Way Wedding

Full Scale Meltdown.

The invitation was glaring a hole into my chest the longer I sat flipping a guitar pick through my fingers staring at it. Could I really do this? Could I put on a fake smile and go to Mikey's wedding? The questions were whirling around my brain making me dizzy. I felt unbearably selfish for the way I felt, I had a wife and amazing children but there was something missing. There was this hole in my heart that made me feel like my entire supply of blood was constantly just running down my torso. I hated myself for being so unhappy. There was a million people in this world that thirsted for love and I had an endless supply of it less than 3 feet away and I still just sat here staring at pieces of paper that spelled the invite to a world of temptation. Gerard and I had played this game, countless times trying to make this work and it always boiled down to the same point: His fear. It was always about him and parts of myself resented him for it. For once I wanted our relationship to be more about us and less about his issues. I wanted more, more than sex, more than his I love you's being lust driven. I deserved more, but still thirsted for the way he made me feel. The person he knew me to be, and the love that I held for him and nobody else on this earth. The kind of love that should belong to the woman who had my ring on her finger, not the frontman of my old band. This thought tumbling around my brain like a marble, causing the guitar pick to fall out of my hand just as I realized how fucked up my last thought had been. I did really love him, other than my children and my god damn mother he was the only person I loved deeply enough to give my life up to. I just wished I could have stopped him from getting married in 2007, and I could have held off Jamia. Because without both of those events none of this agony in my head would be raging. Or maybe it would be, i'd just have less what if's to fuel it with.

"Frank, Miles needs help with Legos, and i've been told that i'm not doing a good job." Jamia joked leaning down and kissing my cheek. Bottling everything my brain was swimming in and reciprocating her kiss I stood up quickly and headed to my sons room. I wasn't in my 20's anymore, I wasn't allowed to wallow in my misguided lust. "You're a father" I reminded myself as I reached the top of the stairs, our hallway was full of happy family pictures. On the outside we looked so normal. I mean besides the fact that I'm covered in tattoos and the only reason I have the amount of money I do is because I was in a band. Otherwise our family was normal, we attended PTA meetings, Jamia participated in bake sales, and every year when it was time for the school musical I helped with the set and whatever else was required of me. No body would ever think that I was actually a closeted raging homosexual that would do anything to fuck his ex band mate again. That would do anything to fall deeper in love with the only person that had ever made me feel whole. 

 "Hey dude." I smiled genuinely taking a seat on his large blue rug full of legos. Little moments like these where I could forget my issues and my old world helped me. Being a child with my children, and being a parent was my haven. Being a parent with Jamia was even a haven it was the moments when the kids were gone where I found myself lost and confused as to why even before Gerard I had loved her. She was beautiful and funny, but the way I looked at her just wasn't the way I should; It wasn't the way I looked at Gerard. I didn't admire her the way I did him. I saw her my best friend, not my lover and certainly not my wife.

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I stepped out of the shower that I had only really taken to dodge having to keep a fake smile plastered across my cheeks. As I took a step in front of the mirror, I allowed my eyes to trace over my aging face. My actions and inner feelings mirrored those of some selfish twenty something, but I wasn't that anymore. My face was aging, my body following it closely which left me dwelling on how impossibly unfair that while I got older  Gee looked the same as he did when i saw him play for the first time in that dirty basement. Running my finger over the place where my lip ring once sat memories started to flood back. The way Gerard's hair always got tangled in it, and how he would kiss it in an effort to tease me, and how he always became mesmerized with the way I played with it between my teeth when I was trying to write a song. The memories filled the air all around me making it hard to breath making every emotion bubble into my throat. Ignoring the voice of my shrink in my head telling me to reach for my Xanax, my hands white knuckled themselves to the bathroom sink trying to make my head relax so that I could rejoin reality. A reality where I wasn't slumped over a sink thinking and wondering about what Gerard was doing. Truthfully I knew it wasn't as if Gerard was in LA missing me, or if he thought about me late at night. Scoffing at myself, at the thought that he may think about our rendezvous late at night when he was supposed to be fucking Lindsay. Deep down I knew so much fucking better, shaking my head to the beat of my own insanity, I attempted to rationalize myself; instead my fist spun forward into the mirror leaving little feathering gashes in my knuckles and a crack in the mirror. 

"Fuck" I sobbed quietly dropping to the ground and holding my hand ignoring the destruction I had created. How in the hell are you going to explain this to Jamia? My subconscious echoed laughing at me only making the emotions spill over and around me like tsunamis. It wasn't like I could come out and say "I cheated on you for the first 4 years of our marriage with my bandmate and one of the main reasons besides Mikey's issues that the band broke up was because Gerard and I couldn't go on doing what we were doing." There was no handbook to that type of confession, hell there was no handbook to that type of relationship. Which is why we ultimately had to let each other go, why like the coward I am I decided to stay in an unhappy marriage that started purely as a sham instead of fight for the only thing I ever wanted; The only thing that ever made me feel alive. Cradling my hand and trying to stop my tears I looked up at the mirror the cracks feeling like some fucked up metaphor of the way my heart looked, and remembered the last time I saw Gerard, how all of the fans had gone crazy and how Lindsay had kept him on such a short leash. I'd bet my entire worth on that she must knows, whether it be because Gerard murmured it in his sleep or he had actually admitted it to her. It had just been incredibly and unbearably hair to see him, on top of that seeing him with her was even harder; but the hardest part of the entire thing was the fact that there wasn't a moment that he actually looked me in the eye. After all the years we had made farfetched plans of having a family of our own, and even contemplating telling the bandmates that he couldn't even return my glance. He couldn't even look at me after he had broken his promise to always love me and never leave me.

"Frank honey, are you okay?" Jamia called from down the hall pulling me out of my hysteric haze, and making me launch upward to my feet as I scrambled around trying to find a resolution to the mess I had created. Resulting to pulling the mirror off the wall I tried to formulate a lie that would fly under the radar. If anything I was sure of it was that I wanted to go to this wedding. I didn't have time for my wife to suspect a full scale mental breakdown and come in between this mission. Sucking my tears back into my eyes and wiping my nose I slapped on a smirk. "Yeah honey, I stumbled and knocked the mirror off the wall." I crossed my fingers it would work and washed my hand under cold water. The pain snaked its way down the drain along with the blood, if there was anything I was sure of it was that I was going to see him and I was going to do one of two things. Either end up sleeping in the wrong hotel room or come home and finally devote myself to trying to make this marriage work. It wasn't her fault I was just more into Gerard than any other human being on this earth. To be honest if it wasn't because red flags would have raised quickly I probably wouldn't be a father. I wouldn't be the one thing that kept me alive.