[i]I’ve been spending so much time with Ryan, the extraordinary lead guitarist and lyricist for my band (who also happens to be my boyfriend) and yet I can’t seem to translate any learned literacy into my own work. Though never one confident in his own abilities- or just with himself in general- enough to give himself any credit, the words he manages to write down on paper (Never aloud, he’d never make himself vulnerable that way) are frequently whimsical and complex and genius, though. Maybe I’m biased. It’s hard to pretend that I don’t adore everything about the man I love- because of his flaws, his rough edges, the imperfections that make him perfect, his damned honey eyes. I drink up every lyric he dares to show me, fall in love with the way he half-turns away as I’m reading, sheepish, and feel my heart swell indescribably as I turn him back towards me with a gentle hand on his jaw, and pull him into an embrace, my head buried in his shoulder as his long arms wrap comfortably around my waist. It’s the only reaction he ever needs. If I try to launch off on some pretentious tangent commenting critically on his work, he’d take it personally, especially coming from me. So I express my appreciation through silence and touch, just as he expresses his through the words he scrawls down en masse, covering piles of notebooks that are strewn across his room, open at various pages, a visual picture of his mind. I adore him.

The downside of having such an eloquent and literate boyfriend is that I can’t match his way with words, even if I can imitate it pretty well. I try my hardest, and somehow can’t find a way to convey what I want to. I sometimes want to go to him, ask him how he does it, how he translates his thoughts onto paper with relative ease- but I know Ryan would say something akin to ‘it isn’t easy, it’s difficult, most of my work is terrible, I only show you things after I’ve edited and drafted it like fifty times-’ and I would cut him off, curl my fingers with his to catch his attention before he can wind himself up with his own self-slander, tell him it’s okay; that I just want to know how he comes up with the original line. Entire, made-up conversations have been entertained in my imagination many times, and the Ryan in my head would tell me that it just came to him, he didn’t know how, but it was mostly me that brought it on. Yeah, baby, I made it that far, I’d tell him. Then we’d get distracted, I by his hands strumming absently at the strings of his guitar, him by my smile, flashing effortlessly because when I am around him I don’t have to think of an excuse to do so, and the conversation would effectively be over. 

Lost in thought, again, I realise that I’ve been staring at the blank, mocking pages of a notebook, dwindling down to the last sheets from the amount of times I’ve ripped one out and crumpled it up. Glancing at my watch, I curse under me breath. We’ve been living in the same cramped quarters for months now, never more than shouting distance away from eachother, and somehow I am late to meet him outside. Slamming the accursed notebook shut, I stand and push my hair out of my eyes, spinning around on my heels to quickly survey the not-so-organised chaos of my room. I don’t use it much, anymore; most of our time is spent in his bedroom, because, for some reason, the fucker managed to bag the biggest one. I even pulled out the ‘I’m the frontman’ argument (and Jon and Spencer, who had initially been on my side, quickly decided that I no longer deserved it). 

For this reason, I have no idea where anything is. My eyes almost skim past a hoodie that is strewn over the unmade sheets, and I dodge dirty laundry to reach out and pick it up, establishing immediately that its Ryan’s, or, well, was. When I pull it over my head, the sleeves are too long, hiding my wrists and the beginnings of my hands, and I roll them, then stoop to pick up my boots from where they were stood against the wall, hopping and trying to keep balance as I pull one on, them the other. Glancing at my watch again, I decide that I have approximately thirty seconds before Ryan comes looking for me, and pull open the door and shut it behind me decisively.

...He’s not in the lounge. Fucker lied- No, wait, he’d never said he was going to be in there, he said he’d be- I click my tongue, disappointed, as if I’ve been beaten in an argument by myself, and head towards the front door, having to forcefully push the handle down as age has stiffened it up almost fully. Stepping outside, it is late, unusually bright afternoon, the sky is a light, icy cornflower, and an unexpectedly chilling breeze sweeps into me as I exhale and my breath spirals off into the air. Hugging the hoodie closer to my body, I stamp my feet on the ground and glance towards the lakeshore reflexively, the wind wrenching locks of my hair from their natural position and hanging them untidily across my face, so I squint and I recognise Ryan’s form, hunched over, undoubtedly focused on some notebook, in an instant. 

