Vol.1: Over the Tracks.
Volume 1- He keeps doing that to me. I don't mind.
- A homeless man is leaning against the brick wall, and I throw him two quarters. He tells me to fuck off.
“Don’t you know who I am?” I ask, half-serious, half-sardonic.
“No!” he barks angrily, scratching his face with dirty fingers and mumbling to himself incoherently.
“Me neither,” I admit and walk away from him. Damn Simon. My fault for getting him into whisky on our last tour. Only three things can ruin a man: fame, women and twelve-year-old whisky.
- Want of love is not love.
- I quickly try to figure out what the odds of getting raped by Brendon are. I could take him on.
- Some of the best friendships are built on mutual indifference.
- Most of the time, I just cannot be bothered with people when my own thoughts entertain me more than the mindless nonsense of a fellow man.
- A different kind of beautiful.
- We’ve got this thing, this funny, odd thing that I don’t know what to do with. It didn’t come with a manual.
- It is not brave to be silent! It’s cowardly! I have come out of the closet, and I’m not going back in for anyone! I fuck guys. I kiss them, I lick them, I suck them. I go to gay clubs and think my gay thoughts and I march in the GFMs, and I am not afraid to say it’s who I am.
- Let's not talk about the past. It never flatters anyone.
- I missed knowing who I am.
- But where’s the sweat? The blood? Life isn’t about smiles and forced politeness. Life is raw, it’s meant to leave marks on you. If you can’t remember anything from the last two years, it’s because you’ve done nothing memorable during them. Fuck that. Fuck my imaginary wife and my bastard children. I want loud music, so loud it hurts my ears, and I want sincerity and vomit and honesty.
- My peace with the act. Still, there is nothing peaceful about Brendon: whenever he walks into the room, a war declared inside me.
- With him, it's like trying to approach a deer without frightening it off: practically impossible.
- The lies are only a sign of things not working, anyway, and everyone knowing the score doesn't change what was wrong in the first place.
Vol.2: Wolves vs. Hearts.
Volume 2- Shane’s mouth remains hanging open, but the rest of the table keep talking as the universe keeps spinning and the puzzle pieces start coming together.
- “What makes you think I want anything?”
Easy. Your smile. The way you fucking smile and the way your shoulders tense up when I’m close and the way I’m circling you and you know it, you fucking know it but aren’t running away. The way you shift restlessly if I stare for too long, when I can almost taste your skin, distant memories fresh on my mind, and the way your eyes sparkle when I say something remotely funny. But you keep knocking me down and pulling me back up, and you want something. I might not know exactly what it is, but I’ve got a few ideas.
- Love is a human condition. No one can escape it.
- I mean, when did he decide that we were just mere humans? Because I swear that for a while there we were gods.
- “You bring out the worst in me too,” I say quietly. Also the best, I think, but I don’t tell him that.
“Yeah, that’s the most beautiful part,” he laughs, sounding sad, and it pierces right through me.
- There is no predestination. There’s just life. You can’t rationalise chaos, Jon. You can’t make everyone happy, so you gotta choose. And I chose me.
- I’d love to see inside his head, see how it operates. See what exactly he thinks of me, and what he thinks of Shane, and how exactly do those differ? But I can’t read his mind, and he will never tell me.
- He can’t be right for Brendon. He can’t be if he can’t even see what’s right in front of his eyes: me. The way I look at Brendon. Jon said that it’s written all over my face, and Jon said that Brendon looks at me differently from Shane, and if Shane can’t see it by now, can’t sense the tension whenever Brendon and I are in the same room together, then he doesn’t know Brendon at all, can’t read him, or can read him even less than I do, and he doesn’t deserve Brendon, he doesn’t deserve to be the guy who gets to take Brendon home.
- How can he be asleep in my bed, still making me feel like I haven't seen him in years?
- Imperfection is the route to lasting longer.
It’s the flaws that attract our attention. Absolute perfection is boring: there’s nothing to examine, nothing to discover. This is true for perfect beauty or the perfect government or the perfect anything – we need the flaws. They make us stronger, keep us alive.
