FRIDAY
08 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               The ocean swallows me whole. Me and my box.

Water flows in through the cracks between the door and window (so much is to be expected with British insulation). A box shouldn't have doors or windows if it's going to be safe. This box isn't safe. The water already reaches mid-calf. I'm going to drown in this box. It's too quiet.

I never thought I would complain about a lack of noise but all I can hear is my own laboured breathing and the gush of blood in my ears which imitate the ocean so well I become seasick. I grip the edge of the bed, sweat pearling at the back of my neck and between my shoulders.

The walls have crawled an inch closer every hour. The faded blue paper peels to reveal a dark grey paint beneath. The waves slosh from side to side and the room rocks. It's going to shrink until I run out of oxygen.

A car door slams.

My head snaps to the covered window (it's not safe!) of our motel room. No moving walls or curling paper. No ocean. Not that it calms me in the slightest. (I haven't seen anyone today. Isaiah was gone when I woke up and isolation has become self-fulfilling insanity within a handful of scrambled hours.)

I've opened and shut the curtains so many times that the scrape of the rings still echoes in my spine. With the curtains shut, I'm stuck right back in Rav Eliraz. With them open, I'm terrified Ima is watching me, that she has a video camera aimed into the room and the moment she has confirmation of my location, she'll send troops to get me.

The door opens and my heart freezes like a mouse witnessing a predator, then takes off at the speed of a rabbit's.

Isaiah has only one foot over the threshold when he halts. 'You're home...'

'Where else would I be?'

'Thought you'd be at temple.'

I stare at him. It's Friday? Of course, it's Friday. I've been so tangled in time, I didn't realise it still moves linearly for everyone else. I didn't remember Shabbat. (How could I forget Shabbat?) If fear is strong enough to make me forget G-d, there's nothing it can't do.

'My parents will be there.' I hope it sounds like "it'll be awkward" and not "they might imprison me".

Isaiah steps inside. It's a heavy movement as though he's wading through water that reveals he regrets the choice even as he makes it. His own body screams at him to turn around.

Turn around, I try to telepathically shout at him. I think I'm going insane and I don't want you to see, which really means please hold me.

He shuts the door so gently it makes no noise (knowing the click will be the equivalent of a gunshot — how do you know?). 'What's wrong?'

Is it possible to have nightmares while awake? That's what I've been doing all day.

Though I haven't dared to open my email since I saw hers yesterday, I remember it by heart: "Odd that your own mother should have to hear of your return from someone else. I'd like you to come over for Shabbat dinner the following week, November 14."

There was no sign-off, no "with love" or even a formal "best regards". The absence of a question is not a detail I missed nor was her choice to phrase the invitation "I'd like"...

How can she shame me for not telling her when she's the one who told me not to stay in touch, that I was on my own when I turned eighteen, that she didn't want to be my mother anymore? (Maybe I am being selfish.) It's not my fault. (It is.) It is. I should go. I've been rude and childish by refusing to talk to them — another of my tantrums. Nobody wins, I'm just being immature. (I've never said no to my mother. I wouldn't know how. She always wins.)

What if it's a ruse to send me back, send me somewhere worse? I'm an adult now. They won't have to pretend it's a school. They can do whatever they like. What if I don't go and she comes and gets me? They'll lock me back in my box.

In my box with no windows and only let me out to yell words at me I don't want to internalise. They'll force me to read things I don't want to and write things I don't want to and when I refuse, they'll hold me underwater. They'll cram prayers between my teeth and force me to swallow them like cyanide capsules. That's the worst part. I have always loved praying, but just as the seeds of an apple contain cyanogens no matter how sweet the fruit, mutinous heirs of the sacred are fatal.

'Nothing.' (I think I'm going insane. Please hold me.)

'You've sweat through your t-shirt.'

'I was working out.'

He scratches his cheek where his beard has already overgrown its intended parameters so that rather than sculpt his jawline, it softens it. He scans the room as if he too perceives its threat close in.

'I'll... go somewhere else. Wouldn't want my faggotry to get between you and HaShem on Sabbath.'

'Stop it.' Maybe I intend to yell but all that comes out is a sob. 'You know I would never think that. You know that. I'm sorry for what I said but it wasn't about you. You have to know that.'

Isaiah drops his forehead against the closed door. I still haven't moved from the edge of the bed where I've been sitting for what might be hours. The room is shrinking again.

'I'm confused, Dorian.' (I'm confused. I was confused first!) 'How can you tell me you wanna be with me when you can't even talk to me? What am I meant to think? I'm not dense; I know suttin's wrong. For starters, how did you live in New York City for four years and not go to one orchestra?'

I stare at my palms. 'I... I'm terrified of crowds.'

'But you always been terrified of crowds. It ain't stop you none of the other times. There's nothing that makes you feel alive the way music does. So why didn't you go listen to anything in New York?'

I open my mouth but words keep tangling and stumbling over each other in my throat. (You're wrong. You're more important than music.) My skin starts to burn again, though my insides remain cold and the discomfort of inconsistency makes it all the more unbearable. I rock forward and once I've started, I can't stop the swing of my body.

'Going to America wasn't some holiday for me.'

