chase after belief

 To whoever believes love to be foolish.

I believed in many things. My friends as much as my family said that it was my best trait, that that is what one would call an optimist. I did not think I was.

I did not believe in God, though I thought I would have actually been able to call myself an optimist if I had. I believed people could change and I believed I could not. The only thing changing was that rotten shell I was living in, the thing that peeled and twisted depending on which person I was with.

I did not believe in God and I did not think anyone had seen what was underneath that shell of mine. And that was a good thing. I didn’t think I could have borne even taking a closer look myself. I was as much a stranger to me than to anybody else.

I often thought that maybe the roots for that lay in my childhood, growing up as a theatre kid, spending my free time (all of it, really) living another person’s life, saying their words, laughing their laughs and thinking their thoughts. But maybe that was just a lazy excuse built upon cowardice to roam for a real reason. Maybe there was none, in the end.

I had come to a stark realization long before even my late adult years; that I was a blank slate of sorts, a clay made to be moulded into anything there could be, there had to be, that it had been so since my inception. I do not believe in destiny, though it might sound like it. I just never believed in an option different from my life as it was. I accepted this life until my twenty-ninth birthday. My life had been a performance… but for whom did I act, really?

What had been an internal battle first, became one clawing to my outer circles and all I could do was watch; My relationships were the first to fall, my performances on stage growing stale with each passing play. I became a no one. I was neither myself nor anyone other.

What I did have was Nic, my best friend and on the darkest and warmest of nights sometimes more. He saw as much of me as I saw of myself; which was not much but more than any other human being could have stated to see. As dramatic this sounds, he was the rock to my ever-flowing river, unyielding presence in the nights I wasn’t sure anymore which direction was the right to flow.

‘What is it that you’re chasing after?’ he had asked me one summer night, laying on my bed with his feet on the bed post, cigarette lazily jumping with his movement of lips. I had looked at him then and remained silent. I had never considered myself chasing after anything. ’You should find something.’ he had said, matter-of-factly. ‘Makes life much more desirable, trust me.’

I had asked him what it was that he was chasing after and he had told me that in that moment, it was me, and I had rolled my eyes and we had made love.

A month after that I told him that it was myself I was chasing after; it had been the truest thing I had ever said. He asked me why that was.

‘I seem never to quite catch him.’

‘Let him go.’ he had said in his manner of casualness that I hated and adored so much. ‘If you have not found him yet then it shall not be.’

‘You don’t understand me at all.’

‘I fear I understand you more than you understand yourself.’

‘It is not difficult.’

He looked at me with such deep interest then that I felt embarrassed, almost invaded.

‘Why are you so terrified of questions?’

‘Why are you always so cryptic?’ I only gave back, getting up from the roof we were sitting on, dusting off my trousers. He did not move, hands behind his head as he looked up at me, curious amusement sparkling in his eyes.

‘Have you not read Oscar Wilde?’ he said a little louder as I exited the roof. ‘To define is to limit. I believe in that!’

He was smart, Nic. Smarter than me, I never denied that. But I was a coward and I was stubborn. I knew this much of myself even then. He wrote poetry and he wrote it about anything. Once he said his favorite poems were those that he wrote while watching me play. I believed it as much as I believed in God.

As a child I had always hated darkness. I would have checked underneath my bed every evening for monsters. As a teenager I would drown in the solitude the darkness revealed, the very presence of a shadow whispering how truly lonely I was became the real monster then. When you do not even have yourself, loneliness seizes to become a whole other definition.

The very indifference of this struck me only when I laid next to Nic for the first time, When I knew that he could write a poem about the gone-bad yoghurt in my fridge and who could look at the stars and tear open the very essence of eternity they held. Someone who carried out bees and hated the government, someone who did not fear to eventually tear at the shell and touch my heart where I had thought it to be rotten, if it existed at all.

‘Do you believe in love?’ I had come to have his questions be the highlight of my day, even if most of the time I could not answer him. It had been dark and I could not see his dimples appearing while talking, could not see his eyes softening as they sometimes did when looking at me (I had taken months and months to even let me believe this a possibility). I wondered often enough what was going on in his mind, so different from any other I had encountered, so captivating in his web of quotes and books and love and charm, memorizing quotes of several philosophers that I had never heard of before (but that I would secretly write down every time I did), for eternity in the mind that I pictured like an old library, smelling of classics and passion, never dying, ever.

I could not see him but I could feel his slow heart rate and his warm breath on my cheekbones, could smell the mix of coffee and cigarettes and sex when the moon dared to come out. I had whispered that I did, I supposed I did, at least.

‘Do you think that foolish?’

I had not answered him because I had never heard his voice go so fragile.

‘I think it is foolish not to.’ I had answered. ‘I would not believe in love if you would not have believed in me.’

Nic was silent for at least an hour then and he had cried suddenly and I had tried to comfort him, though I did not think I did a very good job at it until later as he told me that I did and for the first time I believed him.

When he told me that night that he had a tumor and that it had spread and that there would no miracle be happening even if he had always praised them his whole life, I agreed with him that love in fact was foolish. It was a pact with your soul, every bit of it, a pact promising devastation.

Nic was an optimist and Nic was half of myself, so maybe I became an optimist there. I have The picture of Dorian Gray on my nightstand now every night and keep it as much a reminder to myself to not limit my very self as to Nic’s courage to ask questions until their answers make you anew.

He was the very essence of who I was and still am and everyday I smile because my soul became the shadow of a love poets could envy us for. Because every flinch, every beat of heart, every word I speak and thought I think is painted in the crimson ache of what once blossomed under his breath. Where people would say they lost themselves in parts they lost him, I can only say that I found myself in every part I found and lost him.

People tell me to move on from him but really what is left to me if my veins drew blood flawlessly, if my skin did not falter under every scar still lingering, if my heart did not throb with every word I read because once, he was to say it.

He was for whom I acted and he was for whom I dared to look beneath the many roles I played. For whom I lived even when he did not anymore.