Breakable

It's just that you are really pretty.

Brendon solemnly—although this word rarely describes him—picks it up.

The word “it”, in this case, is referring to a small glass blown bowl, but not the kind for suburban wives to hold fruit in, or small children to eat cereal from. The kind that leafy clumps of the finest greenish-yellow weed sit in before he lights them up and sucks in smoke before they curl orange, fade to black. He likes to believe that smoking is a beautiful thing, when you’re using a beautiful piece. And this piece is more precious to him than the Mona Lisa.

He laughs in spite of himself, finding it interesting that he chose that particular painting to compare this bowl to, because of their most recent song and the person it is about. The same person who makes the bowl beautiful. Bittersweet, but beautiful.

---

Ryan and Brendon are at a flea market. They are on the Honda Civic Tour and it is their day off from working, but they are stuck in Connecticut with nowhere else to go. Ryan’s new-but-not love of everything paisley and/or slightly old drew them here, and Brendon’s love of Ryan will keep them here for as long as Ryan wants.

Brendon travels up and down rows upon rows of oh I could get Ryan that for his birthday and oooh, that’s so Beatles I think Ryan’s having an orgasm. He’s pretty sure that Ryan stopped somewhere behind him to look at yet another suede vest he can add to his proud collection of outfits that only further prove his metamorphosis into a complete flower child. Brendon doesn’t mind though. Ryan’s arms are slender and if Brendon could graph it, there would be a positive association between the amount of sixties music Ryan listens to and the less clothing he actually wears. Or he thinks so. He’s never really been good at math.

He comes across a table of artistically made pieces, bongs and bowls and other “questionable smoking devices”, which is what the cops at Border Patrol called Ryan’s vaporizer before giving them a warning and passing it off as a humidifier and letting them cross back out of Canada. Brendon thought that was what it was before Ryan educated him in Marijuana 101. He often says things like that, which are totally unacceptable in normal conversation, but Ryan just nods his head and doesn’t question it when Brendon sounds really stupid and Brendon is at least thankful for this if nothing else.

His eyes fall on one in particular, one that looks like the art from Dr. Seuss’ Oh The Places You’ll Go has exploded on the inside of the glass like a mushroom cloud. He picks it up, likes the feeling of it between his fingers, likes the way his hand wraps around it perfectly. Not too big, not too small. Just right. He runs his calloused thumb over the card, back and forth and back and forth, just feeling the small bump beneath his explorative touch. Brendon wonders why this piece reminds him so much of Ryan, but then he thinks everything sort of connects back to Ryan in a “if you can’t get someone out of your head maybe they’re supposed to be there” sort of way. Or perhaps it’s because it’s made of glass.

See, Ryan is a porcelain doll.

Brendon decided this upon gathering gratuitous amounts of evidence. One, he has perfect complexion and is so white that people think he’s a birch tree with his shirt off. Two, he’s far too beautiful to be a real person. Three, he is still so small that you could easily crack him clean in half despite how much he eats. Well, perhaps not clean in half. There would probably be plenty of broken ceramic pieces scattered on the floor.

When Brendon brings up his “Ryan is a Madame Alexander original” primer with Spencer, Spencer’s eyes start to narrow, and Brendon runs away because he knows exactly what that means. Brendon thought today was a good day and he’d rather not get melted by Spencer’s beady gamma rays of are-you-fucking-kidding-me.

Brendon still believes that Ryan is porcelain, no matter what Spencer says.

Sometime in the middle of getting lost in the complete labyrinth of his thoughts, he feels long spindly fingers firmly grasp his shoulders. In any other circumstance it should make him feel alarmed and super uncomfortable, because who has long skinny creep fingers except for creeps, but he knows the feel of Ryan’s particular fingers. He has studied the length, where the bones meet and bend, how the skin is always moisturized but not oily or slimy. Just right.

“I like that one, B.” Ryan’s arm drapes around Brendon’s shoulders, but in a very lethargic way, and not really in the way that Brendon wants it to be draped. Brendon wants Ryan to need him, and to hold him like he needs him, but really he’s not sure, based on this method, if Ryan even wants him. The way Ryan calls him B, though, that at least grants him a thousand-watt smile.

“Yeah.” Brendon holds the bowl up to mouth level and mimics toking up, deciding that, yes, this one seems to be the winner. “Yeah, me too.”

“That’ll be nice. You know, for your new collection.”

---

Brendon is a collector.

He likes to collect what he calls art-but-not, or things that are pretty but don’t cost more than he is worth even after band royalties. Nothing in his many collections are really useful—except maybe the plethora of pipes and the newly acquired shot glasses—but his collections serve two purposes: one, having something to catalogue calms his creeping and typically silenced neurosis, and two, it gives people a frame of reference for present shopping.

Exhibit A: Brendon started collecting knick-knacks and thingamabobs like mosaics and figurines roughly around the age of sixteen, which was also roughly when he began the transition out of his awkward stage and into his girls-actually-like-me phase. Grace, his darling mother, noticed both the hoarding and the transformation, and promptly started buying him pretty mirrors for every holiday, and sometimes just because.