- I’d wrap my arm around Brendon’s waist, keep him by my side, flip them off, steal a car even if I try not to drive if I can avoid it, but with Brendon on the passenger seat I’d stay on the road, I would easily stay on it, and then I’d just drive, the destination unknown and insignificant. To me. Would it be insignificant to him?
- When I close my eyes, I see the sunrise greeting us, shining through the dirty windshield of the car we should be in, and he changes radio stations, sleepy and happy and smiling, and I reach over to card my fingers through his hair, the other firmly on the steering wheel.
- He says nothing. A stone fucking fortress that no one gets to enter, no one. Behind a door is another door, and I wonder how close to the core Shane is. How close any one of us fools has ever gotten.
- I can’t live this lie anymore, be stuck in this – this circle we’ve created. I want you. I want all of you: your kisses and your smiles and your fucked up thoughts and the messes you make and the lies you tell. I want that fucking look on your face right now, the one of you trying to look for a quick escape, that fucking look that I hate. I want it too. All of it.
- Because he wouldn’t be this ashamed of me if he didn’t feel something. He wouldn’t feel guilty if I didn’t make him question the basic foundations that he’s built his life on.
- Don’t go seeking perfection because it isn’t worth it in the end. Seek imperfection. And when you find it, let it stay that way. Don’t go changing it.
- Silence is a temporary art.
- We’d been together for months before I even managed to get him to tell me anything about his past. I get it now, though. I mean, maybe that’s why he keeps people away, you know? He expects people to leave him.”
That’s funny. As far as I can see, it’s Brendon who does the walking away. He has regard for himself. Self-respect.
- I know the things you’ve done. I know the bad in you, all the things you’re ashamed of, the ugly parts you don’t want anyone to see. I’ve felt all of it beneath your skin. I know. And you’re still beautiful to me.
- My chest radiates with heat, but it’s not just sexual want – it’s more than that. A yearning for us to become a part of each other. Then he won’t be able to walk away anymore. Then he won’t be able to do anything except bend to my will and stay.
- He was wrong about practice making someone perfect or the desire of wanting to please. You just have to want it badly enough. Have something to prove or something to lose.
- If you and I had life figured out at this pint of life, what would the next thirty, forty or even fifty years be for?
- How can you say we’re a mistake? God, when I look at you, I can barely breathe!
- Will causing him pain make me feel any better?
Vol.3: A Kingdom by the Sea.
Volume 3- See, here’s the thing: life is not a cohesive narrative. It’s made of puzzle pieces. It’s layered.
- I wonder if I could have been happy in that world. If I would have been different. Happier. Better.
- So sometimes I do wonder if all this music is just a new form of painkillers. Doesn’t get rid of the source, but lets us think that it will get better.
- Love isn't measured by obsession.
- I don't trust myself so I simply don't let myself.
-“She lives to humiliate me,” Sisky says, cheeks a slight red.
“That’s what mothers are for.”
- Heterosexuals. What a fucking mystery right there.
- It’s only ever mattered with you. The words are there, a lump in my throat: only you. And I’ve fucked men in between and I’ve gotten fucked in turn, but he is the only man whose sounds and weak spots I’ve memorised, he is the only one who I wanted to make mine. It’s only ever mattered with him.
- Who could ever keep a healthy perspective on anything when they’re in that deep? How do we see how bad it’s gotten? We can’t. And so we stay even when it gets ugly. Because if love could disappear the second we first hurt someone, then hell – no one would ever get married, most people wouldn’t get past a second month anniversary. We love and we cause pain. We cause pain because we love. It goes hand in hand. We can’t stop loving someone just because they hurt us, and we’re not incapable of knowingly hurting loved ones.
- Thinking of you two, all these mental images haunting me, fuck, it made me so jealous. And that was the worst part. Not that Shane had cheated, but that it’d been with you. I didn’t want him to have you because you were... I guess I just thought that you were supposed to be mine, and I didn’t want others to have you.
- And he laughs slightly and kisses me on the cheek, and I love that kiss, I collect it, put it in a box of kisses I should remember when I’m that old man in the park, walking an equally ancient dog. I won’t look as miserable as he did, though. I won’t be full of regret.
- Because it’s people, like I told Sisky. Home is people. A person.
And after so much war, he now evenly breathes against my skin.