Wherefore Art Thou Romeo? ✓

twenty two

note
it's been a long time. three months long. I don't even know if anyone will read this update because of how long it's been but if anyone does then thank you very much. my appreciation is beyond words. i really hope you like it!

summer 2018 (mostly edited)

ROMEO'S ROOM WAS a gravesite, a headstone, with Rodney's name scrawled over it. It was a coffin so stuffed with memories that there was no room for the body. The books, the clothes, the cigarettes, the pills, his stuffed fox Freddie and his origami projects, the scrawls and drawings inside Romeo's books and old homework assignments and the imaginary scent of his cologne that lingered on everything. The room was his, even when he wasn't there. Even when he wasn't coming back.

There was nothing left of it that felt like Romeo's. He could hardly remember what it had been like before Rodney. He could hardly remember what anything had been like before Rodney. All the space inside the room, all of the space inside him, was filled up by Rodney. There was nothing that could exist outside of him. The universe was only recognisable through him, but even when it became familiar it didn't become any more friendly. In fact, it became more merciless, more unforgiving, than he could bear.

When he tried to conjure up memories of a world he'd known before he knew Rodney, it all fell to nothing. The strings snapped and the seals became loose and the stage walls came crashing down. All the space became meaningless, endless blurs of incomprehensible shapes and colours and movements; the waves of an aura migraine, the flashes of a fever, but muted and endless and much emptier. Nothing was attached to anything else and everything seemed to be floating; nothing seemed solid or trustworthy or even comprehensible. It was almost like being dead.

The bedroom was nothing but an echo of him. It was a song that never stopped. It drilled a hole right through Romeo's head and rang deep inside his skull like it was trying to bury itself inside of him, and he did not know how he could be freed of it.

He wasn't sure that destroying and breaking and discarding Rodney's things would do anything to make the space belong to him any less. He wasn't sure it would ever stop. He wasn't sure he wanted it to, either. The endless reminders of Rodney were excruciating but at least they gave him something to hold onto, at least having too much of Rodney was better than having none of him.

In a terrible sort of way, even having too much of him wasn't enough. No matter how much of him Romeo had left, no matter what pieces he could still hold onto, Rodney was still gone. The shadows of him would never be enough to feed the hunger that gripped Romeo's insides. It was insatiable.

He was unable to leave his bedroom, even though what was left of it agonised him. The knife had already been driven through him. Keeping it there was excruciating but it still hurt less than pulling it out.

His bedroom, he supposed, was an extension of himself, of his body, and he hated what was left of his body, too. It repulsed him. It had been reduced to nothing more than some kind of revolting stranger, some kind of mutilated and sickly animal writhing in his bones. It was all unfamiliar to him; the way it curled itself up, the way it tried to make itself disappear, the way its mouth trembled and eyes blurred, the way its chest was too hard and tight for the hitched, hasty breath, how the heart heaved until it was sharp against his ribs. That might've been the knife.

The animal beneath his flesh was starving to death, waiting tirelessly and relentlessly, never daring to sleep, never letting him rest, in case Rodney came back to him. The animal beneath his flesh ached to be ripped apart by his teeth and torn by his hands, to be marred and maimed and destroyed by him. It needed fresh wounds to keep living, but Romeo's wounds had all faded away.