Exhibit B: Because Brendon is itching to be even more hated and ostracized from the Church of the Latter Day Saints, where the rest of his huge family worships, he is something of a party animal. This prompted his collection of shot glasses from each new city or country he visited. Because she is awesome, Grace sent him one from Vegas for his twenty-first with a dog that looked like Al Pacino on it. At least his mother has a sense of humor.

Brendon only collects fragile things.

This wasn’t intentional. He only recently realized that between glass-blown bowls and antique looking glasses, if a bull could operate an elevator and the door to his apartment he would be one hundred percent fucked. He wonders if this is because he wanted something concrete to match how fragile he feels inside, but that would be far too cliché, and the thought of it makes him kind of want to throw up.

He sweeps his fingers along the edge of the shelf on which he houses the shot glasses. Spencer thought it would be cute to get Brendon a shot glass from New England even though he doesn’t really follow sports at all, but it’s okay because the logo for the Patriots looks pretty cool and to be fair, what else does Connecticut have to offer?

His eyes look up and to the left, which he read somewhere means that he’s thinking about past experiences and relating them to emotions. He always thinks it’s weird when science is right, for some strange reason.

---

On a day like today, the peak of summer in L.A., Brendon decides that he’d rather get melted by Spencer’s judging eyes than by the scalding sun, whose rays are creeping into the window with a close precision, as if it is specifically targeting Brendon’s home. Sinking a little bit further into the sticky leather recesses of the couch, Brendon tugs on the collar of his Patriots jersey, yet another weird Spencer gift. It is too hot to be inside and hotter still to be outside, so Left 4 Dead 2 is the only respite.

As one can most likely assume, porcelain dolls don’t do too well with zombies. Or video games. Or really anything boyish at all. These things, the things Brendon rather enjoys, well, they aren’t really things Ryan cares about, or tries to care about. But sometimes, Ryan catches Brendon by surprise with a heat wave of masculinity.

“I have to say,” Ryan remarks through the vomit-inducing groan of two spitters and a tank coming closer and closer and closer, “I’m partial to the old Patriots uniform.”

“You’re such a button masher, Ross! Learn how to use a fucking, ungh, bazooka!” Brendon said, annihilating all three zombies without even a glance away from the screen. After a moment, though, he pauses the next undead onslaught. “Why do you say that?” His eyebrows furrow and he glances suspiciously in Ryan’s direction.

Ryan sighs dramatically, ignoring the button mashing comment—which in Brendon’s eyes is the highest grade of insults. “I don’t know. I just do. It was pretty.”

“It’s just the weirdest thing to point out. If you’re really averse to my current shirt, I’ll gladly take it off. It’s hotter than me in here, and that’s saying something.”

Brendon watches Ryan roll his eyes and although it is customary to ruffle Brendon’s hair after a particularly stupid comment, he refrains. Brendon isn’t sure why.

“I don’t know,” Ryan continued, cryptically. “That part of sports is nice. It’s like math. Even when something major changes, the rules stay the same. The game is fine.”

Brendon is terrible at sports and he is also pretty terrible at math, but he doesn’t think Ryan is really talking about either one. Ryan does this thing, and he’s pretty sure it has something to do with being a writer, but he speaks in a way that really only he knows what he means, and everyone else is just different levels of good at guessing.

---

Brendon guesses that Ryan had a reason for leaving. He guesses that Ryan expected him to know he didn’t plan on coming back. He guesses it wasn’t supposed to come as a surprise. And it didn’t, not really.

But he sometimes feels this pain in his chest and he knows that it is Ryan’s fault. Well, really it’s his own fault for caring so much and being so vulnerable and loving too hard when he knew, he knew even from that simple draped arm, that Ryan wasn’t in it for Brendon. He was in it for convenience.

And that, that made Brendon feel sicker than anything else.

---

Brendon is drinking with Spencer in his apartment, and it is a few weeks after Ryan leaves. Brendon sometimes blames drinking for why he feels his neurosis developing into a deeper psychosis, but if anything it’s not the alcohol’s fault. It didn’t do anything wrong.

Brendon has downed a few already, and he doesn’t tend to slur unless he’s gone, but words have just begun to run together like his mind has forgotten the existence of the space bar. Spencer, with his Irish tolerance, just laughs at Brendon, which is not unusual, because sometimes Spencer can be such a bitch.

For example, once, Brendon decided he was going to sing the song that never ends and slowly crescendo with each repeated verse. And, okay, that was kind of really annoying, but he was feeling restless and needed an outlet for his energy. He was bouncing up and down in his chair and tapping his hands on his thighs and singing at about a mezzo piano when Spencer—without even turning his head—set his Carolina Blue lasers to kill and glared at Brendon from beneath furrowed brows. Brendon clamped his teeth together so quickly that it hurt.

