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The streets are almost entirely dark, and you realize it’s the first time you’ve had a good look at the night sky since you left home. A lucky few of the brighter and larger points of light, like Venus and Sirius, could be seen from the school grounds—but even then, they were almost lost in the crepuscular sky, jaundiced from the abundance of light pollution. Here, in the aftermath, there are so many that you’re sure you’d die before you could count them all. It is clear; cloudless: you can see stars zip across the sky, dancing in your eye line in an endless moment of glory before they burn apart in the upper atmosphere. Briefly ablaze, and then gone forever.
It makes sense, you think, that generations of people passed down tales of gods, and creation, and destruction when confronted with all of this overhead. Not you, though: you’re not a religious person. You lose count around 55, your eyes finally going hazy from focusing too hard on one corner of the cosmos. Your vision goes dark as you squeeze your eyes shut, blinking the duskiness away. Inhale and start over from one. No one ever teaches you to believe in a god, so you don’t.
You don’t believe in a god, but you might believe in something that runs parallel; or, at the very least, adjacent. Believing in something tangible, something with a name, strikes you as too final, too decisive; you’ve always been better suited to piecing together scattered fragments, forgetting to punctuate incomplete sentences. The love letters you learned to write to yourself consisted of half of a scribbled word abandoned on a scrap of paper, aged and yellowing. You’re used to things like this; it makes sense to you that nothing is ever finished becoming. The house where you grew up, the one that smelled like the things you loved, but that never quite took a liking to your familiar shapes, was fraught with things half-lived: the dining set with one chair missing; the single mismatched wall in your bedroom that no one ever bothered to paint; the vacant picture frame—still nailed to the wall because no one ever got around to finding a photo to build a home there. You’ve never been fond of destinations or of endings; conclusions aren’t something you were taught to yearn for, so you settle for your half-baked beliefs in something nameless, something greater.
Another streak of light darts across the sky, and you lose count at 38. You don’t like endings. You don’t like that the music can crescendo and that the credits can roll, and That’s all, folks! and then there’s nothing more—as if you can so easily forget the things you’ve seen. There’s dried blood splattered on your shirt, and you keep running your thumb across the fabric like you could somehow sow the seeds of something haunted; like you might convince the seedling of the ghosts that you feel compelled to carry with you to drink, to sprout, to grow a forest inside the cavity of your chest. Like they should leave you with something, some other weight to carry.
And maybe you do believe in god, after all: the way that your world spins itself into something like an ongoing loop of tragedy, the beats of sadness so frequent that it’s borderline comedic, seems incompatible with something as fickle as entropy. It feels less like physics and more like design; like you can almost hear the playwright laughing on the other side of the curtain.
The executioner’s mouth twists, his lips caging in words that probably ring with tones of pity, and you hate it almost as much as you hate your role in this reprisal of a Grecian drama, this dance choreographed according to Murphy’s law. His eyes are heavy on you like the credits have long since ended, and the lights have flickered back on, and the screen has gone dark, and still: he sits there, the only person left in the theater, waiting for the show to continue. That’s all, folks!
When you lose count again—this time, at 23—you close your eyes, and you don’t open them again. It feels wrong, somehow, to gaze at something beautiful when there’s still blood caked beneath your fingernails. No one teaches you to believe in a god, so you don’t. But no one ever said that you need to find god—to understand what a prayer tastes like upon your lips, to revel in kisses of red-wine-turned-blood and absolution—before you can understand the weight of a sin.
If, while still in school, you’d ever gotten around to reading Shakespeare, you’d have thought to yourself that Lady Macbeth has it easy: sleepwalking to the sink, begging the soapy water to cleanse the single spot of blood that caresses the creases in her palm. What would she do in your shoes, you wonder, if she’d woken to the slippery, ceaseless slide of a stranger’s blood between her fingers, upon her wrists, all the way down her forearms; how late into the night would she have let the tap run, letting the water dye itself pink, spilling over the sides of the basin, pooling onto the floor around her bare feet? Would the sin have weighed less, you wonder, if you had been sleepwalking, too? The confirmation comes when you close your eyes and still see carnage: blood is still blood even when you choose not to see it.
