The Chasing of Moons

Frank gets cornered into his locker near the end of the day by Mikey, which he has honestly been expecting since the blow out at lunch. Frank just grabs his backpack from his locker, takes a deep breath and tries not to burst into tears.

“Real talk, Frank,” Mikey says. “I have to actually say some shit to you, and it might sound mean, it might hurt your feelings, and that doesn’t matter, because you need to open your ears and hear me for real.”

“Okay,” Frank nods. “I’m ready. Lay it on me.”

“You don’t sound like you’re ready.”

“I’m not,” Frank replies, “but it’s now or never, just tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Mostly, you’re an idiot. That’s the first through twentieth thing on my mind. On a check list, my life consists of telling you you’re an idiot for three solid years in a row.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

“Second or well, twenty first after all those proclamations of idiocy, you and Gerard are written down in history already, and yet you still fuck it up. It’s like it’s a game to you. It’s a game to see how far you can stray from your destiny, and that game is one you’re intentionally trying to lose. Why are you doing that? You know how things should end, but you’re jumping over obstacles to run away from that. I don’t get it. I thought you wanted Gerard.”

“I did! I do, I mean, I want him, of course I do. I’m crazy about him. Hell, I love the son of a bitch.”

“Damn right you do, because Gerard is fantastic, and he’s too good for you, but I’m choosing to look past that for now because I think, or well I was under the impression until the last few days that you would make him happy. I thought being with you would be good for the both of you, but especially him, because dude, you’re not bad, and I don’t dislike you or anything, I’d consider you a friend, but he’s my brother. He’s my brother, and he’s more important to me than anyone, and I will seriously fuck you up if you hurt him, but I can’t do that now because I feel like we’ll lose the plot even more and no one needs that, least of all Gerard. What I need is for you to pick yourself up by whatever you need to, and you need to accept that this is real life. You cannot hit redo, or do things over if you mess this all up, you have this one chance, and if you keep pissing all over that chance, you don’t just get another one willy nilly. There’s no cheat code, or reset button, there’s no second try; there is fact, and that’s it. If you fuck things up like this and refuse to even do anything to go about fixing it then you have not just lost the game, but you have literally lost your whole future.”

“I know that,” Frank says, shaking his head.

“Really? Because it doesn’t seem like you do. You keep pushing him away with every little thing. I don’t know what you’re doing, this is supposed to be a big amazing love story that’s so important to the universe that the laws of time bend to make it happen. This is so emotional and important a thing and you’re disrespecting how hard laws and possibilities are trying to get you and Gerard to work. I can’t intervene as much as I want to, because honestly, I’m afraid you’re going to drag me down with you and I really like that asshat friend of yours. You are toxic to yourself, I don’t even want to begin thinking about what else you might destroy, and besides, it’s not my job to make sure you don’t fuck things up. Because, and I mean this in the nicest possible way I can, if you need to fall into nothingness because you can’t make things work, I’m not going to kill myself trying to pull you back up. That’s not my duty. That’s your problem. Believe me, I don’t want to see you fail, but I’m not going to take it upon myself to fix you if you do something wrong. At the end of the day, Frank, Gerard can still find someone. He isn’t torn apart on the inside knowing what his future is supposed to look like, so he doesn’t have that tie to you that you have to him. If you can’t make it work, then this will all just be a blip in his life. A weird story he tells to his future husband who isn’t you. But you, you don’t have that luxury. He’s always going to be the ‘what if’ for you, and the one who got away. So either you woman up and start taking your life seriously, or you let Gerard go now so that you can meet your ultimate destination of eternal solitude.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been insulted so poetically,” Frank frowns, “and yet I kind of want to punch you in the face? But, like, I know you’re right? You make a good point, and I wouldn’t expect you to be on my side in this all when Gerard is your brother, but damn, still wanna hit you.”

“Well, I’m not neutral in this, Frank, and don’t think for one second that I’m not on Gerard’s side. If this were a real war, I do hope you realize I would be on his team and I would shoot you in the face without a second thought, but seeing as this is not a war and it’s mostly just a quest to see if you’re capable of not being a little shit, then I will provide advice, but I’m still not on your side, and you really have no merit to punch me. In fact, I think the punching permission lies in my favor.”

“I really hate you Way’s,” Frank shakes his head, “you’re so smart but you’re mean about it?”

“It’s a genetic thing.”

“So is fibromyalgia,” Frank says, trying to highlight how pointless that statement was by inadvertently making himself sound stupider.

“Right,” Mikey says, “so I’m just going to walk away from you and you had better have a fucking plan by tomorrow. Gordon Ramsay this shit, okay, take it from zero to a hundred overnight.”

