Fading
Echoes
By
I wonder if you still remember that night as much as I do. That one moment in time that took us both to another place, into another dimension in where it was just the two of us. I wonder if you can clearly recall the two of us being in that cold hotel room hiding away from the world because we both know that we can never be together. But we were. That night we did the impossible: We stole a moment in time and kept it for ourselves.
“How do I look?” I remember asking James. It was going to be the night of all nights. The night that starts it all.
“You are not going to get laid with that,” he replied with a smirk on his face.
“I’m not trying to get laid. Christ,” I said and took off the ridiculous bowtie from my tux.
“Yeah, keep telling yourself that.”
James was a big guy, not the biggest, he was just a couple of inches taller than me, but that didn’t mean he has that as an excuse for being a dick.
“Whatever, man,” I said, finally. I was frustrated, not at the fact that I was insecure with the way I look, but because he thought that I was trying to get laid during prom night. He knew better than that.
“Hey don’t get so depressed with the way you look. I mean guys like us could get laid all the time if we wanted. The difference between you and me is that you choose not to.”
I knew that he found some pride in that statement of his, and I know that he takes pride in the fact that he does get laid more than any of our friends, but, Jesus, those girls that he screws on a nightly basis could pass for being forty—old, desperate, and alone. I don’t know if I should pity him or pity the girls he screws.
I grabbed my phone from my bed and unlocked it. It was one o’clock in the afternoon. I stared at the screen for a while, searching for something, waiting for something. It had been such a long time since you texted me, and I waited each day to see your name pop out in my phone’s screen. But it hadn’t appeared in a long time. I guess I had really separated from your life. I hated thinking about it, but it’s not like I have a choice.
“You’re driving right?” James said from behind my back. I hadn’t noticed that I had stared at my phone for a whole minute.
“Uh yeah,” I mumbled, “is everyone here?”
“Lemme check,” he replied and went out of my room. I was finally alone.
I jumped on my bed, and stared at my empty ceiling. Cracks started to form and I remembered that I was planning to repaint it a couple of days ago. I had forgotten all about it because most of the time I seem to be out of place when I’m alone—it’s like I’m floating in this world, not existing, just eternally watching my body do its thing.
I checked my phone again. It was just the time, slowly ticking forwards. I thought if you were going to be in prom. I told myself that you were too cool for that. I convinced myself that you would be in some other part, making out with some hot guy that you’ve always wanted to make out with for a long time. Giving him a blowjob right after in a couch that your friends own.
“Fuck,” I muttered, and pushed the thought away from my head. I wanted to punch myself in the face for thinking of such a thing.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. My life felt like it was a twisted lie. You were everything I hated, but that was some excuse for me to avoid you. And yet I was drawn to you like an insect to light. I kept lying to myself that I don’t want you—that I don’t want to be with you. I had lied to myself so much. Then I would see the way you look at me, as if I held every answer to all your questions about the world. I would see in your eyes the want, the yearning, the waiting.
I slapped my face for thinking that. It was just my imagination, an embedded lie among the stars. You looked at me the same way you looked at any of your friends. You looked at me as if I was just any other guy. I was never special in your life… and I will never be.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” I remember Veronica telling me when I had told her about you, “Elizabeth likes you whether you like it or not.”
“What makes you say that?” I argued.
Veronica’s face ricocheted backwards as if she was trying to dodge an invincible slap to the face.
“Because her eyes say so much to you,” she replied. She bit her lip. She was trying to hide something from me. She looked away from me, and said, “I know, because…”
“Because what?”
The wrong words still slipped out of my lips. I wished I had shut my mouth instead, because I already knew the answer.
“Because it’s the same way I look at you,” she said.
Veronica was one of our friends who had feelings for me. We were close. I told her a lot of things about me and she did the same thing, but our feelings weren’t mutual. I had wished that I hadn’t told her about you. I had hurt another and I hated myself for that. Sometimes I wished that I loved Veronica instead of you, because Veronica was everything I wanted in a woman, she was everything that would be all checks in my checklist of whom to marry, and yet, it wasn’t her.