This time, the executioner smiles, his lips curling around something like a secret. He tells you that you’re a mirror, that he sees himself reflected in the oasis of blood on your hands. You wonder if the sin would weigh less if you could unload it onto people who have blood under their fingernails, too, and even just that thought makes the sin even heavier, even sharper. The guilt sits atop your stomach, hovers like a buzzard waiting for the wounded creature to gasp its final breath and collapse on the side of the road. Something dead and dense coils in your gut, and the birds come flocking to the carnage, scavenging for scraps. Breath catches in your throat again, the blame threatening to smother you.
No one teaches you to believe in a god, but the steady hands of someone better than you have taught you to believe in forgiveness. The skin of your chest stretches tight over the fresh wound, and you find it is easy to forgive the executioner for slicing you open, for spilling your blood across the pavement. The words roll around on your tongue, but you don’t pray right now: it comes easily for you to forgive others. You worry that if you called upon a god to forgive you, they might actually do it: absolution is an easy feat for those who know how to admit atrocities in the dark. It’d be easy for you, too, if you could bring yourself to believe it was something you deserved.
The cold night air blows frost across your bare feet. A stray ember from the fire lands atop your skin, the brief glow burning you before extinguishing. Your shoes sit somewhere off to the side; you don’t pull your eyes away from the flame to find them because you already know that they’re still covered in someone else’s blood. Silence drapes itself across the space between you and the executioner until you break it to ask him why he allowed you to live. Because, he says, his eyes going soft around the edges like absolution, and nostalgia, and recognition: you’re important to people who are important to me.
Another star streaks across the night sky; your eyes keep finding new ways to flood, so it looks to you like a meteor shower, a barrage of blurry lights embarking across the canyon of the midnight canopy. You blink, and a tear carves a river bed across your cheeks. It doesn’t feel right to be looking at beautiful things.
Later that night, when the moon passes overhead and illuminates the three bodies beside you, the words at the tip of your tongue finally untangle themselves, and you do pray. You can see water vapor filling the air as their lungs empty with every breath; you can sense them moving in their sleep, can sense the hot blood running marathons through their veins. No one ever forgets how it feels to lose something: a presence that’s always there until, suddenly, it’s not. Your heart stutters in your chest like a phantom limb. You can’t ask your nameless god to forgive you, but you can ask them to spare everything else from becoming the wreckage left behind by your whirlwind.
When the sun rises, all four of you rise with it. The devil’s cruel voice shakes inside your skull, reminding you that this isn’t redemption, that there can be no redemption. His voice is like pinpricks, like tingles left behind on your cheek after a sharp slap: are you fool enough to believe in miracles?
The sun filters through the low-hanging clouds at the junction of heaven and earth, and the breath rattles in your lungs when you catch his blue eyes glinting in the creamsicle dawn. You don’t believe in miracles. You find yourself thanking god, anyways.
None of your dreams are ever the same as they used to be. Perhaps it’s because of age or experience; maybe it’s because of the devil that lives inside your skull; or perhaps—and most likely—it’s because the bulk of the nightmares happen while you’re still wide awake. When you do dream, though, it is rarely something good.
Your older brother—or rather, the man who claims to be your older brother—shifts his weight beside you, the quiet rustle of his clothing loud against the backdrop of a night that’s almost silent. The calm breaks every now and again: a shrill car alarm, a sudden scream, the shatter of glass. When the sky first began to darken hours prior, and those thousands of stars began to reveal themselves against the sky, you offered to take the first shift to watch for danger. The weight of your eyelids tried to coax you to slumber, but eventually conceded to a pulse that was too heavy, too outraged to quiet down for the night. You hear the rustling once again, shift your eyes to the figure beside you. The flickering light of a nearby streetlight glints off of your older brother’s wide-open eyes, scanning the horizon for shadows that lurk for a moment too long.
His arms are locked around his knees, elbows burning red where he digs his fingernails into flesh. It occurs to you that maybe he’s right, that you could perhaps be brothers after all: you see it in how he holds himself, a wary form that echoes your own haunting. Which of you would scream themselves awake, bathed in a cold sheen of sweat, you wonder, if either of you would ever let yourself sleep for long enough to dream?
The following morning, when the dark circles beneath his eyes are a shade darker and touch deeper than they were the previous day, you try to turn him loose. You’d like to pretend that it’s for his sake that you choose to release him from this mission so that he might go find greener pastures. The truth is uglier: you’re running out of space in your graveyard; you’re not sure if you can shelter another skeleton of someone you love. When you tell him that he can leave you, he pretends he doesn’t hear you. When you try the next day again, he turns on you sharply with wounded eyes—and you suppose that your graveyard will have to become a little bigger, will have to accommodate another person who thought it was wise to sink their roots into you.
