A History [m.h.g.d.]

Dizzy

I found you sitting alone in the dressing room. I didn't think I'd ever seen you so still before...so vacant. You had a large palm over your face, like a desaturated statue against the ruddy venue walls, cigarette burning too close to your knuckles. 

I wanted to reach out and pry your fingers from your eyes, like I used to do when we were younger and I knew there was a laugh just beneath them. 

*

Matty blinked awake, his damp eyes focusing on the cracks in the ceiling. The high had wrapped itself around him and whispered such sweet things, but he violently and painfully wrestled himself from it upon seeing the world around him turned to rust. Staying sober had resulted in his body being released from a great burden, but his mind scattered to pieces and drifted far away from their home. He desperately collected and sifted through them every night, only looking for one in particular. His face. Matty knew who he yearned to see the most, but it was as if someone had taken his memories and burned out all the parts that had ever brought him joy. 

Tonight was different. As his eyes began to well up and the cracks in the ceiling started to blur together again, he heard something familiar—a quiet voice from a far off memory.

"I-I wanted to show you something Matty..."

Matty closed his eyes and focused on picturing the soft naïvety of the mouth that had said those words to him so many years ago.

That humid summer afternoon in my basement, you showed me the first song you properly worked on. When you finally smiled, there was sweat on your lip and I burned looking at you, George. You were so nervous, you stuttered. I wanted to hold your hand. 

I should have held your hand. 

There it was. Finally. George. Sixteen years old. Wearing a doe-eyed blink and slow spreading grin—a gentle show of vulnerability that Matty knew had been reserved only for him.

The picture of George came back to Matty in a flood. His shameless exposed laugh, that ugly yellow jumper three sizes too big, his stolen glances behind smoke at the lake in their hometown, the sounds from inside his mind he didn't let anyone else hear, the deep scars on his collar, the sweat on his neck in the middle of the night, their heads on the same pillow, his long arms that encircled and grounded. 

Remembering George so vividly was a feeling better than any high, better than sinking his teeth into sticky toffee pudding, than hearing a crowd screaming for him. It was a calming balance that made Matty see the drugs as a cheap imposter for what he'd wanted all along. To simply be known. To have him. All of him. To belong. 

And Matty's mind let out a deep and hollow pulse upon realizing that he'd finally found his way home to where he belonged, but no one was there waiting for him.