Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodies

I was the mess. I was the Drama King. I was the boy whose heart and whose head went in every direction, spinning out of control until he’d draw me back in. He’d find my center and pull everything towards it, focusing me. He spent more time working on my head than his own, but then, his own never seemed to need all that much work.

*     *     *

“Pete, it’ll… Pete, look at me.” Pete continued to stare down at his bandaged hand. He stroked the gauze gently as though trying to glean some meaning from the white layers. Patrick broke the stare as best he could, covering Pete’s hand with his own. “Look at me.”

Pete looked up. His eyes were red and swollen from tears and weary anger. As soon as he found Patrick’s consoling gaze, his mouth pulled into a grimace. A fresh batch of tears welled in his eyes and wasted no time in spilling down his cheeks.

“Pete, it’ll be okay. It’ll hurt like hell for now, but then it will be okay.”

“But I really liked that windshield,” replied Pete in a vain attempt at humour. Patrick bit his lower lip. Anyone else would have interpreted the habit as him simply not knowing what to say, but Pete knew him well enough to recognize it as reassurance; a way of saying “you don’t need to laugh this one off. You’re allowed to hurt” without actually saying anything.

Pete sniffed and looked away, swallowing thickly. After a few deep breaths he turned back to Patrick and found in his face the most perfect mixture of sympathy, encouragement, and fondness. Without thinking, Pete leaned in and placed a light kiss on Patrick’s lips, allowing himself to linger there a moment. Patrick leaned in almost imperceptibly, but it was enough to reassure Pete that it wasn’t weird, it wasn’t taboo. It was just a kiss, and if it was what Pete wanted, it was what Patrick would give him.

*     *     *

For the longest time I wasn’t even sure if he knew. For some reason, right from the beginning I always felt completely transparent whenever he was around, and towards the end I definitely was. After so many years of conversations and collaborations and lyrics and lamentation he ended up knowing more about how my mind worked than I did. I know he knew there was interest long before I made any sort of move; I’m just not sure if he knew it was love.

*     *     *

To Patrick, the creation of music was itself almost musical. Pete would start the exhibition with his lyrics, and Patrick would develop them, supporting his theme. Then they would start again, taking Pete’s lyrics and reworking them, weaving them more perfectly into the music. Each draft was a verse, and by the time they were ready for the final coda, the song was done, scrawled on pages that would have been unintelligible to anyone else.

To Pete, the creation of music was erotic. He’d present himself completely naked, stripped down to just a font, and Patrick would make him beautiful, exposing his own bare beauty in the process. Their creative act was the most personal, intimate interaction they could have, and it never failed to leave Pete a little breathless.

When they’d first started using Pete’s lyrics, it had been a bit of a tease. By the time Pete became the official lyricist, it was almost foreplay. Eventually, Pete ran out of patience for ‘almost’.

“Pete…” Patrick barely had the word out before his mouth was covered by Pete’s. He was gentle but insistent, making his intentions known without pushing. Patrick, for his part, offered little resistance, showing his reluctance but making no real effort to get away.

Pete cupped Patrick’s cheek, drawing him in for a deeper kiss, and Patrick obliged, parting his lips and letting Pete in. He wrapped his arms around Pete’s tiny waist and drew their bodies together. There were no scrambling hands, no ripped seams as clothes were removed as quickly as possible. There were just slow kisses and nimble fingers. One warm body and another; near, against, inside.

*     *     *

Looking back on it, I have no idea what was going through my head. I felt completely alone, like no one saw me, but part of me was still trying to hide. I’d wear a constant grin, laugh as loud as anyone, go to every party…I worked so hard to keep a secret I could have sworn no one even wanted to know. Later on, Patrick told me he knew something wasn’t right, but even at the time I knew he saw something. I’d kid myself into thinking he didn’t know what he was seeing, but he did. He just didn’t realize he was only seeing a small part of it. The thing was, I didn’t actually want to die; I just didn’t really want to live.

*     *     *

“How could you say…” Patrick choked on his anger and had to take a minute to remind himself to breathe. “How could you say I wasn’t fucking there for you?”

“Patrick, I didn’t say…”

“The fuck you didn’t! You said it in half a dozen magazines! You said it on the radio! You said it on M-T-fucking-V!”

“Patrick, please.” Pete looked up at Patrick’s face. His mouth was open and at the ready to continue his attack, so Pete waited for it to close before he even attempted a rebuttal.

“I know you were there. I mean, I know now that you were there. I was sick. It wouldn’t have mattered if you were standing right beside me every second, I still would have felt completely alone.”

“I wish I had been.” Patrick’s statement was so simple and so sincere that Pete was at a complete loss for a reply. “Do you know… Could you possibly have any idea how fucking scared I was? I knew something was wrong, and every single time I’d go home or even go to the fucking bathroom I’d wonder what I’d come back to. And you…” Patrick’s face tightened, trying to hold back a sea of hot tears.

“Patrick…”

“You went away and then I get a fucking phone call and you… Jesus Christ, Pete. I spent months just trying to be there for you when you wouldn’t tell me a Goddamn thing about what was going on, and then all of a sudden my best friend is in the psych ward because he tried to off himself in a parking lot… And who was I supposed to talk to? Who was supposed to be there for me? You want alone? Give that a fucking try.”

Pete stood up as Patrick broke down completely, burying his eyes in Pete’s shoulder.

“I am so sorry, Patrick.”

“Don’t be sorry,” replied Patrick, taking in a massive breath just to get the words out. “Just be here.”

*     *     *

Things got better. For a long time everything was okay. I got help. I evened out a little. Patrick and I, we’d been close since the day we met, but after that it was like all bets are off. No ‘arms length’, no secrets. He got the intimate conversations, but he also got the lyrics. All the lyrics. He saw everything that went through my head, even the stuff I knew might scare him. He knew when I started to fall apart again. He knew when I went off the meds. He saw every inch of my downward spiral, and for his part he never left my side. He even made little jokes about ‘why bother since I already fucked it up once’ trying to draw some sort of confession of intent from me. It was true, though. I had fucked it up once, but instead of trying a different method, I just doubled the dose.

*     *     *

It was just after 3:00 am when Joe and Andy delivered the news. They looked down at the sleeping figure, neither wanting to be the one to wake him. In a sick twist of luck, neither had to, because his long lashes fluttered open on their own.

“Hey. What’s… What’s going on?”

Joe closed his mouth and looked to Andy, who looked away.

“Where’s…”

“Dead,” whispered Joe, almost inaudibly.

“What? What do you mean…?”

“He’s dead,” confirmed Andy. “He killed himself last night. He called me yesterday and he was just… he was crying and rambling and saying he couldn’t watch you go through it again, and then this morning Pat went to check on him and she found him.”

If there were any words trying to find their way out of Pete, they were drowned in the wave of vomit that forced itself out of him. Nurses came into the room, pulling off his bed linens and hospital shirt and replacing them with fresh ones. “Oh God…” he finally managed, the words still hard to hear under his sobs. “Oh my God, Patrick…”

*     *     *

I always took for granted that he was there for me. I leaned on him so often and so hard, I never stopped to wonder who he was leaning on, if anyone. He was my friend and my love and I made him my guardian on top of it, and the only thing he ever asked of me was to stay with him, and I couldn’t even give him that.