Hesperus

I was in the forest in the bathtub full of glass. 

My chest is sticky under the splinters, partly from wine partly from the blood, and I'm not surprised to see the familial pines and oaks around me. I knew that would happen. After a dozen tries you lose last bits of hope, but every time something is pushing me to believe that maybe this time will work. There is no hope among the trees except for rippling sun. The woods are not so thick there, you can see a meadow nearby if you squint. I never do. 

I move my legs gently. It's a painful thing to do with the body numb from sleep and piercing pressure of pointy edges all around. I still manage to sleep like that, though. Eventually, I'll have to stand up, but for now, I want to breathe. 

Looking above, there's nothing new to see there. No-one to see. I know he can't be there. By the end of the fifth year, it was destined to fail. I know and I can't let go. 

I try, and it seems nothing comes out of this deadly spa-procedure. You have to find a vessel big enough to store you in and somehow transport it in the middle of the forest. Then it's time to dig up its legs into the forest floor so that this thing won't turn around in the night and trap you underneath. It takes about six full-length mirrors to full the bottom and covers him with its pitchy blanket. It's painful as it is, laying under the shatters, but then you have to turn on the electrical current. That's what was challenging. Thought, I got used to it years ago, several months after I constructed my first machine. 

It sounds mortally dangerous and dumb. I wouldn't have done this if I had other options. He left me only hastily scribbled instructions in the old sketchbook. I use what I can, my lilac-blue skin tingling under the waves of lightning. Every time I hope to wake up. I do in the same old bathtub I lost my conscience and start again. This deadly spa-procedure will kill me someday. I try not to think about it. 

I crave to think about Helios more, about other ways to see him, catching a glimpse of a shadow in the hallways we occupied together like a wildfire swallows the house and chokes anyone who tries to enter. I can't forget it. I don't want to. But apparently, Helios can. 

Mine isn't an ordinary story or I would like to think so. I don't know till this day, cold and scared inside the barbed tomb I create for myself if what he ever told me was true. Then again, there was nothing certain about him. Helios was like the sun he was named after, blinding you with such light you had no other choice but close your eyes to a lot of things. Now come think about it I felt him more than I ever saw him.

I knew something was askew about that boy since the first time I noticed him: sitting near the playground of five-year-old and surveying them as if he was the king watching over his precious cattle. By closer assessment, he turned to be even more haughty and arrogant and this should push you off, not draw in. His name was unusual along with his appearance, not matching it in the slightest. He was glowing despite his pitch-black hair and coal eyes. And there was his mother, the angriest bitch I have ever known in my life. Tall and lean, looking deadly like a spear in a warrior's hand and with a face in a burning forest fire of red hair. She reproached me for staring at her precious boy alone. I still wonder how I happened to spend all these years near their family, especially after what I learnt.

She knew, of course. I came to believe she knew from the start.

There was something about her, alien and too unacquainted to ever wrap your little human mind around it. Her husband wasn't better. Theia and Cronos. The pair of them was intimidating even at the age of twenty, imagine what it was like at five. Helios used to reassure me that his parents were very nice people, but he thought them to be a bit overboard.

'The rest of us are not that…' he murmured to me after one particularly dark insult from his mother.

'Angry,' I interrupted. 'I hoped so.'

 He laughed then, showing his delicate teeth like a lion would frighten a little cub away from his prey. I never left him, though. How could I ever leave him?

The two of us were glued together in a sense no-one could comprehend. Most of the time I couldn't. Helios seemed to be only amused by it. Every time we dined under that huge tree in his backyard or watched movies as I struggled to keep my clammy hand pressed to my side, looking at him, gaping at him until my chest hurt, he was always the one to reach for me. He did a lot of things first since that time on the playground where with a serious look he put down his toy plane and said, 'You're gonna be my companion for life.'

I remember everything in flashes after playing, talking, singing and some playing again. Our games at fifteen were different from our games at five, of course. There were new troubles, new acquittances, even a couple of new girls. We were growing, and in this momentum our lives were tangled like roots of small trees, emerging from the ground so tightly pressed together that their shape deformed to match the other's form. Through these years we softened and melted into that one being so indistinguishably whole that five years of bloody pagan-styled ritual can't cut him out of me.