We’re all so busy these days that Ryan and I have resorted to scheduling time in which to enjoy solely eachother’s company. Most of the time the band spends working together, writing and recording what we can before Spencer accuses me of being ‘too distracting’ (not my fault Ryan is weak and has an even worse attention span than me), and I am kicked out. Another large portion of the time we spend alone, conjuring up individual ideas to bring to those sessions. The rest of my time I spend vying for Ryan’s attention just as Ryan spends it vying for mine.

Stopping beside him, I immediately lower myself into the ground and draw myself close to his side, enamoured suddenly by memories of that fateful night by the lakeshore where I told ryan that I loved him. The connotations from that are so strong that I know that for as long as I live, no matter what happens, if I ever return here, I will be floored by the lingering sense of intensity and raw emotion. Closing my eyes, I exhale again, suppressing a shiver. I’m cold, but I say nothing. 

[b]”You should’ve brought your jacket,”[/b] He says, lifting his head up from where he was concentrating on some line or other and shutting it with one hand, setting it down on the ground beside him.

[b]”I did,”[/b] I protest, waving my now fully unrolled sleeve in front of his face to make my point. 
 
[b]”That’s mine,”[/b] Ryan replies, and I grin. He is now fully focused on me, regarding me with wide, warm eyes and a soft smile. We fall into place automatically, one of my hands finding its place with fingers curled into the steadily growing curls of his hair, the other against his waist. I feel his feather fingers at the back of my neck and at my own waist and we both draw eachother in, meet in the middle in a simple, gentle kiss. His hands feel like home.  [/i]

Straight ahead are treetops, leaning over the lake and beyond, for as far as I can see, an ocean of leaves and branches in which I wouldn’t be able to drown even if I tried to. Maybe if I get irremediably lost in the mountains, a wood nymph will take pity on me and pull me into a tree to live there forever. It’s cold, dry, late evening, and when I look up, the impressiveness of the streaks of orange and pink and gold take my breath away for a second before I look to my side at that familiar spot and there is nobody there to catch the horizon, nobody there who was always so much kinder on my eyes. 

A slight breeze makes me shiver, and I catch myself wishing I’d brought a jacket with me. [i]I told you to bring your jacket,[/i] He would say, if I complained about being cold- of course [i]my [/i]jacket, of course not his, we aren’t together anymore, and it’s not like I still have hold of a few of his hoodies that smell like him and I just can’t bring himself to take them back and have to face him, look him in the eye, because I know I’d become overwhelmed just as I am now, by the intense nostalgia and painful reminiscent memories that flood my mind as I stand here, a few feet back from the shore, staring at the water. I’m not allowed to be sad, to be in pain about it. I broke up with him, not the other way around- it was my decision- and yet, here I am, having returned to the place it all began in an effort to accept my past and therefore be able to move on with it, finally. 

For a while, I’d been thinking- I can now hear Ryan’s name without feeling sick and guilty. I can now think about him without feeling an empty pain and longing, or a lonely hand by my side with no other hand to hold. I’d been focusing on getting a new band together- after our split, the band split also, Spencer and I soldiering on and continuing with the name and Ryan and Jon going off on other ventures that I couldn’t allow myself to be interested in. Last I’d heard, everything was at a standstill for them, content was dry and infrequent- that was until about a week ago, when I was sent the same fucking soundcloud link by dozens of fans until I caved and followed it. When Ryan’s name flashed before me on my phone screen, my stomach flipped over, and then my whole body stiffened when I read the title of the song. If I knew what was good for me, I’d close it, not bother listening, I’d come too far to just regress into sadness that I brought upon myself to begin with anyway.

