Not Even in Death Do Us Part

Jack always said Alex was beautiful.

Everything about him, pure beauty.

Alex would thank him, blushing profusely and biting his lip.

One of Jack's favourite things was Alex's long, shaggy, golden hair.

Jack doesn't tell Alex he's beautiful anymore.

Jack didn't love him anymore.

As stupid as it may seem, Alex's reflection reminded him of Jack.

Jack loved Alex's hair, so Alex cut it off.

His nimble fingers shook with the anxiety that haunts him constantly as he scrambled through drawer after drawer in their, no, his, kitchen for the scissors.

Tears soaked his pink cheeks and sleeves as he wiped at them furiously. His water marked vision was not aiding him in his search for the scissors that he knows were here somewhere.
It's 4am. You could call him crazy. But maybe he's just blinded by lost love.
The only noises were the sobs choking their way out of Alex's lips and the utensils falling to the floor as Alex searches.
The silence was painful.

Alex felt as though the entire world took a sudden breath as his fingers grasped the cool blades on the closed scissors.

He was fighting the urge to pass out and being aware of his surroundings was becoming difficult. All he saw was a blurry, vague shadows of the tiled kitchen around him and all he could feel was the ache that filled up every vacant space inside his chest and the butterflies that tossed and turned in his empty stomach.

Something dropped from the drawer and onto his bare foot and he was vaguely aware of what it was. A kitchen knife, sure to leave a scare in his pale skin. He didn't care. He didn't even stop to check for blood.

This was Jack's fault. Jack didn't have to leave. He didn't have any need to disappear from Alex's life just as quickly and as effortlessly as he'd arrived into it. The silence was deafening, it sounds cliché, Alex knows that. But that's how it's been since he's been gone. The silence is hurting him. And he didn't know how to handle it anymore. At night Jack's figure dances behind his eyelids, a twisted portrayal of the boy Alex loves, taunting him with teasing words and half-hearted promises.
Alex's love for Jack was filled with hopes and dreams but Jack had torn them to shreds and left them to rot away.

Vacations together, pets, wedding, bigger house, children, growing old together. For eight years Alex had been pumping his heart and his entire being into a boy he'd met at some charity concert in down town Baltimore. He'd given his all to a man who had taken every colour and every dream and every emotion away from him.

He no longer felt pain unless it was intentionally inflicted.
And recently, it often had been.

He no longer saw his life in colour. Everything was black and grey. Music no longer comforted the 29 year old. His guitar sat in the living room, untouched, gathering dust. The journal next to his guitar left open, the ink on the page fading in the sunlight that goes unnoticed by Alex.

Alex remembered what the journal contained. He knows what's written in it. He knows what the scribbled handwriting says. The ink may be fading and the guitar may be layered with dust, but he knew the words, there were stuck in his head.
Lyrics and poetry, promises of forever. The words promised a future, they promised something greater than the two of them. Their happily ever after. A future with the one who had pulled him out of his darkest moments and lifted him up into the clouds.
But Jack let Alex go.
And now he's falling.

Alex didn't want to think about that anymore. The scissors were found.

He gripped onto a fistful of hair and cut.
Watching the golden strands fall to the floor in the dim light.
As the first strands of hair fell, something connected together in his mind. Realisation. He's lost a hold of his sanity. And he couldn't care less, so he screamed out violently in anger as he grabbed another chunk of hair and cut it off. He gripped section after section, cutting messily.
He felt empowered.
He felt like he was cutting Jack's love out of his chest, out of his soul.
Out of him.
He carried on, nipping and scratching at his scalp as he desperately ridded himself of his soft locks.
Trying to release himself of something that reminded him so much of his love.

He grabbed an unopened drawer by it's dull metal handle and yanked, dropping the scissors into it before looking down.

As he does, he feels his insides ache and his heart begin to ooze with this thick, unwanted tar that spread through his body like the most poisonous toxin, it froze him, clogging up his veins and short-circuiting his nerves. His blood ran cold, so cold it felt like ice. His chest emptied. The butterflies escape his stomach.
He let out a unnatural sound that was somewhere between a scream of pain and a cry of help and a bed for his lover to come back to him.

There was a photo of him and Jack lying in the drawer.
Their smiling faces staring up at Alex.

He couldn't describe what he was feeling. He was stuck in paradox.

