Seven Mornings
Seven Mornings
Rating: R
Author's note: And old story that was workshopped during one of my Creative Writing classes. Features homosexual content, but you knew that already.
1)
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
Something catches Charlie’s eye. About four meters from where he and Lewis are standing-resting by a wall with posters of that rising shampoo commercial model with shiny black hair and buck teeth- is a black cat with bald patches and a bloody right eye. The cat jumps, startled by a tricycle noisily zipping past. The now drenched cat meows irritably and scurries away from its humble home of newspapers and rotting vegetables, leaving specks of blood-rain on the street.
It is a fitting image. He almost smiles until he notices that the edges of his jeans are drenched and heavy as well, and Lewis is staring at him with this somber look that does not suit his face at all.
“I will never regret what we had.”
Charlie wants to laugh at his words but he can’t, not when Lewis looks so serious, not when his jeans feel absolutely disgusting. He ought to cry but he can’t. The whole situation is just too ridiculous.
“It’s never too late to be friends.”
Charlie decides it's the perfect time to walk far, far, and away before he hurts someone, because he is not hearing what he thinks he’s hearing, and this will not change his life. He laughs awkwardly and moves briskly, waiting for Lewis to grab his arm and pull him back.
Thirty minutes later he is still walking away.
2)
The first thing Charlie thinks about is that he should be doing something else other than sitting around, trying to feel. As soon as he finishes cleaning up the table he sifts through the daily newspaper, tossing the other sections away, reads the headlines and the local and international news. He always checks the newspaper; it’s a daily habit. Today the news is a sea of large, black letters, unusual yet unrecognizable. He blinks, and the words become clearer, bigger than the paper even, but he still cannot read them. He usually saved the Sports and Lifestyle sections for Lewis, and they read the comic strips together. He scowls; would not do to suddenly bawl in his cup of cheap coffee.
His mother had been giving him worried looks from across the table. “You have not been eating very well.”
“I’m on a diet, ma.”
“Yesterday, I told you I left some nilagang baka on the table, asked you to reheat it when you come home from work. This morning, it was still there.”
There were tired lines beside her eyes, on her forehead. He wonders if it was his fault, but did he not just help with the household chores?
Charlie shifts his attention to the television. Approximately a hundred people have died because of a flood, says the beaming broadcaster of a night-time news show. A politician has disappeared, hiding from the authorities due to a scandalous highway scam. Angel Locsin is very excited to be in a new teleserye, which she promises to be different from the others, with more unexpected plot twists and a bunch of old, dying stars vying hard for comebacks.
“Danny came over yesterday. He asked me how you were. He’s a good friend, always looking after you, even after you went to different colleges.”
“Why did he show up all of a sudden? He could always just text me.”
“You’re always busy, and you only come home on weekends. He must have heard from your Tita Elia that you’ve been home for quite a while now.” There was the question, hidden beneath careful words and his mother’s constant fumbling with the remote control.
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” Charlie says to appease her, and mostly to end the conversation. He suspects she knows; he did get his smarts from her, after all.
When he walks to his desk the laptop says something else. Google informs him that terrorists are on the loose, that the new president’s polls dropped ten percent, and tells him to look at sexy Asian girls in school uniforms. Charlie thinks about hunger, the war on the other side of the world, the street kids with dirty fingernails. He feels sick, despicable, misshapen because does not care. He struggles with sympathy and the human will, but they do not come. Their world is too big, and the world he’s in is not as huge, as impressing, and there are no agencies in his world that can give him aid, no written laws to violate.
His mother walks up behind him and puts a hand on his back, rubbing his neck. He leans his head back and looks up at her. Her eyes are soft, pleading.
“I’m going back to bed. I don’t feel too well, ma.”
“I’ll wake you up when lunch is ready.” His mother replies, and lets go of him.
He switches his laptop off and goes back to his old bedroom, nice and familiar. Sleep comes easy after that.
3)
“The poets were telling the truth.”
It’s a Monday evening and Charlie has to teach a group of wannabe poets tomorrow, but here he is, waltzing around his own bedroom, feeling the earth shake. His breath reeks of Gran Matador. Good old Danny tightens his grip on Charlie’s shoulders, preventing him from falling over. Danny’s grown a few inches taller, if that’s possible, and his grip is firm. Charlie tries to look at him, to see if his face has changed, but his vision is strangely out of focus.