“Did you just say without irony ‘Gordon Ramsay this shit’?” Frank asks.

“Don’t question my methods,” Mikey says, “you absolute fucking walnut.”

Frank nods, “I’m going to go cry in my car and listen to breakup albums now.” Somehow that sounds less embarrassing than his other alternative which was to just cry in the hallway.

“Just know that if you ruin Gerard’s birthday I will hunt you down and make your life hell for every waking moment that you continue to exist.”

“Noted,” Frank says, turning around and walking away as quickly as he can in a way that doesn’t make it look like he’s trying to run away from Mikey, but it’s still pretty obvious that he’s running away from Mikey. Who wouldn’t?

When Frank gets out of the building, the front steps are flooded with students all talking about this or that, with the air drizzling so sparsely around them that it might just be wayward spit from people talking too emphatically.

When Frank does make it to his car, and out of the parking lot, which feels blissful to him, all he does is get far enough away from the school so that no one is going to see his pitiful crying in the front seat of his car. First of course he stops at a convenience store for a massive bag of Kit Kat’s because that’s what a breakup, or whatever this is, demands. It’s like meeting a Dementor, as soon as you experience that, you have to binge on chocolate, it’s just a fact of nature.

Frank pulls out a Taylor Swift CD from his glove compartment, which he will tell anyone who asks that he received as a birthday present from his aunt the cat lady from Hell, Michigan, literally, and which has never in it’s entire life been inside a CD player, nor has it even seen the light of day. What actually happened was that he got it as a joke and then realized it was good after it was too late, and he can’t turn back. He can’t turn back now, it’s far too late. Too late. It’s just too late.

Also it’s really good to soothe a good heartbreak. Not that Frank’s ever had his heart broken, because he’s never really dated anyone. But he watches a lot of teen shows that he also would deny ever having seen. But goddammit, Clare and Eli were meant for each other.

Even more so however, he and Gerard were meant for each other. Not only meant for each other, they bend time and space for each other. That’s how meant for each other they are. Fuck off Marshall and Lily, Gerard is way fucking cuter and has less obnoxious siblings. Frank is aware that that analogy entails that he is Lily, and he is very much okay with that.

When Frank grabs the CD case, he huffs as he opens it and that’s when a folded piece of paper flutters out and onto his lap.

Frank, curious, picks it up, throwing the case in the passenger’s seat.

He recognizes Gerard’s handwriting immediately.

He’s read over that note at least a thirty dozen times, he would recognize a comma in Gerard’s handwriting at this point. The words and letters are etched into his brain like a chisel in rock.

The letter looks to be a continuation of the previous letter Gerard wrote him, and Frank, hungry for more information, reads through it so fast he barely takes a word in.

Part II

So, not to ring my own bell or anything, but guess who is probably half psychic? I’m actually descended from Raven Baxter. Because seriously, not only did I know when you would open this CD, I also knew what happened to make you open this CD. I’m on fire, I’m awesome.

I’m going to start this off with the fact that you are a lying little shit. I know you claim your aunt gave you this CD, and it’s not a bad back story, it really isn’t, because aunt’s don’t know how to use computers, therefor are incapable of sending you iTunes gift cards for you to figure out yourself what you want for your birthday, but the real kicker is that you left the price sticker on it. I mean, no person in their right mind leaves the price sticker on an album that they’re gifting to someone else. When you gift it, you don’t want the recipient to know how much you spent, and that means that the fact that you kept the sticker on it is because you bought it. Maybe I’m actually Sherlock Holmes, or, it’s entirely possible that you left the receipt in the case and I worked it out from the name on the receipt but the specifics are not important.

The fact of the matter is that you bought a Taylor Swift album and you didn’t want anyone to know about it. Personally, I wouldn’t have gone for Red, but that’s just me, I mean I liked her eighth album, but that hasn’t come out yet for you, but just you wait until you find out what happened with- I’m getting ahead of myself, I promised not to give you any spoilers. You haven’t earned the juicy details of Taylor Swift’s love life. But as a completely unrelated advance, make sure you watch the series finale of Iron Chef, that shit was fucked.

First, a word on why all of this is necessary. What I’m about to tell you, I’ll admit, is not fact. I don’t have a sheet of paper to give you stating for certain that this is true, but I’m pretty sure it is.

Basically, if it weren’t for the whole time travel thing, we never would’ve happened. I don’t know how clear on that you are, but that’s something I’m pretty sure of. I think, if you put the pieces together, a long time ago on a plane separate from either of our realities, we didn’t end up together. That’s my theory at least, and that theory then goes to follow that with every time this timeline repeats, it becomes more and more dire that these events fall into place accordingly, because otherwise shit will happen. Paradox type shit, mind you, so we’re talking serious shit.