If either of you let yourself have nightmares, yours would be about sinking beneath the weight of sin, the waves of blood; you think that his would be about collapsing beneath the weight of everyone he loves, of fracturing the foundation of a legacy. His eyes are sharp and wounded, and you can feel the size of the cross he bears. You swallow the offer of freedom back down your tattered throat, and the understanding that you come from a long line of martyrs lacerates like shards of glass—maybe the guilt is destined to eat you both from the inside.
(Even though you know the answer: later that night, you’ll ask him why he chooses to stay. He’ll keep his gaze aimed straight ahead, and in the faint light of a sliver of moon, you’ll catch only the glimpse of his smile painted in pearlescent light. Because, he’ll say, like you were foolish to even ask, that’s what older brothers are supposed to do, and you’ll discover that the only thing tougher to swallow than abandoned words is love.)
His name means blessing, and you find out firsthand how man fell prey to the original sin.
For a long time, you had embraced the paradox of sacrifice: choosing to bear the weight of living and the looming inevitability of death all at once. You can only breathe easy by naming yourself a martyr, by letting your blood give rise to greener pastures. It’s funny, you think, that you had once feared death: dying for others is a simple task that requires nothing more than an offering of blood and a peaceful parting smile. That cold fear of the unknown had left you the moment the devil planted himself inside your ribcage, replaced with something reassuring and unshakeable. But even this is taken from you: the solace snatched away from you by hands that somehow tremble while still being steady, with a touch that is endlessly kind.
He is the first person who believes you are capable of being gone too soon; he is the first person who wants you to breathe forever.
You want to be angry when he encourages your soul to persist; when he’s faced with a bitter choice and somehow chooses you. His name means blessing, and his gaze transforms your blood sacrifice into an explosion that causes collateral damage; your selflessness turns into selfishness; your solo act becomes a suicide pact. You wish you could be furious with his forgiveness—his blind absolution that precedes the sin itself—, but even this is an impossibility, for how could anyone stand to slap away hands that so graciously reach out to bear the burden themselves?
The city is silent and haunted with the ghosts— your ghosts—that you keep counting on your fingers. You lose count at the beginning, and at the middle, and at the end; and his forgiveness creeps up on you, snatching you back from the pit again, and again. The lump in your throat grows larger with every bite of spoonfed forgiveness: you’re important to the people who are important to me; that’s what older brothers are for; it is not your fault, it is not your fault, it is not your fault. It’s almost enough to make you choke.
(You wish to god, or whoever, that they would stop lightening the load; that they would let the cement gravestones build up and up inside of you, that your skeleton would finally crumble under the guilt of living and the weight of the dead. It almost does, sometimes: when the sun is still steeping beneath the horizon, and the surviving songbirds haven’t opened their throats to rejoice for a new day—a chorus of your dead, your wounded, crowd inside of you, composing a song so desperate that it knocks the air from your lungs, threatens to crush you. But there he is, every time: his hand upon your chest, finding the rhythm of your pulse, in the still dawn; if you were braver, you’d look him in the eyes, find a window into the soul that is poised to shower you in a kindness that is doomed to cannibalize itself; to cannibalize him. You keep your eyes closed: you’ve always hated endings.)
(You want to resent it. You built a monument for him in your throat, in your chest, and his compassion transformed it into a funeral pyre for two. You want to resent him for stealing your atonement, for making it his cross to bear. And in the in-between moments—before the twilight sky incites the moon, and the silence grows too thick to breathe; when both of you have yet to bleed or to draw blood—he pulls you close, grants you clemency with arms clinging to your shoulders, his face buried in your neck, painting apologies and acceptances on your flesh with his lips: and the only person you wind up resenting is yourself.)
You keep your eyes closed, your lashes heavy with shame. It feels wrong, still—to let yourself look at beautiful things.
His name means “blessing.” Your name means something like “permanence” and “benevolence”; if you weren’t so busy tempering your disgust, you might just find it in you to laugh.
Your life is a study on taking things in stride: you conquer the act of transformation, you defeat the permanence of death, you tame your flesh into something that hurts, then heals, then hardens. The devil inside of you sentences you to live, condemns your heart to continue beating, and beating, and beating beyond its judgment day; not even poison can kill you now, and yet things like love—like the immortal, relentless kindness that others insist on bestowing upon you—never become any easier to stomach.
