroom’s doorway. His hair was sticking up in some places and the shirt he was wearing was wrinkled, but Brendon didn’t mistake the intensity in his eyes.

“Were you just in my room?” he asked. His eyes flickered with uncertainty. The light bulb in his head was very nearly turning on as ideas and thoughts crossed his mind.

Brendon could feel his throat tighten and he gripped onto his blanket, like he had when he was little, for protection, as his mind raced to find anything to say. He could lie, but he was
already lying to Ryan enough.

“I—yeah,” he stammered.

“Why?”

Brendon felt his ears grow hot and he looked down at the ground. “I—I was going to ask you something.”

“At three in the morning?” Brendon shrugged, unable to make eye contact. “Well, it must have been important, what was it?”

“It was nothing,” he mumbled.

Ryan furrowed his brow and took a step forward. Brendon felt naked with Ryan studying him, no, more than naked, he felt transparent. He felt like a math equation. “Bren,” he urged.

Brendon took a deep breath, and though the words were on the tip of his tongue, it took more strength than he thought he had to say them. “I can’t sleep.”

Ryan’s eyes softened and he touched Brendon’s arm lightly. A small smile tugged at his lips and he guided him back into his bedroom. Brendon could feel his heart racing beneath his skin. For a moment, it reminded him of his dream. Ryan turned on the lamp on the bedside table, letting the room glow with soft light that seemed the way Brendon always thought heaven would. Ryan sat him down on the edge of the bed and placed himself only a few inches from him. He peeled the blanket from his shoulders and tossed it on the floor. An icicle shiver ran up Brendon’s spine as he wished that he hadn’t been wearing anything under that thick comforter.

“You okay?” Ryan asked, letting his hand linger near Brendon’s thigh. Brendon watched his long fingers as they moved from his leg to the white sheets and traced lazily on them. Brendon wondered what he was drawing, but he was probably writing.

He looked back up to Ryan and forced a smile, partly because he wasn’t happy and partly because he had already gotten lost counting the golden flecks in his eyes. “Yeah,” was all he said. He wasn’t quite sure why he had lied, he knew Ryan could already see that something was bothering him and had maybe even found out what that something was.

“You haven’t been sleeping,” Ryan started.

“Not tonight, no,” Brendon answered dumbly.

“No, shut up.” Ryan rolled his eyes. “Not just tonight, the past couple nights.” Brendon furrowed his brow. He hated that Ryan was always right. “I can see it in your face. And no amount of Red Bull is gonna change that, so stop drinking that shit like it’s water before you OD on it or something.”

“You can’t OD on Red Bull.”

“That’s not the fucking point.” Ryan opened his mouth to continue, but quickly closed. “You know what the point is, stop being so damn difficult.”

Brendon felt his shoulders fall and he looked down to his hands, clasped awkwardly in his lap the way they were when he attended service when he was younger. He waited for Ryan to continue, too afraid to open his own mouth.

“You know, maybe that’s the problem.” Brendon looked up at him. There was a playful, mischievous flicker in his eye that Brendon didn’t quite understand. “Maybe you just drink way too much goddamn Red Bull and it’s all finally catching up to you.”

Brendon could feel something rising within him. He didn’t know what it was. He felt hurt that Ryan didn’t seem to care about what monsters were keeping him awake at night. He felt angry that he was belittling something that was beating him, tearing him, and breaking him down. Ryan knew about a lot of things, Brendon wouldn’t deny that, but he had no fucking idea about this. He had no clue about how scared he felt, how desperate he was to cling to something other than his own icy blankets. Ryan just didn’t understand.

“It’s not the Red Bull,” Brendon spat.

Ryan raised his eyebrows and edge closer to him, their thighs now touching. He reached out and combed the fringe that fell over Brendon’s eyes with his fingers. He leaned down, trying to make eye contact with his friend, who he just wanted to open up and become real so he could just help him. He had said that Brendon hadn’t been sleeping for the last couple nights, but he’d been noticing how dogged he looked for at least a week and the whimpers he sometimes heard from Brendon’s hotel room the nights he couldn’t sleep himself, told him that was something was wrong. He knew it wasn’t the fucking Red Bull keeping him from sleep, but he had grown tired of sweetly asking if anything was the matter and being lied to, or ignored altogether. So he made him angry, in hopes that he would tell him out of spite.

“It’s not?” He paused to see if Brendon would correct him, but when he didn’t, he said: “Then it must be nightmares.” Brendon’s head shot up. He had found it: nightmares.

“What?”

“I said, ‘it must be nightmares’.”

Brendon sighed and twisted the blankets around his fingers. He looked like a child, helpless and fragile. Cautiously, Ryan put his hand on Brendon’s leg. It seemed like a soft whimper escaped his lips the moment Ryan’s soft skin touched him.

“Bren?” Ryan whispered. Brendon shook his head. He could tears filling up in his eyes. He didn’t know why he was crying. He could be crying because he was scared, or he could be crying because he was embarrassed. “Bren, it’s okay,” Ryan continued. “We all have nightmares.”

“Ry, we don’t have to talk about it. I don’t even want to talk about it…”

“You just want to be with someone,” Ryan finished for him. Brendon hated that Ryan was always right but he was grateful that he was right this time and that he had spared him the embarrassment of asking to sleep next to him. Brendon simply nodded.

“Okay.” Ryan smiled and moved, giving Brendon space to lie down. He pulled the blankets up over both of their bodies. “Can you just grab the light?” he asked and stopped fixing the blankets, waiting for Brendon to climb back in.

Brendon turned off the lamp and wiggled back under the blankets, pulling them up to his chin. He smiled to Ryan weakly before turning on his side, facing the doorway. Shyly, he reached his foot out until he could feel Ryan’s flannel pant leg. He had always done that when he was little. It always reminded him that he wasn’t alone, even if he couldn’t see the person lying beside him.

Ryan inched closer and wrapped his arm gently around Brendon’s stomach and burrowed himself in the crook of his neck. He placed a soft kiss on Brendon shoulder and his slender fingers found their way beneath Brendon’s loose t-shirt and traced small circles on his stomach. Brendon closed his eyes and the tender, rhythmic movement of Ryan’s touch on his bare skin lulled him into a peaceful sleep.

Brendon awoke the next morning, in his own bed, curled up as tightly as he could and clutching the blankets to his chest. He had hardly slept for the ninth night in a row in fear of that dream, in fear of being alone because Ryan hadn’t ever invited him back into his room; Brendon had simply lost himself in a moment that didn’t exist.