“Oh god, it’s a good thing I came over. Charlie-“
Charlie scrabbles at Danny’s shoulders, wanting to stand, but his strength fails him. “Danny, Danny. That thing Hafez kept on talking about. Goran Simic. Pablo Neruda, that bitch. That dead idiot who wrote about strawberries being pushed on a fucking mountain. Faggots. It’s real. It’s fucking real. And you know what sucks so bad? It can happen to anyone. That’s right. Those stupid, sappy movies can happen to you. Poets, songwriters, the fucking saints, they think they’re the only ones who’ve been through everything. But you’ll go through everything they say anyway. It’ll happen anyway. They just write whatever screws other people up, and sometimes they get paid for it, and then you see their names in text books and in papers. I hope they die, but they’re dead. Fuck. You know what, I have a theory. We are all seriously fucked. We're doomed.”
Danny pushes him gently on the bed. “I never know what you’re talking about.” He says softly. Charlie turns to his side, not wanting Danny to see him like this. His friend starts rubbing a hand on his back, and he shudders. “But I know you. Everything will be okay.”
Charlie hears himself apologize, because really, he’s the smart one but now he’s a kid all over again, vomiting in buckets, knocking over books and desk lamps, hungry for attention.
“Go to sleep.” Danny presses. “Everything will be better tomorrow.”
4)
Charlie wakes up, feeling like he ought to die. It’s the end of the world. He’s supposed to die, because Lewis and he, oh they were going to be gods, they were going to rain hail down from heaven and rock the house, but Lewis broke it off and they were no more. He’s painfully aware of how normal his breathing sounds, how his alarm clock reminds him that it’ll be shrieking in three minutes, how sticky his left cheek feels because rests on a puddle of drool.
It is cruel and inhuman punishment, Charlie thinks, to breathe air, so he stops.
His cell phone vibrates suddenly, and his body betrays him.
“Shit,” he says, groping for his cellphone underneath his pillow. Another text from Danny, inviting him for a jogging session at the newly-opened park near their subdivision. He doesn’t have time for that. Dropping the cellphone, he drops his head back on the pillow, exhaling loudly, spreading his arms across the duvet.
The left side of the bed feels cold so he run his hand over the thick blankets, warming it. His chest aches and he feels his muscles tighten, starting from the toes of his feet-tense and curling-until the rest of him follows. The tension turns into warmth and urgency, exciting him. He’s horny. And strangely enough, he’s alive.
What he needs is a fuck, Charlie thinks. He touches himself, tentatively, and his cock twitches. Soon his strokes are fast and efficient. He does not think about anyone -- only two large, calloused hands stroking his cock, just the way he likes it -- and there is no need to dwell on unnecessary details. Temporary delight, only it hurts, so he closes his eyes, wishes for the orgasm to never arrive, and relies on his lonely creativity.
5)
Charlie shows up on Danny’s doorstep, carrying a dusty bottle of rum that he liberated from the equally dusty and abandoned cupboard in their house.
“It’s eight in the morning.” Danny says slowly. He sounds more amused than annoyed. Charlie sighs inwardly, relieved. He raises the bottle with a sheepish look.
“I promise I won’t throw up on your shoes again.”
“Don’t worry; I’m wearing my Dad’s old rubber shoes right now.” Danny laughs. This morning Charlie’s eyes are working; he can see Danny’s sleep-mussed hair sticking out in different directions, his tiny eyes, his ready smile. He’s wearing his pajamas, all soft and loose and-
“Your shirt has five holes in it.” Charlie points out, surprised at his own accuracy.
Danny grins and sticks a finger in a hole on the hem of his shirt, wiggling it. “Best shirt I have.”
He snickers and Charlie laughs - loud and true - and then his jaw aches from the sudden movement. He stops abruptly, feeling guilty and not knowing why. Danny catches this and frowns.
He leans back on the doorframe, looking grave. “There are rules before you can enter my house, is that okay with you? We’re going to drink, but we’re also going to talk. You’re going to tell me why you’re back here, why you haven’t been really talking, and why you’ve been locking yourself up in your room when you’re not at work.”
“It’s nothing major, really. I’m just asleep most of the time.”
“Why? Are you tired? Stressed?”
“…When I’m asleep,” Charlie explains, so softly that Danny has to lean forward to listen, “I don’t dream about him.”
Danny pushes the door open and walks back to the living room, feet quietly moving against the wooden floorboards. “Come in. And close the door behind you.”
