So Long, Not Goodnight

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Sleep came in bursts to Frank as he tossed and turned beside his boyfriend who barely moved at all during the night. Every time that Frank found sleep, he was back outside watching Gerard painfully screaming and grabbing at his head. "WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME?!" An infinite loop, a soundtrack on repeat, that roused him right back to heavily breathing and cold beads dripping down his forehead. After multiple encounters, Frank decided that it was best to just stay awake. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, the sky a dusty sienna, just groggily beginning to rise. He slumped his body out of the warm bed and walked downstairs to brew some coffee. Collecting the grounds and pouring the reservoir full, he flicked the switch on to a neon orange. Pulling out a chair from the table, Frank sat and listened to the gurgling of the machine as he stared at the discarded Ouija board that was still on the floor from the night before. Run frantically bounced around inside his head. What did it mean? It had to have been another clue from Helena who could barely remember anything when summoned, more communicative as a spirit if anything. All they had wanted were answers to this riddle, to end not only Gerard's suffering, but Helena's as well, but why was she still baiting them? She confessed that she didn't know why she had been pushing them to these limits, but how could that be? How would that be possible? It wasn't like someone could be putting a gun to her head or ransoming her. She was fucking dead!

The coffee machine whirred and beeped, dragging Frank out of his mind as he rose to collect a mug from the cabinet. It had a cartoon angel with red cheeks and squinted eyes beneath a bright yellow angel with emphasis lines also in yellow with a cheesy, knock-off scripture font reading 'Jesus Loves You' right about it's base. Frank held the bottom in his palm and squeezed it tightly, the happy drawing and dumb saying laughing at him. His fingers shook with the force around the mug as he remembered all the religious bullshit that excused everything from since he was small. When he was curious about his biology in elementary school, that was a sin against God and his son. When he had his male friend sleep over in the same bed in junior high, that was a sin against God and his son. When his mother dragged him to church in his freshman years of high school to listen to the minister preach about how man does not lay with man, that was a sin against God and his son. When he listened outside the curtained cubicle of the hospital as Jamia sobbed and her father told her how thankful she should be at the death of her, their, son because they weren't married, how that was such a sin against God and his son. Why were there all these rules around the human condition? Why was it a sin to be the person that you truly are? Why was it a sin to just be alive? 

Angry tears streamed down Frank's face as his whole body tremored with aggression. In slow motion, he found himself throwing the cup forcefully to the floor and the porcelain shattered in chunks that clinked together beneath his feet. "HOW DO YOU CLAIM TO LOVE ME WHEN ALL YOU DO IS HURT ME?" Frank shrieked, his voice meeting the shaking of his muscles. 

Sinking down to his knees, he felt shards from the broken mug dig into his skin, but he didn't care. He succumbed to his tears, feeling them burn into his hands as he sobbed and sobbed. Visions of Jamia in her hospital bed, completely numb from her pain and unable to speak ran through his head. The night with Bobby, he could feel the warmth of his body atop him still just to remember that he was gone, taken. So badly Frank had wished himself back in time to remain distant to both his friends so that they would still be breathing and walking around, even if the pain killed him at his absence at least they would be alive. Would Gerard follow this pattern? Would he fall next just by correlation? He would never let that happen. Never. 

As the present shook him back, he realized how he had destroyed something that wasn't his to. "Oh no," Frank continued to cry as he gathered the broken pieces that stabbed his palms open, reminiscent of all that has shattered around him. "Oh no..."