Stars

Max is fascinated by the stars.

Floating billions of miles above him, shimmering drops of silver on an ebony canvas, they watch the world go by. They’re untouchable on a level beyond human comprehension, with a gaze all-seeing but aloofly unconcerned with matters as trivial as space and time.

But what are they, really?

He ponders these kinds of questions often on nights like this, laid limp and motionless on the bare, uneven mattress tossed carelessly onto the floor of his filthy apartment, chemical wonderland flowing through his veins and his consciousness somewhere far, far away from the cold loneliness of too many empty rooms and a view of nothing but barren branches reaching yearningly for a freedom that Max himself longs for with just as much desperation.

His body is securely tethered to earth by his own gravity, a painful, crushing weight composed of emotions and addictions that he was too tired to rein in any longer.

His heart and soul, however, float somewhere among those beautiful, beautiful stars.

Even as he floats, however, twisting and weaving between them, his thoughts spreading and scattering throughout space and time on a web of veins and memories that is everywhere and nowhere all at once, he wonders.

Stars.

The earthly experts say planets, fire and rock and chaotic destruction, but all he can see from here is peaceful white gold petals on onyx, looking down at him and him alone, a strangely comforting gaze on his tattered form from billions of light-years away.

More importantly, however…

Does Ronnie see these stars too, wherever he is?

It’s a comforting thought to Max – one of the few he has left nowadays – that feeble sliver of hope, so tiny that it trembles and cracks under the pressure of its own weight, that maybe, somewhere in the world, Ronnie is looking up at these same stars and thinking of him.

The thought brings the barest hint of a hopeless smile to cracked pink lips.

Max isn’t sure how long Ronnie’s been gone now – at first, without even meaning to, he’d kept a careful tally – every day awake was another day alone, another day to sit and wait for the return of every promise the wild boy that had once loved him had ever made – but eventually those days began to blur together into an inconsistent mess of meaningless existence.

Get up.

Get drugs.

Pay with the only thing he had left.

His body.

Max can just barely see his bony arm stretched across the pillow at the edge of his tunneling vision. He is skinny. Too skinny, as he often reminds himself.

Not that it really matters anymore.

Max used to think things like that were important. And maybe, to that Max, they were. The makeup smeared around his dull green eyes, food filling his painfully contracting stomach as he sat and waited for the happy ending he’d always been told he deserved.

And waited.

And waited.

They’d told him long ago that Ronnie wasn’t coming back. That their relationship had been a one way path to destruction, that Ronnie wasn’t worth the pain and the tears.

They didn’t understand.

Max hadn’t chosen to fall in love with the wild singer the way he did – he’d never chosen to wake up to pounding hangovers and ratty bedheads, staring into coffee-brown orbs deceptively masking the raging storm of ragged emotions behind them, hadn’t chosen to get sucked into arms marked with vibrant ink clashing against dirty, drug-dusted skin.

He hadn’t chosen Ronnie.

But somehow, some way…Ronnie had been chosen for him.

And once a choice like that is made…the deal is done. There’s no way out.

So Max sat and he waited, because what else could he do?

They gave up on that line of thinking eventually, instead going for the more poisonous barbs, the ones that aimed lower and burrowed deep beneath the skin, flaring and stinging until the spot they hit was so irritated you couldn’t help but scratch.

“He would’ve wanted you to be happy.”

That was the worst one. Happy…Ronnie was Max’s happy, the thing that kept him waking up and breathing every morning, the reason for the younger boy’s existence since the day he’d walked into it.

That was a concept that was difficult to really grasp, however, until that happiness was gone for good.

So he went for chemicals instead, Ronnie’s go-to, Ronnie’s happiness…as though, by taking on Ronnie’s vices, by becoming Ronnie in some aspect, he could fill the gaping hole the older boy had left behind.

Even so, that pit deep within him, that blackened, hungry abyss tearing straight through his heart ripped open wider and wider each day, vicious and snarling and devouring everything in its path.

Just like their relationship.

Fitting, really.

They were just as poisonous as any drugs could ever be, him and Ronnie, contaminating their surroundings and watching with loveless eyes as everything around them withered and died with them. They hurt – they hurt each other and everyone else that made the mistake of taking a step too close, they tore down friendships and good intentions without a backwards glance, like weeds choking the life out of the gossamer petals around them – they were unstoppable.

That was how Max knew that it had been love that he and Ronnie shared.

Because that much pain was just so beautiful.

And it had hurt, much more than he’d ever anticipated, when Ronnie walked out that front door and didn’t return.

Ronnie was already broken – that’s what everyone said. He was twisted and shattered beyond repair, the once-dancing light behind his eyes extinguished forever by bloodshot anger as he sunk deeper and deeper inside himself, lost in the whirling torrent of his thoughts.

Ronnie was broken, but Max still had a chance.

That’s what they told him, anyways.

But what was a relationship, after all, without a matching set?

Everyone around him fed him nothing but lies. They manipulated him, twisted him into stripping down and beating away his only fleeting hope for the return of the least sane of sanities with confusion and doubt, and for that he hated them.

For that he continued to believe.

His and Ronnie’s love was harsh and gritty and oh-so-real, so real it hurt and scarred and destroyed.

Their love was the truest of truths.

And true love always wins in the end, right?

Max watched the streetlit sky outside the dingy window float far above him, endlessly shifting with the rotation of the cosmos, unhurried, unaffected, uncaring. The stars shone brightly, too brightly, a little less like all-seeing eyes of benevolence and a little more like cheap rhinestones reflecting false hope onto a dirty canvas, and in that instant he hated them.

A star flickered once, twice, then disappeared.

Max was getting too old to believe in fairytales.