6)
Charlie spends his mornings jogging along the new park with Danny. There are at least a dozen girls and boys in bikes who nearly run over him every time, and a million stray cats living beneath the santan bushes. When Charlie and Danny sit on the park benches to eat their snacks the cats swarm around them, meowing their hunger. Charlie always gives them a share of his food, while Danny brings a few crackers especially for them.
Charlie and Danny also discovered that there is an ancient-looking bookshop at the end of Winston Drive, right before the road meets with gnarly-looking trees, menacing grass, and a sign that probably said KEEP OUT but is now decorated with spray-painted quotations from a dead person. There are no self-help books and poetry anthologies in the store that remind Charlie of him, mostly laughable romances, stories of aliens in other planets, tales for children, and tales that are written for teenagers but are actually loaded with sexual intent. The owner is a crabby old man, but he doesn’t really talk that much, so Charlie usually grabs a book at random and leafs through the old, coffee-colored pages. He loves pressing his nose against them; inhaling the words as if he spoke to them in their tongue. Danny loves teasing him about it.
There are seven thick books stacked on Charlie’s bed, all from the bookshop. He reads them before going to bed, and proceeds to dream of fairytale murders, of younger years and a hand on his back, perfect and warm.
*
When Danny tells Charlie that he loves him, Charlie says it doesn’t work that way, that he has finally learned to live again and it is just too unbearable to live for another person, to care and die for one.
Danny looks at him straight in the eye. “Just so you know.”
Charlie feels like hitting him. “Am I supposed to say something back?”
“Not really,” Danny smiles sadly.
Charlie does not say anything. Danny is too nice, too patient, and Charlie realizes that he has grown used to seeing him every day, wondering when it became necessary. Most important of all, he knows that Danny will never take his life the way Lewis owned his; no matter how much he wants it.
Yet Charlie is going to give it to him, anyway. He will read the newspapers and the columns and the ads, and all the stories in the bookshop before the pages crumble with time; he will smile and laugh and forget the jaw-hurt. Charlie will live and die a thousand times in a span of eighty years; he will stop himself from breathing at night and then wake up the next day; and in the seventh morning of his life, he will love again.
Rating: R
Author's note: And old story that was workshopped during one of my Creative Writing classes. Features homosexual content, but you knew that already.
1)
“It’s not you, it’s me.”
Something catches Charlie’s eye. About four meters from where he and Lewis are standing-resting by a wall with posters of that rising shampoo commercial model with shiny black hair and buck teeth- is a black cat with bald patches and a bloody right eye. The cat jumps, startled by a tricycle noisily zipping past. The now drenched cat meows irritably and scurries away from its humble home of newspapers and rotting vegetables, leaving specks of blood-rain on the street.
It is a fitting image. He almost smiles until he notices that the edges of his jeans are drenched and heavy as well, and Lewis is staring at him with this somber look that does not suit his face at all.
“I will never regret what we had.”
Charlie wants to laugh at his words but he can’t, not when Lewis looks so serious, not when his jeans feel absolutely disgusting. He ought to cry but he can’t. The whole situation is just too ridiculous.
“It’s never too late to be friends.”
Charlie decides it's the perfect time to walk far, far, and away before he hurts someone, because he is not hearing what he thinks he’s hearing, and this will not change his life. He laughs awkwardly and moves briskly, waiting for Lewis to grab his arm and pull him back.
Thirty minutes later he is still walking away.
2)
The first thing Charlie thinks about is that he should be doing something else other than sitting around, trying to feel. As soon as he finishes cleaning up the table he sifts through the daily newspaper, tossing the other sections away, reads the headlines and the local and international news. He always checks the newspaper; it’s a daily habit. Today the news is a sea of large, black letters, unusual yet unrecognizable. He blinks, and the words become clearer, bigger than the paper even, but he still cannot read them. He usually saved the Sports and Lifestyle sections for Lewis, and they read the comic strips together. He scowls; would not do to suddenly bawl in his cup of cheap coffee.
His mother had been giving him worried looks from across the table. “You have not been eating very well.”
“I’m on a diet, ma.”
“Yesterday, I told you I left some nilagang baka on the table, asked you to reheat it when you come home from work. This morning, it was still there.”
There were tired lines beside her eyes, on her forehead. He wonders if it was his fault, but did he not just help with the household chores?