I checked my phone once again. 1:13 pm. I argued with myself that you’re not going to be at the prom. You’ll be somewhere, far far away, somewhere I would never find you because you’re living a different life. A life that you’ve always wanted.
“Yep. Everyone’s outside. Should we go?” James asked me. I looked at him and his tux. We both looked sharp for two roughed up boys from the football team.
“Yeah.”
I stared outside my window. The sky burgundy and the last of specks of light started to fade away from the horizon.
“Yeah. Let’s get out of here,” I said and stood away from my bed.
“What about your tie?” He asked and pointed towards it. I looked at it for a while contemplating whether I should take it or not.
“Nah, fuck it. I don’t think I’m going to need it.”
I can look at a million stars, see a million sunsets, and not be able to compare any of them to what I could feel during that night. It felt like every emotion that is possible to feel, I had felt that night, all at once, overwhelming every sense in my body. It felt like the entire universe had disappeared and left only us, to feel and touch one another.
I never expected that you would be there. I had told myself so many different reasons as to why you weren’t going to be at the prom. And yet, there you were, in your simple black dress and glimmering gold bracelet that I remember giving you on one of your birthdays. I never thought you’d wear it because it was cheap and it was like any other bracelet ever created, and yet you wore it for some reason. I didn’t know that you were there at first. I was too busy laughing with my friends. I didn’t know that you were there until Veronica told me that she had seen you enter. And as always, you were late.
I didn’t know what to say to Veronica. I simply nodded at her, but I guess she saw through my deception. She knew that anxiety had entered through every vein in my body, rendering me paralyzed.
“You want to talk to her?” Veronica asked me.
I couldn’t move my lips. I felt my hand tremble. I never felt like that before. So I ended up shaking my head. I could see that she felt sorry for me. She gave me a friendly smile and gestured me to go back to what I was doing. I felt thankful for her more than anything else. I would feel an eternal guilt for breaking her heart, but I guess breaking a heart is better than holding on to it, making bleed even more because you were never meant to be together. She deserves someone better.
I grabbed her arm before she left.
“I, uh, thank you, Vern,” I said to her.
She gave me a genuine smile, and I questioned my heart—why I didn’t choose her over you?
The answer came faster than I could think. It was simple. There are many things in this world that are not under our control. My heart is not under my control, the same way that the universe always compels us to see each other during small desperate moments in our lives.
I looked for you as soon as Veronica left our table. I had to see you. I yearned for your voice, that dreadful voice that couldn’t sing a single song properly, that dreadful laugh that sounds like an old man laughing. You weren’t perfect and I’ve grown to accept that, because each day with you felt like a roller coaster ride. There were times we fought just because we’re so different from each other. We would laugh at stupid things that other people wouldn’t find funny. There were times when you would look at me as if we were the only two people in the world. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from you is that perfect people are boring—broken ones have more depth and love than the rest.
I heard your voice. No one would mistake that voice. I got a glimpse of your face from far away. You were laughing and god, you are and will always be gorgeous. I smiled. I had stolen a look from your face and made it a screensaver in my head. Your laugh was similar to your laugh during those times when we were together. Laughter with a hint of sadness, a sadness that only you and I could understand—a sadness with a realization that happy moments are nothing more but fleeting moments in the strings of time, because we both know that one day we wouldn’t even remember why we were happy in certain moments in our lives, and that one day we would later on forget happiness as we enter oblivion.
Your hazel brown eyes, your fair white sensitive skin, your black hair, your dress black as the night, the golden bracelet that I gave you – all of them made you look like Aphrodite.
You caught my eyes and I caught yours. For a moment I felt everything stop. In that moment I felt like my heart had stop beating. Oxygen had stopped reaching my head. I felt that I would die from what I felt when my eyes connected with your eyes.
