Colour Blind

I picked up smoking almost a year later. Every time Lyle had caught me with a cigarette he would sigh like I was a disappointment, and then he would drop down beside me and place his hands on his knees.

“You’re too old to be actin’ this dumb, Armand,” he had said to me late one evening, when the air was particularly cool and the sky was littered with stars. “That stuff ain’t good for you.”

Blowing out a puff of smoke, I had lowered my eyes towards my feet. “Ain’t got nothing to live for no more, Lyle, n’you know it.”

“Don’t you go sayin’ that,” Lyle had said fiercely, more angry than I’d ever heard him. When I had turned to look at him I was close enough to see every line on his face — every whisper of age time had left on his skin, the light of the moon reflecting off of his dark eyes. It had struck me then how badly I wanted to kiss him again, how much the stars were making me remember the tears and everything awful; the roughness of his lips and the way he’d comforted me afterwards.

I realised that I didn’t have nothing else — no family and no friends, nobody but Lyle, and I couldn’t even see Pa in the stars no more, and I could feel the cigarette burning my fingers like a warning, a don’t go there; a reflection of Stanley’s eyes in the front seat of his car.

Watch yourself, boy, he had told me. But that was the thing — I didn’t know what I was supposed to be watching for, why everyone was always warning me, why they all thought I was doing something wrong. And I had started to cry then, the cigarette falling from my fingers, dropping onto the aged porch step where everything had first begun. “There’s somethin’ wrong with me, Lyle,” I had told him, voice quivering as I dropped my face into my hands.

“Ain’t nothing wrong with you, Armand,” Lyle had told me fiercely, hand coming to rest gently upon my shoulder — a reminder that I wasn’t alone. And that was the thing, and always had been the thing; that Lyle was there and nobody else, that time passed and people died and stars disappeared but Lyle was always there beside me, an ever-present colour in my life, the best friend I had in the whole wide world. Something had swelled in my stomach then, almost akin to loneliness but fiercer — scarier.

When he’d pulled his hand away and my cries had turned into ragged breaths I placed my head against his shoulder, longing to look beside me and see my childhood again, but when I turned to look there was nothing but an aging man beside me. I wasn’t a little boy no more with his head resting against his friend’s shoulder, I was a lonely man resting upon everything that was left of his life.

I had placed my hand on his then. Tentatively, ‘cause I had known that he wouldn’t like it, his knuckles and skin calloused and alarmingly dark under mine. He had looked up at me as soon as my skin touched his, and I could see the fear reflected in the back of his eyes, the watch yourself, boy that didn’t have to be spoken. But I knew that he wouldn’t pull away — that he never would, because Lyle was the only person that never had.

I should have known as soon as I saw the look in his eyes that I’d killed him. Should have felt that fear myself, should have found it consuming me, but I was and always had been a dumb and selfish boy. All I knew was that with the hand under mine the loneliness began to bubble away, becoming a dry emptiness in my stomach, and that I believed that Lyle and me would always be just that — Lyle and me.

But I was wrong, because that look killed him.