Temperance is not learned in a single day, but you try to shy away from his touches, to spit up the kindness you’re so bad at swallowing; maybe you’ll stop flinching at the sight of split lips and fractured bones if you could love him a little less. And if he calls you a hypocrite, you can try to explain yourself to him, telling him that the devil has a ledger and an unbalanced debt, one that can only be paid for with his blood. He reaches out to you, anchors himself in the spaces between your fingers, and something thrums just beneath your skin like a thread waiting to snap, like a prophecy blooming into a promise, and your fingernails create little canyons in the give of your skin. Fear is not a new taste; it’s just so much worse—almost spoiled, almost rancid—when you feel it for someone else. You can try to tell him that your hands are not safe, that the blood in your veins isn’t wholly yours, but he will rage, and clip your wings, and tear down your funeral pyre to make space for his own right beside it. Together or not at all goes unsaid: neither of you has enough of yourselves left to grieve for the other.
At least you are cruel together: his name means blessing, and you damn him every time he breathes the same air as you.
His hands can’t quit that old habit of seeking you out, of grabbing onto any part of you that he can reach; your hands, despite your best efforts, make a habit of accepting his touch, of melting into the haven kept within his palm. You feel like a piece of ancient pottery, and it breaks your heart when he touches you. You wish he’d just let you fall onto the pavement, let the shards of aged clay scatter in a billion different directions, let you become dust at the mercy of the wind. You wish he’d never let you go.
(You still don’t pray very often: god doesn’t have a name, and it feels wrong to ask for guidance from someone you keep nameless. When you do pray, however, it’s not for you. Never for you. Instead, you pray for good omens; you pray for little moments of reprieve so that he might laugh; you pray that you go first, and that he’s lucky enough to forget about you, someday.)
Maybe you are a hypocrite: you’ll die for him as many times as it takes, as many times as he asks it of you. Part of you wishes that he would just ask so that you could rip the heart out of your chest again and be done with the whole thing; the other part of you knows—almost accepts—that he could never ask. When he tells you to be careful, his hand loose around your shirtsleeve and his eyes flitting around your face, unsure where to look, you’re certain once again: the bitter taste on the back of your tongue is not fear, but love. Being careful is not something you’re familiar with, and you wrap his shaking hand in your own, press a kiss to his knuckles, and swear that you will. The trembling in his fingers barely recedes, and you almost miss the ghost of a smile on his lips—but you see it out of the corner of your eye, and your heart falls into your stomach. You choke on the sourness but force yourself to keep it down: maybe it won’t hurt so bad if he could love you a little less.
(It’s not enough to stop you from praying, and the monument in your chest marches to a tempo of please, please, please. )
His name means blessing, and you see what all those people who have found something like faith love so much about confessionals. Guilt is heavy, and fear is heavier, and love is heaviest of all. You want his face to be the last thing you see before you die. You want him to never have to look at you ever again.
You don’t know what you want these days. But:
His sister blinks up at him with clear eyes. They look just like his , you think, even though the color is entirely different and the shape is only similar, but when the light hits the iris, they gleam with something kind, something almost ethereal. You understand, now, why ancient people needed mythology, why modern men need religion: how else can one make sense of gravity, and beauty, and kindness, and one another? You don’t believe in god, but you’re tempted to believe in something when he grips her hand so tightly that his knuckles turn white, and he smiles. The pendulum swinging in your stomach in a balancing act of relief and wonder makes you dizzy. You help save the life of someone he loves; you’re important to the people who are important to me— and he turns that smile towards you.
Something unfurls inside of you—maybe in your chest, somewhere perhaps wholly different—and it feels like antigravity. It feels like a reprisal, like the second wind you didn’t know you were still waiting on. Seemingly for the first time, you notice that there is blood in your veins, that there is a brain inside of your skull, that your body belongs to you and that you belong to the world: and you feel light for the first time in what seems like months. He smiles with his teeth, with his cheeks, with his eyes; and although the bitter flavor still burns in your throat, it no longer threatens to choke you. His name means blessing, and you understand what it means to be absolved, and to be forgiven, and to be loved: like the mid-December sunlight has cracked through the cloudbank for the first time all winter, and you’re obliged to let it spread across your skin; like you have a duty to let yourself be reborn amidst greener pastures, ones not watered with your bloodshed.
The devil tries to tell you that this isn’t redemption, and you aren’t listening to a damn word: the sun shines too bright for you to recall that there was ever anything but spring.