Charlie shifts his attention to the television. Approximately a hundred people have died because of a flood, says the beaming broadcaster of a night-time news show. A politician has disappeared, hiding from the authorities due to a scandalous highway scam. Angel Locsin is very excited to be in a new teleserye, which she promises to be different from the others, with more unexpected plot twists and a bunch of old, dying stars vying hard for comebacks.
“Danny came over yesterday. He asked me how you were. He’s a good friend, always looking after you, even after you went to different colleges.”
“Why did he show up all of a sudden? He could always just text me.”
“You’re always busy, and you only come home on weekends. He must have heard from your Tita Elia that you’ve been home for quite a while now.” There was the question, hidden beneath careful words and his mother’s constant fumbling with the remote control.
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow.” Charlie says to appease her, and mostly to end the conversation. He suspects she knows; he did get his smarts from her, after all.
When he walks to his desk the laptop says something else. Google informs him that terrorists are on the loose, that the new president’s polls dropped ten percent, and tells him to look at sexy Asian girls in school uniforms. Charlie thinks about hunger, the war on the other side of the world, the street kids with dirty fingernails. He feels sick, despicable, misshapen because does not care. He struggles with sympathy and the human will, but they do not come. Their world is too big, and the world he’s in is not as huge, as impressing, and there are no agencies in his world that can give him aid, no written laws to violate.
His mother walks up behind him and puts a hand on his back, rubbing his neck. He leans his head back and looks up at her. Her eyes are soft, pleading.
“I’m going back to bed. I don’t feel too well, ma.”
“I’ll wake you up when lunch is ready.” His mother replies, and lets go of him.
He switches his laptop off and goes back to his old bedroom, nice and familiar. Sleep comes easy after that.
3)
“The poets were telling the truth.”
It’s a Monday evening and Charlie has to teach a group of wannabe poets tomorrow, but here he is, waltzing around his own bedroom, feeling the earth shake. His breath reeks of Gran Matador. Good old Danny tightens his grip on Charlie’s shoulders, preventing him from falling over. Danny’s grown a few inches taller, if that’s possible, and his grip is firm. Charlie tries to look at him, to see if his face has changed, but his vision is strangely out of focus.
“Oh god, it’s a good thing I came over. Charlie-“
Charlie scrabbles at Danny’s shoulders, wanting to stand, but his strength fails him. “Danny, Danny. That thing Hafez kept on talking about. Goran Simic. Pablo Neruda, that bitch. That dead idiot who wrote about strawberries being pushed on a fucking mountain. Faggots. It’s real. It’s fucking real. And you know what sucks so bad? It can happen to anyone. That’s right. Those stupid, sappy movies can happen to you. Poets, songwriters, the fucking saints, they think they’re the only ones who’ve been through everything. But you’ll go through everything they say anyway. It’ll happen anyway. They just write whatever screws other people up, and sometimes they get paid for it, and then you see their names in text books and in papers. I hope they die, but they’re dead. Fuck. You know what, I have a theory. We are all seriously fucked. We're doomed.”
Danny pushes him gently on the bed. “I never know what you’re talking about.” He says softly. Charlie turns to his side, not wanting Danny to see him like this. His friend starts rubbing a hand on his back, and he shudders. “But I know you. Everything will be okay.”
Charlie hears himself apologize, because really, he’s the smart one but now he’s a kid all over again, vomiting in buckets, knocking over books and desk lamps, hungry for attention.
“Go to sleep.” Danny presses. “Everything will be better tomorrow.”
4)
Charlie wakes up, feeling like he ought to die. It’s the end of the world. He’s supposed to die, because Lewis and he, oh they were going to be gods, they were going to rain hail down from heaven and rock the house, but Lewis broke it off and they were no more. He’s painfully aware of how normal his breathing sounds, how his alarm clock reminds him that it’ll be shrieking in three minutes, how sticky his left cheek feels because rests on a puddle of drool.
It is cruel and inhuman punishment, Charlie thinks, to breathe air, so he stops.
His cell phone vibrates suddenly, and his body betrays him.
“Shit,” he says, groping for his cellphone underneath his pillow. Another text from Danny, inviting him for a jogging session at the newly-opened park near their subdivision. He doesn’t have time for that. Dropping the cellphone, he drops his head back on the pillow, exhaling loudly, spreading his arms across the duvet.
