The Nine-Minute Goodbye

Nine minutes ago he was almost gone. His leather jacket was almost all the way on his shoulders. His fingers were almost on the door knob. The door was almost open.

Nine minutes ago the end was just beginning. The front door was reflected on his irises. His ocean-wave lips were parted, painted sadly along the deep lines of his jaw. There was an unlit cigarette dripping from between the ink on his fingers.

“So, uh, so where are you going to go?” I asked. My voice was an empty subway. I cleared my throat but I didn’t have any more words to say.

He looked up. Not at me. Not in my eyes. He raised his hand to push it through his hair. Realized there was an unlit cigarette dripping from between the ink on his fingers. Stared at it, waiting for the sad paper to give him an answer.

“I don’t know, Gerard,” he finally sighed, tucking the cigarette behind one ear, “I’ve got a friend up in Montauk. Might go stay with him a while.”

“Good. Yeah, just as long as you’re, you know, taken care of.”

“I’ll be taking care of myself.”

“Okay.”

Silence. The kind you only hear when you stand by the ocean and can’t see the moon. Standing at the edge of something and looking down, wondering just how long it would take to fall. To hit the ground. For the silence to snap your neck.

I curled my hair around my ears so the strands didn’t intermingle with his image. Slice his face into fragments. Just one, clear photograph of the moment when he had to turn around and this was really over. “How are you getting there?”

“Maybe the train. I’ve got some money I’ve been saving up for a little while.”

“So you were planning this?”

He looked up. At me. In my eyes. “Don’t you do this, Gerard. Don’t you go trying to blame this on me, this was never my fault.”

“So you’re saying it was mine?”

“I’m not saying this was anyone’s fault. How could this be anyone’s fault?”

“You think it was my fault.”

“I think we just need to leave it,” he snapped tiredly, honey-coloured orbs darting from his shoes to my face, always ending back up on the tattered laces. His eyelashes were kissing his cheeks like they were lovers. “We just…need to leave it.”

I started to pace. The wall. The couch. The wall. The window. Snow dripping from leaves like globules of paint. Always ending back up right where I started, on the other side of his suitcase. “You keep fucking saying that! What does that even mean, Frank?”

He sighed, the hum threadbare and worn. The way his t-shirt hung from his frame made me want to believe in God again. “It means…I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You just said it, you just said those words right now. How can you not know what they mean if you just said them?”

“You’re making me hate you, Gee. That’s what it means. That’s what it’s always meant,” he spit, crossing his arms over his chest. Under the sleeve of his jacket I could just barely make out my name inscribed on his skin, a promise laced with pain. “If I don’t go, I will hate you.”

It was my heart. That crash-pounding-brain-splintering-catacomb-echoing scream shattering against my ears. It was that hollow place, that skeleton place.

His shoes made scuffs on the wooden floor as he nervously scraped them back and forth. How many times had I told him not to do that? How many times had I actually been angry when that sheepish grin creased across his face and shy apologies blanketed his lips?

“I don’t want to hate you. I…I don’t want to…to not be able to see your face and tell you that I love you so much that it’s killing me. But right now, we’re broken, Gerard. We’ve been on the edge of this cliff for so long, and it’s like I can’t hang on any more. I can’t keep hanging on if nobody is going to come rescue us.”

“So you’re letting go?” I whispered.

“So I’m giving my arms a break. I’m free-falling for a while,” he murmured, shuffling closer to me. Our knees might have touched if it hadn’t been for the shabby leather of his suitcase. “And who knows? Maybe I’ll hit the ground. But maybe I won’t. Maybe there’s something down there, but we don’t know because it’s always just been safer to hang on.”

Safer. I had never felt safer than when his hand traced my skin.

His eyes traveled the surface of my face, digging for a response. When I could finally convince myself to look him in the eye, it was too late. His hand was already reaching for his suitcase, and his lips were moving but I couldn’t really hear what he was saying.

“So this is it then?” I uttered slowly.

He nodded, hair falling into his face. “Yeah, Gerard. For now, this is it.”

His nose brushed up against my temple as he came forward again, pressing a dry kiss to the hollow of my cheek. The action was so painfully intimate that I shuddered a sigh against his skin, and that was the middle of the end.

He turned his head.

Our lips brushed like velvet petals; I couldn’t remember flesh so soft. I felt his eyelashes brush against my cheek, almost like lovers. His fingers came up to my face, tips barely caressing the bones before sliding into my hair. I choked back a sob that crept up my throat, instead gripping his clothed sides so tightly that he whimpered from the bruised skin. My mind screamed that he was an eternal mess, but I wanted my hands so dirty that I would never feel clean. Just safer.

His mouth tasted like strawberry narcotics and nicotine; the cigarette behind his ear crushed between my hands so that all I could smell was tobacco. I curled my hands into his hair like cobwebs, sliding my tongue along the inside of his bottom lip. He moaned my name, but it only sounded like a goodbye.

“Why are you leaving?” I heard myself ask against the skin of his neck. His breathing was ragged and laboured in my ear, drenched with tears that threatened to drown.

He buried his fingers into the flesh of my lower back, crystals tattooing his blush-dusted cheeks. “You…you never asked me to stay, Gerard.” His voice cracked on the last syllable of my name, turning it into a whisper. A plea dripping through the ink on his fingers.

A weak noise escaped from the back of my throat. There were stars laced into my eyelashes. “Would you have stayed?”

“I might have if you had asked.”

“I didn’t know you wanted me to.”

He tilted his head up, eyebrows coming together in pain. Hurt pulled the corners of his lips down. “You have to want to, Gee.”

“I…I don’t want you to hate waking up next to me. I don’t want you to hate kissing me and fucking me. I don’t want you to wish that it wasn’t me at all.”

“I don’t.”

“But you will, Frank. It’s who you are and it’s who I am. There was always going to be a day where you would wake up and realize that you’d been saving up all your money for the day that you finally left me. You always would have gotten tired of living like this. And…and I would always let you go.”

“So this is it then?” he asked, resting his forehead against mine.

“Yeah,” I breathed, “Yeah, for now, this is it.”

In nine minutes his suitcase had gone from the floor to his hand, the leather jacket was snug around his shoulders. His hands were shaking as he opened the door, but it was just fate finally creeping up on us. My stomach was dropping, but I knew it was just us letting go.

And we were free-falling.