I wished that I had taken cover from the bullet of love. Perhaps none of us could. It always hits us. And kills us from the inside.
Your eyes say so much to me.
They really do.
All the glitters in the universe and all the diamonds in this earth could never compliment your eyes.
Eyes from a being that lives far away from this universe. Skin of a fair angel from the sky. And lastly, a love of a million souls. That was you.
You gave me a chuckle. Music rung through my ears. Music of love and life. Music that could never be replicated by any instrument in this world. The music of my heart.
I smiled at you and we stayed like that for a while, until both of us realized that we were not the only ones there in that room, that there were many more others, walking and passing by. Others who want our attention.
“Hey man, I was looking for you.”
James had bumped unto me. I wish he hadn’t.
“Uh yeah, wassup man?” I asked and looked away from you. I wish I hadn’t.
“I just thought that you left us there like idiots, man. I mean come on, we were having so much fun,” he said. I wanted to ignore him. “What were you looking at anyways?”
I pushed him away. Because I couldn’t let him see you. I didn’t want him to look at you. Because if he had seen you, he would fall in love with you. And then he would have the same moment that you and I had. And I didn’t want that to happen.
“Jesus Fuck, man! What the hell was that?” James muttered out loud, rubbing his chest.
“Fuck, sorry. I didn’t mean it. I was, uh…”
I looked back, searching for your face again. Your attention was back towards your friends. I turned back to James.
“It was just…” I started, seeing how pissed he was, “I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean it.”
“You’re acting weird, man,” he said as he walked away.
He was right. I was acting more than weird. This wasn’t me. I took a deep breath and told myself that I was okay. My chest is hurting but I’m okay.
I needed to walk away from it all, to breathe, to escape, so I walked out to the cold November wind.
We were both in a moment of trance. Our eyes were staring deeply into the other’s soul. We couldn’t look away because we were connected.
We were sitting on a bench while others from our school were busy playing in the park. It was a school activity and I knew that you hated those, but you were there with me, sitting on that bench, smiling at me, telling me that it was just the two of us.
“Why can’t we just run away from this place and get married? Far away from these people we know, far away from this place… why can’t we just do that?” I said without thinking.
You had pushed me to say those words. I don’t regret saying them because for once, I had told you what I really meant, without meaning to do it.
“You know we can’t do that,” you replied, but that smile on your face told me that you wanted to do it. That you had thought about it.
We could have. You have no idea how many times I had thought about it. I would always be the one who receives checks from my family’s business and I would always deposit them in a nearby bank. Everytime I would look at the check, the money in it, I would wonder about leaving this place. It was so easy to withdraw that money, to take it with us and go some place far away. All I had to do was ask if you are willing. But I never did.
“You’re right,” I sighed but gave out a friendly smile, “I think you’ve actually fallen in love with me when I said that.”
You gave out a smile and looked away, embarrassed.
“You wish!”
I could do nothing else but smile. Because you never did fall in love with me. But I don’t regret that. There are so many reasons as to why I fell in love with you. Sadly, I concluded that these are the things that you will never see in you because you are too blindly jealous with what other people have. But these are the reasons that made you and your choices in life.
First reason. You are strong when madness ensues. For some reason, you can keep going, even if odds are against your favor. You might be pessimistic at points in your life and yet, from your very own downfalls you pick yourself up, even if you’re alone, even if you know that you’ll never make it.
Second. You know your limitations. You know that in your ability to measure yourself, you measure yourself against others and against the world. Your brain will keeps a straight line towards your heart because you know how to fight for what is right in your life, for the things that keeps you living and in love.
Third. You find beauty in the universe even if it’s filled by the sick and the mad. You believe in a “future that will never be gained”, in a future that only we know exists. It is a utopia where both human emotions and human rationality are at peace with each other. You’re a believer, and that’s what matters, because there are many in this world that chooses to believe in nothing, because they are cowards who wish only to protect themselves. That’s not you and that’ll never be you.