The left side of the bed feels cold so he run his hand over the thick blankets, warming it. His chest aches and he feels his muscles tighten, starting from the toes of his feet-tense and curling-until the rest of him follows. The tension turns into warmth and urgency, exciting him. He’s horny. And strangely enough, he’s alive.
What he needs is a fuck, Charlie thinks. He touches himself, tentatively, and his cock twitches. Soon his strokes are fast and efficient. He does not think about anyone -- only two large, calloused hands stroking his cock, just the way he likes it -- and there is no need to dwell on unnecessary details. Temporary delight, only it hurts, so he closes his eyes, wishes for the orgasm to never arrive, and relies on his lonely creativity.
5)
Charlie shows up on Danny’s doorstep, carrying a dusty bottle of rum that he liberated from the equally dusty and abandoned cupboard in their house.
“It’s eight in the morning.” Danny says slowly. He sounds more amused than annoyed. Charlie sighs inwardly, relieved. He raises the bottle with a sheepish look.
“I promise I won’t throw up on your shoes again.”
“Don’t worry; I’m wearing my Dad’s old rubber shoes right now.” Danny laughs. This morning Charlie’s eyes are working; he can see Danny’s sleep-mussed hair sticking out in different directions, his tiny eyes, his ready smile. He’s wearing his pajamas, all soft and loose and-
“Your shirt has five holes in it.” Charlie points out, surprised at his own accuracy.
Danny grins and sticks a finger in a hole on the hem of his shirt, wiggling it. “Best shirt I have.”
He snickers and Charlie laughs - loud and true - and then his jaw aches from the sudden movement. He stops abruptly, feeling guilty and not knowing why. Danny catches this and frowns.
He leans back on the doorframe, looking grave. “There are rules before you can enter my house, is that okay with you? We’re going to drink, but we’re also going to talk. You’re going to tell me why you’re back here, why you haven’t been really talking, and why you’ve been locking yourself up in your room when you’re not at work.”
“It’s nothing major, really. I’m just asleep most of the time.”
“Why? Are you tired? Stressed?”
“…When I’m asleep,” Charlie explains, so softly that Danny has to lean forward to listen, “I don’t dream about him.”
Danny pushes the door open and walks back to the living room, feet quietly moving against the wooden floorboards. “Come in. And close the door behind you.”
6)
Charlie spends his mornings jogging along the new park with Danny. There are at least a dozen girls and boys in bikes who nearly run over him every time, and a million stray cats living beneath the santan bushes. When Charlie and Danny sit on the park benches to eat their snacks the cats swarm around them, meowing their hunger. Charlie always gives them a share of his food, while Danny brings a few crackers especially for them.
Charlie and Danny also discovered that there is an ancient-looking bookshop at the end of Winston Drive, right before the road meets with gnarly-looking trees, menacing grass, and a sign that probably said KEEP OUT but is now decorated with spray-painted quotations from a dead person. There are no self-help books and poetry anthologies in the store that remind Charlie of him, mostly laughable romances, stories of aliens in other planets, tales for children, and tales that are written for teenagers but are actually loaded with sexual intent. The owner is a crabby old man, but he doesn’t really talk that much, so Charlie usually grabs a book at random and leafs through the old, coffee-colored pages. He loves pressing his nose against them; inhaling the words as if he spoke to them in their tongue. Danny loves teasing him about it.
There are seven thick books stacked on Charlie’s bed, all from the bookshop. He reads them before going to bed, and proceeds to dream of fairytale murders, of younger years and a hand on his back, perfect and warm.
*
When Danny tells Charlie that he loves him, Charlie says it doesn’t work that way, that he has finally learned to live again and it is just too unbearable to live for another person, to care and die for one.
Danny looks at him straight in the eye. “Just so you know.”
Charlie feels like hitting him. “Am I supposed to say something back?”
“Not really,” Danny smiles sadly.
Charlie does not say anything. Danny is too nice, too patient, and Charlie realizes that he has grown used to seeing him every day, wondering when it became necessary. Most important of all, he knows that Danny will never take his life the way Lewis owned his; no matter how much he wants it.
Yet Charlie is going to give it to him, anyway. He will read the newspapers and the columns and the ads, and all the stories in the bookshop before the pages crumble with time; he will smile and laugh and forget the jaw-hurt. Charlie will live and die a thousand times in a span of eighty years; he will stop himself from breathing at night and then wake up the next day; and in the seventh morning of his life, he will love again.