“To forget him! I could go home and go back to work and go back to Babylon and everything would be normal. But it’s not. It never will be.” You sink to your knees, the fight draining away as the truth settles in, heavy and irrevocable. “I would have done anything for him.”
Michael’s arms are strong, his body warm as sobs wrack your body. “You did. You did everything, Brian. You did everything.”
Sometimes, in the dark and quiet of the night, when things are most still, you are convinced that the last six years are a dream. That he never woke up, never learned to draw again and fuck again and love again. Never left you. Never came back.
All this time, he has been in this bed, silently passing by the months and years. The rings in your dresser drawer — his drawer — are not there. You never told him you loved him, never said all the ridiculously romantic words that had bottled up inside you for years.
It was all a dream. A beautiful, terrible dream.
Meep. And this is when I start to cry, and read faster to get to the happier parts.