Gamma Ray

I sit on my usual bench and watch as he crosses the courtyard. I have a cardboard cup filled with hot black coffee clutched between my hands. He looks hurried and distracted. At some point in the past I feel sure he would have felt me staring at him so intently and, just by a look, I would have been able to pull him off the course he seems very set on walking now and brought him over to me. This does not happen today. It seems both very right and very wrong that this is the case.

I tug at the collar of my jacket so that it is pulled up further around my neck (although it is summer the temperature demotes a much chillier time of year). As I do so I get a flashback of when things changed. There are some sentences that will do that to a relationship. One minute they are one thing, the next, something completely different.

‘I love you’ does that.

‘I slept with someone else’ does it too.

Then there is the sentence he said to me: ‘Today is the day my father died.’

We were lying on my bed. Sunlight was streaming through the window and falling across the upper part of his face (when I think of that summer this is how I always think of him; half in shade and half in the light).

I frowned slightly. This wasn’t the response I’d been expecting when pointing out that he didn’t seem his usual, affable self.

We lay there for a moment considering each other. Me resting on top of his chest and he with his left arm under his head propping him up slightly. Finally I quietly said; ‘how?’

‘He drunk himself to death. I was 16 when it happened.’ He shifted. The sunlight poured onto the pillow under his head as he reached for the cigarettes (I should clarify, my cigarettes. I paid for all the fripperies like these) on the nightstand. He drew two slowly out off the pack and offered me the extra. I kept my gaze steady and considered what to do or say next. In the absence of anything better I kissed him. I tried to use that kiss to give him back everything he’d lost, everything he’d never had. We’d been playing before and now it was real. He gave me a part of his past and I gave him a part of myself.

He reaches the double doors on the opposite side of the courtyard from where he started. I watch him disappear and take a sip of my coffee and wonder to myself how many other people know that today is the anniversary of when his father died.