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perexcri · 1 year

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you and i were fireworks that went off too soon - [byler week - day 4]

title from: fourth of july by fall out boy

dedicated to: the lake i lived next to in rural [STATE REDACTED] for 3/4 of my college years

It’s something that haunts him, of course.

It’s the colorful bursts of light he sees when he blinks too fast, the popping in his ears once the pressure builds up, a cool sluice of water against his ankles, and the slickness of forearms beneath his fingers. It comes to him in waves like the ones that lapped against the shore, cuts into the soles of his feet like the juts of limestone buried beneath the mud, invades his sinuses like the scent of dry, overgrown grass and burnt-orange pine needles blanketing the land.

Summer is usually the time of freedom, when the sun stays out far past when it should have gone to sleep and coaxes people out of their homes and into hazy, smoke-filled nights. The world is burning with color, the earth warm beneath his feet, and the hours trickle away in untamed drops of afternoon showers and the lingering blue wash of dusk. When he was younger, summer seemed the season of possibilities: for adventures, for discoveries, for reading new books and seeing new sights, for slipping from the cloak of shadows the rest of the year seemed draped in to finally embrace the warmth of life reignited in his chest.

Once, it had even felt like the possibility of something more.

Mike’s mouth drops into a scowl as he stares at the face of the lake. The book between his ribs and arm presses into his side just a little harder, his hands are shaking, and even after twelve years, he thought he’d be done with these pitiful twists of hope he feels every summer he returns here. He can make it down the main street of the town without worries, even if he does double-takes at every brunette he sees pass by in his car’s smudged windows, and he can make the winding trail down to the lakeside just fine. He can unlock his family’s summer home and breathe in its scent of musty sheets, stale coffee, and woodsmoke of vacations past. Hell, he can even toss his pile of books onto the kitchen table and listen to it groan under the strain of his literature Ph.D. program’s third year, a further reminder that time has passed and his life, for better or worse, has changed.

He’s always fine until he sees the ever-shifting face of the lake, how it mischievously gleams under both sun and moon. That’s when his heart convulses into these ugly, gut-mashing twists and his body gets forcibly wrenched back in time. 1999 dissolves around him like pixels on the screen of a video game being shut off, and suddenly, 1987 burns against his skin. His parents are in the lakehouse, there’s fireworks popping colors all across the sky, and the boy he’d seen around town the past few summers has his fingers tangled with Mike’s, and he’s tugging him towards the lake, his mouth flush with moonlight as he says, What’s the worst that can happen?

A lot, actually. Sometimes, you turn over a stone and discover something either wonderful or frightening, and it slips from your fingers before you have a chance to decide which one it is. Sometimes, the summer fades into the new school year, and there’s no way to contact the only person you’ve ever felt like this for, and when you come back the next year, he’s nowhere to be seen.

And now, he’s got nothing to show for it but the way his heart twists and turns inside the empty cavity of his chest, and the images that haunt the poetry he submits to the campus literary magazine: lakes frosted with moonlight, summer humidity pressing hot between chests and mouths, fingers curled into the damp fringes of hair, distant sparks of light that could be stars or fireflies, though the narrator is always too preoccupied to tell the difference.

He glowers at the lake and how it sucks all the light from the sun, steals its colors to shade water’s surface instead. The sky is growing dimly bruised with purples and magentas and oranges, the water burns scarlet from the light, and the navy cloth of night is quickly overtaking it all.

The book presses more forcefully into his side; it shakes. He’s twenty-eight, and he should be over this by now, but he can’t help that every time he sees the water, he thinks of how it tasted pressed between their mouths, or how slick it felt against the other boy’s skin, or the way they’d forcefully embraced after clambering back onto the shore, the other boy’s back crinkling into the reedy grasses of the shore, Mike sprawled on top of him, alternating between pressing his ear to the other boy’s warm chest to hear the racing pulse of his heart, or else tilting his head up to admire how the colors of light burst against the other boy’s skin and eyes. They rained on him in showers of colors Mike thinks couldn’t exist except for that summer, and how they shaded every single other moment they spent glued to each other’s sides after that. He’s twenty-eight, and he should be over this by now, but nothing beats the feeling of weightlessness that comes from falling, falling, falling down into love when you’re sixteen.