He never means harm to Brendon when he puts on that face and places his arms akimbo on his womanly hips. He’s just never quite as tender with Brendon’s occasional stupidity as Ryan was. Ryan always had the same procedure for Brendon: one, he would roll his eyes, two, he would ruffle Brendon’s hair, and three, he would tell him to go outside and play with Bogart and just don’t talk for a while, or like, maybe ever again, if he could help himself, even though Ryan knew very well that Brendon couldn’t. But Spencer will not have Brendon’s shit.

It is in those especially bitchy moments that Brendon wishes he had not been so stupid. He wishes Ryan…well, he wishes a lot of things.

“Fuck, Spencer, I just—ugh, I just get these feelings and they’re all just so cooped up inside of me right here,” he says, pointing at his heart with all of the fingers on his right hand, “and I start thinking about Ryan and I don’t want to think about him ever again. Like, even this shot glass makes me think about Ryan because the Beach Boys are from California and he loves the Beach Boys and sometimes he would sing God only knows what I’d be without you to me even though he never loved me, fuck, Spence, I know he never loved me and I was so stupid, just so fucking stupid, and I wish I could just break Ryan like he broke me.”

And then it dawns on Brendon that he can.

Of course, he can’t physically go to Ryan’s apartment and throw him against a wall and watch him shatter, but he can do the next best thing.

He looks at the shot glass in his hand. He downs the shot. He lifts up the glass. He opens his fingers. It’s almost like an adrenaline rush to hear the glass break into pieces against the wood floor. This is Ryan’s never wanting to cuddle.

Brendon sees Spencer look at him as if he has gone completely crazy, and he probably has. But Spencer says nothing, knows that Brendon is hurting. Brendon knows he is drunk, but drunken words are sober thoughts.

He walks over to the wall, the carefully categorized wall of possessions: his art gallery. He picks up a hand mirror from his mother. This mirror is Ryan’s vanity. Crack. He hovers over a mosaic he found at a thrift store. This is Ryan’s ability to be insufferably more creative than Brendon. Crash. He throws item after item at the wall, tears flowing freely. Each piece is a little piece of Ryan, and Brendon is slowly getting rid of him. Every single shot glass. This is Ryan’s hatred of drinking and replacing it with coke. Smash. Every last pipe. This is Ryan’s love for hippies more than he was even capable of loving Brendon. The artisan glass shatters in slow motion. A figurine of Marilyn Monroe? Sorry, Marilyn, but you’re too pretty, and Ryan was too pretty, and Brendon has decided he likes to break pretty things.

Soon the walls are empty and Brendon is a sloppy, drunk, sobbing mess on the floor, sitting in fetal position and surrounded by glass. Spencer still stands by, as Brendon can see through his blurry teary vision, and he has watched the entire spectacle, speechless. Brendon thinks he stays along that wall because he is afraid to even comfort his friend in this state, because Brendon is not a person lying among a floor full of broken things. He is broken too.

---

Brendon wakes up one morning and doesn’t feel like crying. This is a strange occurrence for him, nearly a year after the massacre of glass. Spencer has, shockingly, not stopped talking to him, and actually parted the glass sea so that Brendon in his bare feet could get by far enough to pass out on the couch. Brendon remembers hating himself when he woke up, in the aftermath of the genocide of his collections, the memories strewn across the floor like a battlefield, but there was no real winner. War is not about who is right. War is about who is left.

Yes, he finally wakes up and doesn’t want to curl back into himself and sleep the day away. This is an astonishing accomplishment for Brendon, and so he feels the need to call Spencer and go out for coffee or tea or some celebratory beverage that isn’t going to make his head swim and spin the next day. He’s not really in the mood to vomit. Today is a good day.

Brendon and Spencer are sitting outside on a park bench when Spencer starts talking, casually taking sips from his coffee. “So…Grace didn’t take it well when you finally told her you’d broken every single one of her mirrors.”

“Let’s just say I never want to be reminded of the look in her eyes. Ever.” He shrugs, knowing that Spencer brought up his episode for a reason. It’s been a year, and they’re best friends. He is just waiting for the reason to come out.

“I feel like you’ve been a lot…more empty since you got rid of all your things.”

There it is.

“I don’t know, don’t get me wrong by saying this, it’s cool that you purged yourself of your relationship-thing or whatever it was…I just think collecting things completed you.”

Brendon had been feeling a hell of a lot more empty for more than a while. Spencer might be a bitch, but he is an observant one. He says nothing, because he suspects there is more.

“I know you’ll probably hate me for this, but…” He shyly pulls a medium sized box out from what seems like nowhere. “Here. To, you know, start on a new foot.”

“Spencer, are you serious? Presents?” Brendon asks, but he gets nothing in return but a shrug and a nudge to open it already. He takes off the cover of the box, which has a small card that says, “Sorry—was a jerk”, and looks inside, first with questions in his eyes, and then with a bittersweet smile.

Inside, he finds a Madame Alexander doll.