And still, through all the pain he was feeling in his heart, he still needed more.

He looks down at his arms, staring at the scars and cuts.
He watches them heal and begin to fade over the days and weeks just as quickly and silently as Jack left his life.

He's began living in a hazy dream in which the nights and days blend together into a never ending expanse of pain. He didn't even know how long it had been since Jack had left. Perhaps it had been months. Perhaps it had been years. Alex didn't know. He didn't care.

He often found himself staring at the clock in the living room.
The time was wrong.
Jack rarel remembered to replace the batteries, and when he did, he didn't correct the time.
But the tick of the second hand was almost calming.
So Alex finds himself walking lifelessly to the lounge.
He stares at the time on the clock.
He knows it's incorrect.

11:11

He wishes Jack would come back.

He felt as though time was frozen.
Stuck in a moment where he can only wish for his love to come back to him. He pleaded with whoever was listening.
But he knew no one was listening.
He spent hours at night crying and sobbing and throwing pillows at the wall, mumbling the promises Jack made him.

Alex wasn't sure, but it must have been an hour later when he finally pulled himself up the stairs and into the bathroom. Whimpers and cries were falling from his lips as he walked senselessly over smashed picture frames and and shattered glass and photos. All torn down in a drunken rage. He doesn't quite remember when. Once he was in the bathroom, he laughed. It was the kind of laugh that would have startled anyone around, if they had been listening. It was devious and evil, and it was terrifying Alex himself.

Alex caught a glimpsing his own reflection.
Hair messy and patchy, cheeks blotched red and eyes burning bloodshot.

But he can hear Jack's voice.
Feels gently fingers combing through his hair.
Telling him he's beautiful.

"I adore you," he'd said, a smile ghosting on his lips and his lips ghosted Alex's neck.
The memory hurt. It burnt like the flames Alex felt when he leant to close to the fire, completely unphased by the heat, even though it hurt.
It felt like the pressure of a blade against his skin.

Only moments later did an echoing smash travel trough the house.

His reflection had vanished.
Crumbled into tiny pieces on the floor.
Calmly, Alex opened the third drawer down on his left hand side.
He did not need to search through these drawers. He knew where it was.
He pulled out a small sliver of silver.
He'd taken the blade out of the expensive razor Jack left in that drawer. He remembers when he bought it. Jack was so pleased with himself and Alex watched from the doorway with a fond expression on his face as the younger man shaved, talking animatedly to Alex as he did.
He gripped the blade tightly in his fingers.

----

When he came around, he was shaking and laying on the bathroom floor.
Blood surrounded him. He didn't feel the pain this time.

Oxygen tried desperately to fill his lungs but there was little room. His ribs were closing in.

Somewhere inside of him, Alex knew this was the end.

A numbness started in his feet and began working its way around his circulatory system, toward his legs and stomach. Eventually it reached his chest.
It settled into his heart, making it feel heavy and broken. More broken that it already is.
It crept into his lungs.
He couldn't breathe.
He was dying.
The sweat on his back turned cold under his t-shirt and he felt like the moisture was going to drown him.

His scalp was tingling and he skin on his arms started to burn in protest.
The blood wasn't stopping.
He didn't care. He accepted it. He bid farewell to the blood leaving his body.

He finally felt something.

He looked around him.
The glass from the shattered mirror was digging into his skin.
He was fading.

Alex picked up a shard of glass.
Staring at his reflection, before it was gone.

Pale skin is pulled tight over prominent features. Dark bags pull down his once beautiful eyes.
Jack loved his eyes.
But they've lost the sparkle they once had.
His hair is uneven, choppy, and completely ruined. Jack would never love him again. He'd laugh. Call him crazy. Call him hideous.
Jack was a sucker for beauty and Alex is no longer beautiful.

A sickening feeling spread through his body. Alex was utterly defeated, destroyed.
He was dying.

The shard of mirror fell from Alex's hand.
His limbs falling loose.
This was his final story.

He never got to fulfil his dreams.
Jack was not his future.
A messy suicide with not explanation was his only destiny now.

Alex was dead.

----

Jack was told three days later.
Jack was torn in two.
He know understood how Alex felt.
He didn't attend the funeral.
He didn't attend the wake.

Because he knew Alex could not attend his.

Jack left a note.
It was simply.

"I shouldn't have ever left. But I'll leave again. This time I'll leave with you instead."