“This is stupid,” he mutters, which is something he tells himself a lot, but it’s mostly to remind himself that twelve years of a pitiful crush on a boy he knew for one summer are, in fact, a little ridiculous, and he’d been ridiculous to decide to do his summer research at his family’s old lakeside home. He’d been studying the Romantics the past three years, and for some reason, he thought this was his last chance at letting their wayward paths cross once more. At this point, it isn’t even about his own wish fulfillment–he simply needs peace, to press his fingers into the other person’s wrist and know he’s alive so they can say their goodbyes and part in peace.

The water laps against the shore, just a little closer to his battered sneakers.

“Stupid,” he repeats before forcefully tucking a chunk of his hair behind his ears, turning on his heels, and storming back to the comforting recesses of the lake house.

Summer is the liquidity of time: he passes through the barriers of day and night, today and tomorrow with ease, sleeping at odd hours, poring over dusty volumes of poetry and diaries he’d checked out in haste from his university’s library. There’s more coffee than blood running through his veins, and when he goes outside, it’s only ever to drive into town to buy groceries or refill his car’s tank. He doesn’t look out the back windows at the lake, and he sure as hell doesn’t try to breathe in more of the musk of pine trees than he has to.

He’s safe, cocooned in his family’s old home, huddled under blankets against the frigid wash of AC he keeps steadily pumping through the vents. He hunches at the table, sprawls on the couch, curls up on the bed in languid fits of sleep, and the taste of undercooked pasta or frozen dinners becomes the all-too familiar fuel to his days of research, note-taking, and thesis writing.

When he does pull out his old weathered notebook of poetry, it’s only ever to scratch down a few lines in tired replication of the old greats: John Keats, Lord Byron, Pushkin. He used to go outside for hours and try to capture the endless summer delights in shoddy, amateur lyrics, but he knows better than to let his pens fall into those familiar strokes now, and he’s fine in the dusty corners and wilting walls inside, anyway.

All dependent variables are removed from the equation, and his summer becomes one of controlled focus: he will get this research done, and he will focus on the next stage of his life, and he will not, for any reason whatsoever, follow the pitiful tugs of his heart towards some vain hope that the other boy will remember, that he’ll show up again, that he’ll even want to come back to this lonely corner of the country on some vague inclination that Mike might be here, too.

Except for one day in early July, when there’s a faint knock at the door that makes his head jerk up from the volume of Coleridge’s poetry he’s been mindlessly thumbing through. It’s as soft as a breeze off the face of the lake, and for a moment, he can almost convince himself he’d only misheard the breath of life around him.

Until there’s another, slightly louder, unmistakable staccato: knock knock knock.

He wrenches open the door and is met with hazel eyes he’d only ever had the courage to admire under the colors of fireworks, moonlight, and the last dying rays of summer sunsets. His hair’s been trimmed from the shaggy bangs he’d once worn, and it’s strange for it to be mid-summer and him to be clad in jeans and not shorts, a collared shirt and not a polo.

The volume of poetry slips out of Mike’s hand and falls, painfully, on the arch of his left foot.

“Is it really you?” he asks through a wince of pain.

Will grins, his face alight. “Yeah, it’s me.” There’s a beat, then, with a quirked eyebrow, he asks, “You remember?”

How could I not? Mike thinks, drinking in the matured features of the boy he only knew for a summer, now grown-up and full and alive.

Once more, summer becomes a time of possibility, and the love kept captive in Mike’s chest feels a little less small and derisive. He feels whole and electric, like he could dissolve into the brief flares of light and color of those fireworks from long ago.

For the first time in twelve years, the world seems blossoming, full of possibility, and when Mike reaches out, he’s greeted by that feeling of life beneath his fingers, a chance to know that this is real.

With a grin, he realizes that the possibilities are endless.

---

the lake in question: