InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Tweak should talk to Jabby"

Have been days, didn't know your name (ashwynter) wrote,
@ 2032-02-17 20:29:00

One summer day, he went away.
Gone and left me, he's gone to stay.
Now he's gone and I don't worry.
I'm sittin' on top of the world

Ash Wynter

There's a time after all the customers are gone. After we've sent the staff home for the night. When all the chairs are turned up on the tables and the stools are stacked neatly in the corner. It's empty and quiet, but you can still feel the ghosts. My partner and I, we share a drink. Just one. It's never quite silent, we both like to fill up the empty space that kind of quiet leaves; but it isn't the bustle of a packed gastropub. He likes his vodka on the rocks with three tomolives. I like my whiskey ginger with three cubes and a lime. He pulls down one of those stools and he sits and he stares into his glass. I stand and I lean and I stare at the wall.

There are a few moments before we realize how quiet it's gotten. Silence promises to tell you the truth about everything if you just tilt your head the right way. A truth you probably don't want to know. About how you're not the person you think you are. How you didn't grow up to be what you wanted, even if you never really had any idea about who it was you wanted to be. Twist the prism just right and white light breaks into every color that ever was and every one that ever will be.

I was seven when she left us. Dad and I stayed. He was happier then. Could finally be who he wanted to be. Fan out his tail and shake those colorful feathers for the world to see. For me to see. Regularly. Trot out a long line of manboys. My mother did the same, at a distance. We'd go for years without seeing her, and my dad never seemed to be bothered. Didn't want to know whether or not I was. He'd just stare exasperated by my inability to be demure. Not that he served as a shining example of the concept.

At times, I think I'm obsessed. I'm fighting the battle to be her opposite, or to be the version of herself she couldn't be. The one we needed. Me, and my father. The one who stayed because we needed her to. The one who would never leave me to figure out where the line between real woman and drag queen lay. The two, I think, are closer together than what I invented. Could've used someone to point out that I could wear make up without being a man much sooner. Would've been nice if one of the pair of them had showed me it all could end differently. Instead, she was the one who waltzed into town with age inappropriate gifts and a new boyfriend. There was always a new boyfriend.

My first one, she took him. Came whirling into town promising to stay again. Got herself an apartment. Invited us over and let us drink. And I thought things would be different now. She wouldn't be the parent I had wanted, but she'd be someone. Didn't take her more than three weeks to get that brown-eyed boy to love her. The way she makes everyone love her. She probably broke him, too.

I thought I'd figured out the magic once. Thought I'd managed to tangle myself up with someone I actually wanted. He'd stay, and I'd stay, and we'd wake up in love everyday. One day, I didn't. And he looked at me with that look he'd get when he was watching me and he thought I didn't notice. And my lungs turned to stone and my stomach tied itself in knots and I needed to get out. I needed someplace where no one would ever know that I left his beating heart on the kitchen table. At the very least, I needed away from him and that laugh. The one that started to grate on my last nerve. Pulverize a small piece of me every time he let loose with it.

I left him. And then I left the cushy corporate job I'd taken to bide my time after college. We opened the Abbey that year, my partner and I. My college roommates brother, a nervous chef who liked to keep his kitchen clean. He never asked me why I turned back the clock. Why I moved back to that place across the hall with an aspiring entertainer for a roommate. We try not to talk about why we're both eternally single, why my relationships seem to always end as a casualty to my humor. Don't ask him why he lives in everyone else's shadow. Why he accepts less than he deserves. We just sit with our drinks and try to figure out a way to beat back the silence so that it never reveals any of the truths we don't want to hear.