But I’ve never had any impulse control, and nobody was around to stop me, so I pressed play and felt myself unravel. His voice was always so beautiful, but, more important than that- the lyrics themselves, so blindingly obvious and heavy-handed about the subject matter, made me feel like I’d been punched in the gut and winded. I found myself blinking furiously, Ryan’s voice resounding deep in my bones, creeping into the marrow along with the guilt I’ve been carrying around with me for months. 

I’m back in the present, and blinking furiously again at the ground, trying to gain control of my breathing. I stop blinking, letting my eyes dry out before welling up, because my body knows how to take care of myself better than my brain does. I feel the tears in my eyes, let them overflow and run down my cheeks. Some of them drip off my face, landing on my clothes. One lands on my hand, warm for a second before turning ice cold. I don’t bother to look. Don’t wipe them away, either; they can stay where they are. Dry out where they fell.

Lonely moonlight. Fuck, what about the guilty sunshine? I have been wrestling with my guilty and remorseful consciousness since the breakup, a breakup I still can’t justify, having gotten over my initial panic about the weight of commitment. Ryan, clearly, if judged by this recent song, had not. As I listened to Ryan’s voice come softly through my headphones, declaring that someone he loved someone else, I wondered- who did he think I was in love with? My eyes turn upwards from the ground to the horizon and then I turn slowly, resignedly, back to face the cabin, clenching my shaw and shivering from the cold. Upon hearing that single, I felt the need for closure. I thought that coming back here would allow me to accept the past and move on. Instead, I feel the ghosts of his hands at my hips, his lips at my jaw, my cheek, my temple, the corner of my mouth. I feel him hook me in and dig his claws in from hundreds of miles away. He may have left my life, but he stubbornly clings onto my heart, and as I walk back towards the cabin, I wonder if I’ll ever get chance to tell him I’m sorry that the end of our love story wasn’t as picturesque and fairytale as the start. If I meet his eyes again, he’ll know.

...I’ve never been a patient man. Who knows when, or if, I’ll get a chance to even see Ryan again in passing, never mind approach him and apologise and ask him about this song, this beautiful, painful song that makes me ache because I was the one who caused the hurt to show obviously through his translucent, soft voice. I head back inside, the cold having chilled by bones but the sun conversely warming my skin, reminding me of gentle touches, kisses, warm embraces- things I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Maybe the reason I found it difficult to start dating or even feel something for anyone else was because I was too busy being his to fall for someone new- no, that was jumping the gun, I broke up with [i]him[/i], it’s final, not going to change. 

Still, I have to say something, even though I don’t know whether it will just make things worse. We had, surprisingly, spoken since the breakup; mostly about picking up things, the issue about the band name, talking casually but all strained and awkward about music and how hard it was to find good producers. That’s it. When I scrolled up too far back, and I started seeing the messages sent between two people in love, not two people both unwilling to let go of the other from their lives. I spent the whole following afternoon deleting them all, removing the evidence it ever existed. Any pictures, though- no, I wasn’t going to delete those. Maybe there would come a time where I could say ‘this was me with my friend, Ryan’. Not ‘ex-boyfriend’. Maybe.

I’m at an impasse, standing in the hallway of the cabin when I shut the door behind me and debating which room to head into. I take a step automatically in the direction of Ryan’s, then check myself, turn, and head towards my own. It’s been used by so many other people since I last came here, and it is strange to see the room so empty and bare, the bed made and everything pristine, if a little dated. Trudging across the wooden floorboards, I sit down at the end of the bed, feeling the mattress depress, and I find Ryan in my contacts, now saved simply by his full name. Too formal. Unnatural. I swallow any emotion threatening to throw off the steadiness of my hand and I type out a message.

[i]Hey.[/i]

Too ominous, I have to follow it up.

[i]I heard your new song.[/i] I bite my lip, hard, and continue with, [i]It’s great. Your voice sounds so different.[/i] Beautiful, harrowing, heartbreaking. I have too many words to say and no guts to say them. 

[i]Hit pretty hard, I gotta admit.[/i]