apres-juillet

[apres-juillet]

14 Feb, 2023

God, it was hard. And August knew it would be hard, but he never really imagined how hard. Back at university, the nights were long-- the nights were long and he was alone. And here, the nights were long and he was lonely, but he wasn't alone anymore, and the echo of the other boys’ voices down the halls hammered back and forth between the sides of his skull, down his neck, and around the cavern of his ribs.

To be lonely and also alone was easy, hands curled into his sleeves in the cold, dry air of his one bedroom apartment. But to be lonely and surrounded by people was a beast in a league of its own. 

It was a late night again, and August was in the practice room. He felt that beast paw around in his chest and breathed in as if that could be enough to scare it away. It was strange, something he wasn't used to, being surrounded at all sides by surfaces that reflected his tired body back into his weary eyes. August crawled closer to the mirror and met his own gaze. When he tried to smile at himself, it felt like looking at a dog baring its teeth. His phone pinged beside him, face down on the ground. 

He didn't belong here but he desperately wanted to become a person that did. The other boys would sit together, and smile at each other, and cook together, eat together, talk about what they'd done that day. Offer help and be strong enough to ask for it, be strong enough to accept it. What are you meant to do when people smile at you? How do you even get them to?

His phone pinged again. His hair was too long.

August would only enter empty practice rooms. If he was there alone, it was all in the others’ hands. He didn’t have to muster the bravery to awkwardly shuffle in and occupy space. It was one thing to have the boys come in on their own. It was another to go in himself and know that he was forcing them to deal with the consequences of his presence. 

He felt like the space he took up became a vacuum, like people would turn to speak to him and find a strange void, and absence of light and warmth and sound and emotion, taking in their thoughts and their smiles and their words and never returning anything. What did people see when they looked at him? Each time he tried to imagine himself in a room full of people he couldn’t conceptualize himself there– just a blurry, empty, somewhat humanoid figure where he tried to imagine himself to be. 

Sometimes at night, curled beneath his covers with his arms wrapped around his own shoulders, slowing his breathing to feign sleep, he could hear the others laughing. They’d wheeze, and shush one another, and try and hold back, but he could hear it all still. He couldn’t picture himself being a part of something like that. He didn’t know the rules. He hadn’t had any practice.

He'd gone his whole life without something like that, a relationship with warmth. He'd had acquaintances at school, and familiar faces he'd seen at piano competitions since he was a child. But he'd realized fairly quickly that to them, he wasn't a friend, but a competitor-- a rival, sometimes. People’s interest in him started and ended with his skills, his resume. What would he bring up against me? What could he bring to our team for this project? What grade did he earn? 

Who was he now, in an environment where he was stripped bare of his skills every day? Where he lacked so much compared to the others and it was all on display? He didn't even know if there was a person beneath the polished outside he'd worked so hard to keep pristine.

His phone pinged. A bag of a dozen cold croissants lay in a heap in the corner of the room.