Time burned too quick for me to notice, I can't imagine what a blink of an eye it was for him.

I don't remember a lot of details these days — I reminisced them away. Drank them out until there was nothing left. Mine mind-wiped him away almost completely, but I remember that habitual tedious story of Theia's word by word. With their weird names, she laughed it out.

'Oh, our family is simply obsessed with mythology. You know, all these striking gods' names. After several generations of Gaias and Oedipuses, it's already a tradition. We're greeks by the way.' She told that on every dinner she hosted and even as a teenager I thought it to be a bit odd. Why even bother? Yes, you have quirky names, so what? There were people named Kevin or John, for god's sake. How is this any better? And they never explained, pretending to even like that or brush this off like a bothering fly. Their mother was not very creative or their father was way too traditional. We don't choose our names to have to protect them like this. It seems she did.

I teased Helios mercilessly that night: about greek roots and weird family traditions; until him crawling into the bed to join me. He said, 'She's lying.' 

I blinked at him several times, 'What do you mean she's lying? I can't remember the exact number of times she told this story and you always agreed.'

'I lied, too,' he shrugged. And I have no idea why I couldn't stop swallowing him with my eyes. Was it because he lied to me or because he existed? 

I cleared my throat then, and Helios turned to face me like a deer wound turn to a car in the middle of the road.

'And why is that?'

Then he told me. Everything. 

Helios started from the creation of stars, he'd seen it, he told me and I thought he was mocking me. It turned out he didn't. Or at least he believed it himself. They are not quite humans, he said, not on that step of evolution, travelling along time, no worries of death in their minds. There were rules, of course, in places they came from as well as punishments. But not so severe as one would have thought. It was mostly known to us as ancient gods. He was one of them. His parents, too. They needed to move along soon, and that's why he decided to tell me. Not to say goodbye, but to invite me to come along. 

Swallowing thickly he offered me the world and I laughed at him. I laughed the whole part of him getting angry and springing from the bed, roaming his shelves in search of a notebook with sketches of travelling. I laughed until I teared up and all the way through the part of combining a certain amount of energy in one vessel and putting yourself inside it; then having something similar to the black hole the time would pop up and ingest you in. By the time Helios was raging wet-eyed, I almost suffocated.

I came home that night angry and somewhat embarrassed. 

The next day I woke up to find the world without him pallid and clammy.

I believed slowly. It took me six months to accept the possibility of it all being true. It took me half a year to bring myself to go through Helios' room in his empty house. It took me another two years to figure out how to follow instructions from his notebook. I found the place for the experiment and tried sitting in the bath for ah hour every day until my whole body was more lilac than pink. Then I tried three, six, twelve hours in a raw before they turned into night. I told myself it would work if I was more committed to the cause and increased the electric discharge. I lived there inside the woods, every morning taking off the glass from my hands and feet. I existed with one thin dream of success or Helios finally returning to fetch me and bring somewhere he belonged and I didn't. I didn't care about his world at this point. My soul, formed around his as a vine would crawl around a tree, had no support now, hollow and dry it was about to collapse. I missed him, I did, even though after the third year I forgot the colour of his eyes.

I continued until I forget the sound of his voice, too. Until I was convinced he had never existed at all. I took a break then for several months or so. By the end of August, I came crawling back to the thicket like a loyal dog. 

I perform my duties as one for the last ten years, every time-altering something small in an attempt to change the hollow outcome. It stays the same. I stay in the bathtub. I cling to anything I can remember, but the more I do, the more blurry he gets. I dream of it: there I am a huge tree tilting my crown toward a white fog while my clumsy branches can never catch it. I weep there, filling the face of the field with dried riverbeds. And every evening I know the next morning I will wake up crying in the middle of a forest, and at dawn I know I will crawl into the grass and blood and glass, for a face I can't even remember anymore.