And lastly, in your brokenness, you find your peace. You are broken and you are one of the few that does not want to be fixed. You find yourself in your brokenness and you are not ashamed of it, nor are you proud of it. All you find in it is solace and there is a hidden happiness in that, a hidden happiness that no one else could see or perceive.
These are the things that made you who you are. These things are hidden to many people of our world, but these are the things that are open to me and you. You let me see these things, but I guess, you could have never predicted that I would fall in love with you.
“Look at them,” I nudged towards the sky, “the stars.”
I remember you giving out this distinct sigh. We were out in the parking lot, ignoring prom happening behind us, ignoring everything. You had found me and I couldn’t tell if you followed me, or if you simply walked out because you needed the same thing I needed.
“You always talk about the stars and the universe,” you said to me with a smile.
I couldn’t deny that.
“Okay. This time I’m not going to talk about the stars or the universe. This time they’re a metaphor.”
You had a questioning look on your face.
“A metaphor for what?”
“A metaphor for us and how we’re so small compared to the entirety of the universe.”
You shook your head.
“Enough of your bullshit. I’ve heard it ever since we met each other.”
That too, was true, but you didn’t know how I used that bullshit to keep my feelings away from my mouth. To keep the truth escaping away from within my soul.
“Okay. What do you want to hear?” I asked. I stared intently into your eyes. You did the same. Those eyes that always seemed to question everything about me.
“I want to hear what you want to say.”
“Want to say about what?”
You let off an annoyed groan. It was clear that I was pissing you off. I liked doing that to you, but it was different during that night. I felt bad for doing that to you. I feel bad about a lot of things, but only after I’ve done them. I’ve yet to learn from my mistakes, I guess.
“Okay, okay.” I said right after, “I’m sorry.”
“You always say sorry. You’re fucking stupid, you know that?” you said in such a fast pace.
I nodded.
“I’m tired of sorry’s.”
“I know you are,” I replied.
You looked away from me. I thought you were going to leave, but you didn’t. I wish our lives were different. I wish everything was different. I wish we were living in a different dimension—one where saying the truth is simple, and enough.
I let off a hopeless sigh. My heart and everything in my body was breaking apart. I guess that’s what happens when a person holds their feelings for someone for too long. I could no longer hide it. In a few days we would leave each other, we would find new friends in new places. And soon, you will find someone, someone you’ve been searching for your entire life and he will give you everything and he will sleep with you, have sex with you, cuddle with you and tell you that you’re the most beautiful woman on earth. You will love him for that. You will share your life with him and hold him tight. And when that happens, our friendship will be nothing more but a distant memory. It will only be a moment stolen away from time and space, taken away somewhere that nears the void, forgotten and abandoned. I wish that it would never go to that, but I thought that if the truth would at least salvage that from happening, then at least I should try.
“You want to hear what I really want to say? Okay,” I started, “I don’t know what I want to say but I want to say so much. I really want to. But fuck! I can’t find the words.” I wanted to cry, I was breathing too hard and I felt that I was suffocating. “And I don’t think I could ever find the words, but I’ll try—because for the first time in my life, I don’t want to be forgotten.”
Those words got your attention and you turned towards me. Your eyes were so pure and filled with anticipation.
“I love you, okay? I really do. I never thought that it would happen but it did. Every piece of my being argued against it. I told myself that it wasn’t true. That it was a lie. Because I’m afraid of being alone. But that’s not the case. I found my friends, I found people who really cared for me, I found so much and I knew that I would never be alone, and yet I still looked for you, I still yearned for you. I’ve learned so much from you and I don’t know how I would ever repay you for that. I wish that I could be with you, but I just can’t.”
I felt warm tears stroke my face. I was no longer the same man from before. I felt like a boy who’s on the brink of losing everything. I had lost myself in your eyes, in the way you looked at me. I was lost in the moment. Time had stopped for us, the universe and the world was observing us.
