LOTF: Before and After

Phase 3: Chapter 43

Ralph Langley hadn't had a normal Christmas in two years. Last year, he was on the island, completely unaware that the holiday had come and gone like just another, irrelevant day. This year was his first year home, his first real Christmas since he was eleven years old, and he wasn't in the mood to celebrate.

Ralph knew that his parents weren't fond of his recent behavior; his detachment, the indifferent attitude he had towards any and everything. Neither of his parents could get him to talk about what happened in Brookhaven and why he was lying about it, and not for lack of trying. It was hard for Jeffery and Laurie to surrender to the truth; that Ralph might never tell them what really happened, that he might never change back into the person he'd been when he left the house that fateful morning. But they were running out of options.

It was the first Christmas in two years that Langley family were together for. In 1990, Jeffery and Laurie hadn't put the tree up, bought gifts, or celebrated at all. And despite Ralph's safe return home almost a year earlier now, it still didn't feel right to celebrate. But Jeffery and Laurie decorated the house anyway. They put up the tree, and tried to get Ralph in the spirit. But as expected, he was unreceptive, and showed no more interest in the holiday than he had anything else over the last three weeks.

Eventually, surrendering to Ralph's secrecy and indifference meant surrendering to trying to help it. Jeffery and Laurie were forced to stop prodding Ralph all the time as they grew less and less hopeful his behavior would improve. He wasn't rude, aggressive, violent, nor blatantly disrespectful (very often, anyway). But he was closed off, silent, and hollow inside and out. Jeffery was surprised he hadn't popped a shoulder blade from all the shrugging and head shaking he was doing. It took until Christmas for the Langley parents to stop trying with Ralph, to conclude that no amount of gentleness, assurance, and support was going to unbreak whatever force inside their son had snapped like a wishbone.

Ralph acted like he didn't see it, like it was too absentminded to be aware of it, but he wasn't. He knew how his parents looked at him; with pity and misunderstanding. His teachers at school reported the same behavior to his parents, and conferences were held about it in the last week before Christmas break. Yet the end result was the same; nothing could be done to coerce him into improving.

Ralph could feel the distressing difference between this and the separation anxiety he felt when he and Jack were hiding from everybody. This time, the pain wasn't a means to an end, it was the end.

Ralph thought about the island, and how quickly Jack had been to accept defeat, to believe that rescue wasn't coming. His own hope for rescue had been Ralph's saving grace, the thing that kept him going, his reason for everything he did. It provided him with the strength and energy to keep trying. He truly never gave up hope for rescue, not until he was forced to accept his short-lived fate as hunted prey. That surrender of hope didn't last long enough to sink in, and he was saved before he could fully process the fact that he was going to die. He had fought to the very end, ran for his life when he knew there was nowhere to run. Hope was his virtue, and now for the first time in his life, he'd surrendered it on Malcolm Conroy's front doorstep, abandoning it like an object that had been completely stripped of its value. He thought about how easy it was for Jack to surrender hope on the island, how adaptable he was, accepting of the worst case scenario.

Right now, Ralph was jealous of Jack for that. He wished that he too could be indifferent about hope, letting it rise and fall through his fingertips sporadically without a care in the world. He wished that he possessed the ability to not care, to adapt when his life was thrown into chaos, to accept and thrive in a sudden, unknown, and terrifying reality.

But he wasn't Jack, and he didn't have the stomach to think that way. It wasn't how he was raised, it wasn't what he spent his life believing. When he was thrown into the trenches, like he had been on the island, he stopped at nothing to recover what he'd lost; his life back home. One would guessed based on that that Ralph wouldn't be able to give up on Jack, just as he hadn't given up on rescue. But Ralph was nothing if not smart, and something in his heart and mind told him that Jack Merridew wasn't attainable in the way that rescue had been. There was a key difference between fighting for rescue and fighting for Jack; he knew that he wasn't the only one fighting for rescue. His parents would've stopped at nothing to find him, the authorities, the staff at the academy, the entire country was in disarray hoping for their safe return. But here and now with Jack, Ralph couldn't fight. He would be the only one fighting.

Ralph wasn't good at surrendering, at giving up, at thoughtlessly abandoning all hope. But he couldn't hope, and he couldn't fight. So he just shut down. It was all he could do not to lose his mind; it was the only way to cope, to survive, to escape each excruciating and agonizing day with his head in tact. Ralph wasn't sure of anything anymore, except that he'd never trust his heart with another person again.

Granted, Ralph's raging thirteen-year-old hormones made everything seem bigger, harder, and more dramatic than his grown parents could understand. Ralph should have been too young to know what genuine love was like. His classmates were busy writing 'do you like me, check yes or no' on scrap paper, squealing every time they brushed hands with their crushes, and breaking up with that profound love they thought they'd found after five days of establishing any type of commitment. Ralph thought it all to be petty and childish, forgetting that he himself was no older than they were. He judged them, glared and rolled his eyes at them; too innocent, too young, too inexperienced to understand that their problems and perceptions had no depth to them. Ralph was too busy judging them to realize that it was he who was abnormal, not them. It was he who should've been more like them, not them like him.

It was the island, of course. That godforsaken, stupid island. It had opened him up to the reality that the world was dangerous, and that everything you know can be ripped away from you at any time, any place, no matter how old, young, smart, dumb, sure, afraid, strong or weak you are. He knew that the island had been a huge part of the reason he once embraced what he felt for Jack. Unlike most kids, the twenty-two surving cadets returned home with the knowledge that nothing was promised, that they were more likely to regret holding back than fighting for what they wanted. Because one day, seemingly out of nowhere, that choice to hold back or fight could be taken away in the blink of an eye.

Ralph considered an alternate reality where the plane had never crashed and their lives on the island never existed. He knew deep down that whatever had stirred in his heart for Jack had developed before the island, not after. But he'd ignored it, suppressed it, made excuses and dismissed it. He hadn't even let it find its way to the forefront of his young mind; always an afterthought that dissipated the very moment Ralph acknowledged it. If the island hadn't happened, he never would've admitted to himself that he was attracted to Jack. Jack never would've been more than a friend to him, just somebody he was drawn to in thought but never out loud.

As electrifying and astounding as being with and in love with Jack Merridew had been, Ralph was starting to wish that it never happened. The heartbreak was just as great as the love itself. The intensity of the pain was equal to the intensity of the infatuation, if not greater, stronger, more powerful. Ralph wanted to erase it all from his mind, to rip every hair out of his head until the memories came out with it, to forget the name Jack Merridew and the face that he couldn't stop seeing hovering over his own, kissing him softly and loving him aggressively. He couldn't shake the sensation of Jack's warm skin against his own, or the painfully vivid feeling of digging his nails desperately into Jack's back as he pleaded both for more and less at the same time. He couldn't rid himself of the craving; the longing to feel Jack's body and hear his voice, the way an addict would long to feel the drug running through their damaged veins.

Ralph could see the horrible and stunned way his parents looked at him, the hushed tones they spoke about him in, growing bitterly silent everytime he entered the room. Ralph considered that he didn't want to be close to anybody if he couldn't be close to Jack. He couldn't stand the feeling of another person's touch, the comfort of their words, the prospect of being forced to move on like nothing happened, like Ralph Langley and Jack Merridew never existed in connection to one another at all.

So he kept his head down, buried the truth beneath a rigid and unbreakable surface; a front he put up to keep any and everyone out. But in reality, Ralph wasn't only hiding from the rest of the world, he was also hiding from himself, icing out every hint of emotion that dared try to pace through the hollow shell of himself he had become.