I’ve seen too many movies about time travel, I know that, so I’m seriously grasping at straws, but I’m most definitely sure that if we don’t end up together, one or both of us will die before we ultimately were destined to, as a way to cut any loose ends in this timeline. Am I sure of this, on one hand, no, but on the other, yes, I am. Time is a tricky thing, it’s flexible to some extent and not to some others, and I really wish there was a guidebook that explained all this shit, but there isn’t. Time Travel for Dummies, find it in a store near you. Sadly not.

To make things more clear, my belief is that in the first timeline of existence that contained you and I, we didn’t end up together. In that timeline myself, or a version of myself decided that not being together wasn’t good enough and time bent itself to aid me, which is why I ended up going back in time to get myself and you together. The science aspect I’m iffy on, but the reasoning behind it I am not. That long off Gerard would have died alone in his universe sadly, but he would have put the next timeline of you and me together, with an inflexible demand for it to happen again for the next timeline.

In a sense, this theory works as a metaphor for one life being the end of a book. Once you turn the final page, the book begins again, the same, but slightly different. If you were to tear out a page, or if you and I were not to make it work in one timeline, this timeline to be specific, then the gravity of that rip would cost us our lives and the story. My timeline has already been formed, it cannot change, and I still believe that yours is indeed fixed, but without knowing for certain, it’s safe to assume that if you really did mess everything up, you would be messing up more than just your love life, you would be messing up both of our lifespans, and possibly more than that. By more than that, I mean black hole shit. That actually isn’t a metaphor, I mean an actual black hole.

This is some freaky shit we got ourselves into, and yes, if you keep things calm, it shouldn’t affect either of us in anyway, but if something goes amiss, we will have a debt to pay. Don’t force us to find out just how high that debt really is.

I’m getting off point, so instead of scaring the shit out of you, I’m going to talk about your present. In summary: You’re a little bitch who keeps getting angry with me because I have ‘commitment issues,’ and I’m being an asshole to you about you not being willing to expose your entire life to the public eye. I’m not going to tell you how we settled that argument, but I’m just going to tell you that it’s okay, that was supposed to happen. This is how things are meant to go. Probably. I mean I can’t show you an entire list of what happens and what doesn’t because then there’s no fun in it. You would have little triumph, because then you wouldn’t have had to fight for anything. I’d damn well better be worth fighting for.

What I will tell you is to seriously stay the hell away from Pete until after my birthday because he will feed you some majorly dumb ideas, and I don’t care what year you’re from, there is nothing romantic about jumping up on a lunch table and singing All Of Me to a crowded cafeteria. It just doesn’t work, I mean maybe in a movie, but even in a movie the amount of secondhand embarrassment can be cut with a knife, and really, I don’t need that hanging over my head for my entire life. Basically, just don’t sing any love ballads to anyone in a room full of high schoolers and all will be grand.

Also, Mikey is a prophet of some sort, I mean not actually, but that dude could seriously rake in the cash if he were to set up a psychic detective agency with his, let’s be honest, far more attractive best friend and I’m losing my point again, but what I need you to do is listen to Mikey like he has the key to life sewn into his words. I mean that. I need you to take every word out of his mouth as gospel. If Mikey says jump, you ask how high. Got that? If Mikey says to buy yourself a pair of crocs than you had damn well better buy a pair of crocs, just never wear them okay, because I can’t date a guy in crocs.

So anyway, some updates, no, you absolutely cannot name our future child Boba Fett, and while we’re at it, yes, Galadriel is also out of the question. I can be talked into Leia or maybe even Samwise, it depends on what kind of day I’m having, but that’s the most I’m going to budge on the subject.

In conclusion, please, do not burst into song ever inside a cafeteria, absolutely do not buy an Apple Pencil, and for god’s sake listen to Mikey! I can’t stress that enough, you need to hear that boy and learn from him, because I know he’s younger than you but he is about sixteen times smarter than all other humans ever.





P.S. Mikey’s not joking when he says he’ll fuck you up if you ruin my birthday, he had a whole plan drawn out and it involved jalapeños and an enormous misuse of pipe cleaners so you seriously need to get on that.

Frank thinks that this letter has got to be longer than the last. There’s less information crammed into his for some reason however. He doesn’t know what the hell is going on with his life, or with the universe, or why Gerard and he are so important, or anything at all really.

All that Frank has taken from this letter actually is that his life is about a thousand times harder than he had originally thought. And also, Mikey is terrifying.