'I know.' Isaiah takes hesitant step after hesitant step until he sits beside me on the bed. 'So tell me about it.'

I can't!

'I'm sorry about what I said. I was– I'm scared. But it wasn't about you.'

'How could it not be about me?' he whispers. 'If you think you're damned, it's my fault. I made you sin.'

'You didn't make me... queer.'

'Didn't I?' Isaiah glances at the door, his thoughts practically visible in a floating cloud above his head: this is the point of no return. 'Cause you said you wouldn't never have done any of this if it weren't with me. You said you ain't never feel this for no one else. So if it weren't for me you'd still be HaShem's gold standard.'

My sight clears up enough for me to bolt my stare to his hands. He wrings them in his lap, fingers contorting in angles I know hurt him. 'I'm not a child, Shay. Or some object for you to ruin. You didn't manipulate me into having sex with you. Besides, I'm the one who kissed you — both times: on Bonfire Night and six years ago. If anyone here has ruined anyone, it's the other way around.'

'Not the same.'

He doesn't say it like a child who, unable to phrase a counterargument, points at their bully and mirrors, "no, you're stupid". It isn't a pathetic way of circumventing his logical fallacies; he genuinely believes it.

'How is it not the same?'

'Cause I were already ruined.'

Isaiah's breathing becomes as heavy as mine and a new wave of nausea hits me (unless that's guilt).

'I ain't never been invited to the Garden or the World to Come or whatever you want to call it. Everybody knows that.' He drops his head into his hands. With us sitting on the edge of the bed, he has nowhere to go without standing but I don't miss his lean away from me. 'And I'd already sinned plenty before you.'

Something falls in my chest. A clump of ice that delivers winter, blowing a gust through my body to cool it down. My vision clears, my head stops spinning, and physical illness yields to offer the stage to emotional sickness instead.

'You told me you hadn't.'

'I lied. Apparently, we both be doing that.'

'Why would you lie to me about that? I wouldn't have cared.'

He's shivering. He's crying. As quietly as he can manage, yes, but the tremble of his breath gives him away.

'It ain't mean nuttin, I promise. Not like with you. It only mattered with you.' His voice thins until it wears out and he has to gather it back into his throat to conclude: 'I didn't want to. But a sin is a sin.'

Something ferocious wakes in my chest, something with serrated teeth and five-inch claws that shred me from the inside. How did I never know? How did I never notice? 'Why did you never tell me?'

'I didn't reckon it were worth telling. It were normal to me. You grow up with suttin and it's normal. I only realised what it was as an adult. Not that I– I mean... I dunno. Maybe none of it happened how I remember. Time tends to embellish things. And I was medicated out of my mind often enough. I can't trust myself... Or maybe I didn't trust you.' It's intended to cut and that's exactly how I know it's dishonest.

Still, I reiterate: 'You didn't trust me.'

When the storms in my chest finally settle, the destitution is so silent I almost miss the panic. If I'm not drowning or burning alive (or somehow both simultaneously), where can I hide?

'You never let me come here.'

Isaiah stares at me, struck by the realisation. 'You're right...'

The rose filter on my memories fades. I hate seeing the flaws our friendship had even back then. It was supposed to have been perfect. I want everything to have been perfect but in reality, we were both too terrified of abandonment to ever show ourselves fully.

He never met my parents, I never met his. At synagogue, we'd pretend not to see them. Neither of us invited the other home. Neither of us trusted the other not to recoil — What is a home but an infected wound we keep shoving our fingers into? Aren't we more loveable when all we show is the blood on our hands?

We fall silent for long enough to realise that light is draining from the sky. The crack in the curtains feathers as the sun sinks too low for its rays to pierce through it. Isaiah casts his gaze toward me but turns to his feet before it can land. 

'I need... air.' It's a pathetic excuse but who am I to talk? When he has already stepped over the threshold, he looks at me for only a fragmented second. 'Shabbat shalom, Doron.'

The door shuts.

The ice melts back into an ocean and tears brim in my eyes.

Isaiah was my best friend long before he ever became my lover. I've mourned and accepted the fact I won't ever kiss him again, but I still wake up longing for a hand, to find him waiting for me at the school doors where he'll greet me with his "wah gwaan, cuz" and fall naturally into step with me.

I'm still in denial about the fact I won't ever get to meet his eyes at the other side of a classroom, to turn in search for each other at the exact same time and stifle grins because we're thinking the same thing and we both know it. That we won't ever get to meet in the hallway after being in different lessons, I won't spot him in a river of identical uniforms and he won't look up instantly and smile. We won't ever play wrestle in our spot on the grounds or in my dorm, he won't ever shove my head back and I won't ever elbow his ribs. He won't force me to dance to the music from his radio. I won't play him the music that's not on the radio. We won't ever throw rotting apples onto the road trying to aim them perfectly under the wheels of cars.

The heartbreak of losing him as a lover shattered me, but the ache of losing his love is what shoved me six feet under. If I have to dissect his friendship out of my life, there's nothing left. My life has always been Isaiah.

The agony of being so near him now whilst the distance between us is infinite is unlike anything I've experienced. Was our closeness always fiction?