Chaos

Everything was chaotic, chaotic and elegant at the same time. The shirts he wore, the words he wrote were all like smoke from a cigarette, rising and twisting in no particular pattern, but seamlessly, nonetheless. Ryan knew chaos, he had been dealing with it since he was a young boy and he had found a way to turn everything within him that ran without bounds, into something beautiful and meaningful, full of anything anyone ever wanted.

From miles away, from Vegas, from London, from Toronto, he reached out his hand to anyone that wanted to take it and he pulled them towards him and sang to them and read to them, he read all of the poems he had written and he helped them. Like the stars and the moon, he was always there, there to hold you and caress you in the blackest of nights when the sea and the sky seemed to swallow you whole and you had broken your wings when you fought before.

He was a bird and an angel when we had all grown too weak. He was a voice when even screaming didn’t seem loud enough and a mind when nothing made any fucking sense. He was just an angel, an angel with long hair and a tired face, an angel with flaws that were too prominent to ignore, flaws that made us all feel less alone and more filled with potential. Filled with potential because how did such a little boy, riddled with fears and insecurities and with doubts become a man so seemingly controlled? How can a boy with tear-stained cheeks from childhood hide those fears somewhere so deep that all we could glimpse on the television was a confident young man that simply didn’t have any fucking scars.

But he did have scars. And if you only listened, like me, you could see that. If you only read his words you could feel him reaching out for a hand to hold and if you listened with enough sympathy, you could hear that piano just screaming until it hurt for someone to really understand. He needed someone real, someone tangible, to sing to him and tell him that there was someone out there that understood him just as much as we all felt that Ryan climbed under our skin and like a ghost in the middle of the night, laid down beside us and whispered soft somethings into our ears, somethings we would eventually get written on our bodies with ink just so we wouldn’t forget them, or him.

And there were somethings, so well rehearsed, that we wanted to say to him, but we would never get the chance so we just wrote it all out so we could pretend that that moment was real and since it was written on paper, that moment would become as permanent as the mad as a hatter tattoos that lined our arms and spread out like wings across our backs.

We all wanted him to know. We all wanted him to see how much his music and poetry dug out our hearts, changed them and then put them back in our chests, but that feeling, that connection was ours and unspoken. Why did he have to know? That would only make a beautiful moment an awkward one where no words, his or our own, escaped our lips so we just asked for a fucking autograph that didn’t mean a damn thing because he wasn’t a celebrity anymore, he was just Ryan, the boy that laid down beside us every night and, through the tears, pleaded for our help.

He just wasn’t that superstar anymore, not the one he pretended to be, he was just alone in a dark bedroom with monsters crawling out from under the bed and from the closet. He knew that the monsters were very real and that sometimes, they won, he knew that very well. He just needed someone to tell him that, though the monsters had enough strength to beat him down, there was someone (it could be us, though we so desperately wanted it to be Brendon) that would always be there to hold his hand and shout and scare the monsters back into their hiding places.

And when we couldn’t help him, when we couldn’t drive the monsters away, it hurt us, almost as much as it hurt him. It made us cry, it made us angry. But he made us angry too. He made us angry when he left, when he hurt himself, when he was filled with more contradictions than love. We were angry and as much as we didn’t like what he would do, to others and to himself, we got it, we knew why he did the things that he did and as much as we wanted to scream at him or hit him, we wanted to hold him more, we wanted to tell him that eventually, everything would work out.

But what do words mean when they aren’t real, when they’re shared with no one but ourselves? And that’s what hurts the most, not our own pain because Ryan will always be there to soothe it, but the realisation that this relationship, the one with moments of comfort and arguments never existed and never would exist and that we don’t exist, to him anyway. And that stone in the pit of our stomachs will never go away, not until he fixes us and we won’t move on, we’ll just learn to live and learn to love someone that isn’t Ryan. But nothing will ever be same; no one will ever be as exhilarating and tiring as that first love affair we had when we were seventeen.