“I can’t be with you because I’m not the man you deserve. And you know what? It would hurt so much to hear to argue against that. Because I know you would say that we were meant for each other. I am not the person who you think I am, hell, I’m not even the person that my friends or family think I am. I’m a stranger, a wanderer, a person who can’t even tell if he’s right or wrong. I’m a walking contradiction and I’m fine with that, but I’m pretty sure the world is not. The only time that I would be with you is the time when we’re so far away from this place. But I know that would never happen. I am so in love with you, but I know that the universe would implode if we end up together. I am so in love with you, but I know that it would hurt so much if we end up together.”
I sighed and wiped away my tears, “I am so in love with you.”
I had lost all those words. I could not believe it that I had mustered all of that courage to say those words. I had tears running down my cheek. A single tear had run down from yours. You were as lost as I was. There was silence around us. After a while you bit your lip as if you wanted to say something, but stopped yourself from saying it. You then turned around and walked back towards the party. I watched you as you walked away, slowly disappearing in the distance, your figure turning to be something else, then nothing. I knew I had lost you already. I wanted that, but I guess I never prepared myself fully.
I sat with my friends and I continued to laugh with them and act like nothing ever happened. I would casually glance to the place where you were and I could see that you were also looking for me. We had hid that small reality within us and I’m happy for that.
In the end, everyone had started to stand up and look for someone to dance with.
“I’m finally going to get laid!” James shouted, “oh yeah!”
The boys on our table laughed, and the girls shook their heads disapprovingly. I sat down in my chair and watched everyone else dance. I looked at you as you danced alongside the king of prom night. I looked at you as you smiled ever so beautifully at him. I looked at you as you talked to him and laughed with him. I looked at you as you are slowly taken away from me.
There’s something about him that you love so much. He is a man of kindness, of smiles, of intelligence; he is the man that I’ll never be and I am jealous of him. If only I could take you away back from him I would, but I had chosen differently during that time. Years later I would regret my decision because I would be picking up pieces from a broken past that I am cursed to remember; the past in where during that night when you were taken away from me, I didn’t choose to fight back, instead, I chose the girl who was behind me, the one who touched my shoulder and partly my soul with a smile that would daze even the strongest of men.
“Hey,” she said with an alluring smile. Veronica had always this amazing and innocent smile.
“Want to dance?” she asked me.
And just like a vow, I said yes to her. From that moment on, our ways were separated, never bounded to be brought back together, because I chose her and you chose him and we never looked back from that moment on then.
There are certain predetermined moments in our lives we could never take back even if we wanted to. And sometimes, even love seems to be the fog in our eyes that covers our vision, creating a false reality in where we find clarity in other people. If I could ever turn back time, I would keep rewinding those small moments in my life when we had each other. I would never change a single part of it. Because I would always know that a part of you will always live within me. A part of you will always be a part of me.
So why are we in this hotel room at 4am in the morning drinking cheap wine and laughing as if we’re lovers? Why are we stealing time? Why are we away from the people who love us?
Everyone wear masks. I do, and you do too. Masks that cover our real faces, the real us. No one ever knew us. Not our friends, not our parents, no one. We were both strangers to them. That is why we are in this hotel room together, sharing each other’s warmth and company. We are the only two people in the world because no one else mattered.
But I would kiss you lightly and it would hurt. I would touch your curves and know that it would never be mine. I would make love to you and know that we would be far away from each other the next day. But you know what? That’s alright. I don’t care if we’re meant to hide from the rest of the world and from the eyes of god like some kind of universal fugitives, I don’t care if the whole universe would dissipate and die around us if we spend nights like this together, I don’t care if I would get crucified and be judged amongst the people of the world because I let these things happen around us. As long as time exists, we will be stealing from it. As long as we exist we will spend some of it existing together as one. As long as I am here with you, everything else doesn’t matter.
Everything that is not us is nothing more but fading echoes in the wind, waiting to be heard, but will always be ignored. Just like the two of us to the rest of the world.