FRIDAY
14 DECEMBER, 1990
ISAIAH

               My fingers are on the brink of being ripped out of their joints. I wring them incessantly as I pace; tug, twist, bend. The lamps on either side of the school gates illuminate semi-circles onto the gravel which I trace, never daring more than one step into the dark.

The sky is dim and though I know clouds block the stars, I can't stifle the fear they've died.

I can't see the stop, but I heard the evening bus when it came and went at least fifty paces ago. My thighs and toes are numb despite the fact I haven't stood still for longer than a second. Why don't I own a watch? I have no idea how much time has passed since I left.

She could hurt him. She could be hurting him right now. It was in complete earnest that Dorian said they would kill him. I shouldn't have left him with her! Why did I leave him–?

Shuffled footsteps.

My head snaps up. Recognising his gait before I make out his features, I run to him, run into the dark.

I tackle Dorian into a hug. He doesn't hug me back.

Clutching to my composure, I cup his face. The lamps of the gate are too far behind me and the school too far ahead to provide any light, even as it glows with four Chanukah candles lit on the menorahs behind every window. My sight struggles to adjust and all I see are the whites of his eyes, glistening in the dark. He won't look at me.

'What did she do to you?' With numb and skittish fingers, my attempts at caressing his temples end up raking his flesh. 'Whatever she said, it's not true. It's not true. I love you, Dorian — I know you better than any of them. It's not true.'

Dorian refuses to look at me no matter how much I implore. As my eyes adjust, the flat line of his lips materializes.

'They're sending me to America.'

The words hit the ground without detonating. There's no explosion, no shock wave, no ringing... just stillness.

'What?'

'They want me to go to yeshiva in New York — state, not city.' His voice is often toneless, but it has never been hollow. 'They already booked the flights.'

His eyes finally meet mine. The galaxy of his dark irises is as empty of stars as the one above us. But unlike the sky, there are no clouds, no curtain that can be pulled back to reveal the milky way: they're lifeless, unreflective.

My hands fall off him.

'I'm leaving tomorrow.'

'What? Wait. What? No.'

I step back from him as if my thoughts will flow better with some distance. They reel fast enough to make me motion sick, which in turn makes it impossible to catch more than a glimpse of anything other than the pestilent: This can't be happening! This can't be happening! THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!

'Fuck your parents. You can come stay with me– Well, you can't, but... we'll find somewhere. You can sell some of your stuff. Lower's hella cheap, we'll get a place to stay until Oxford. There's a motel; we can live there for a few weeks to start. Or we can leave, run away like we always said. Forget Oxford, forget all of this. Let's just go.' My arms, which have been frantically waving around, drop to my sides. 'They can't send you to fucking America.'

Dorian shrugs, not with the familiar twitch of the neck but with his shoulders. 'Maybe it's not a bad idea. Julliard is the world's highest ranking school for music...'

'But I can't afford phone calls across the Atlantic...'

He shrugs again and the textbook gesture is so horrible to see, the corners of my eyes sting.

'Sorry. I'm being selfish, sorry.' Mustering all my strength, I manufacture a smile. 'If you wanna go to America, you shouldn't not go cause of me. You'll come home for the holidays, right? We'll see each other then. I can save up to talk to you once a month or sum. We'll figure it out.'

'You should keep your money for something more important.'

'There ain't nun more important.'

'Maybe you should find something.'

My body admits the truth before my brain; tears well in my eyes but my tongue insists on ignorance. 'I don't understand. I don't understand what's going on.'

Sighing, Dorian shifts his attention to me. 'Listen, it's been nice, but this — whatever we have, it won't survive out there. We're too different, our worlds don't fit together. Aside from being Jewish and Jamaican, we don't really have anything in common...

'It'll end anyway. We might as well cut it off now before it gets painful.'

His annunciation is unnaturally perfect, tone masterfully conducted. He doesn't mean it. He doesn't mean it. I know him. This isn't how he speaks when he's sincere. Dorian isn't a person of reason, he doesn't act without considering emotions. It's his mother speaking. She rewired his brain somehow. I shouldn't have left him with her.

I know this. But the part of me that's my mother, the poet, the masochist that loves squeezing blood from wounds was convinced years before he said a word. It revels in victory.

'This ain't painful for you?' My voice snags in my throat. 'I thought we was moving in together. That were your idea.'

'It's a fantasy, Shay. It'll never work. You're not stupid.' Dorian says it in a manner I'm sure was taught by his mother: patronising and pitying. 'You know it'll never work.'

'Why not? It's worked this far.'

His faded eyes don't bother to respond.

I lunge at him, grip the lapels of his wool coat, and shake. But Dorian sways like a puppet. I'd rather he shove me off and scream at me not to touch him than this apathy.

'I promise whatever your muma said, it ain't true. What did she do to you? Dorian, please. I love you.'

'But it's not real, Shay!' he shouts. It breaks his trance. He manages to escape his mother's spell and his eyes blaze, but what he says with his own tongue is much worse: 'It's forbidden. I can't be with someone like you.'

I stagger back. The ground melts into tar under my shoes and I can't find stable footing. My breaths condense in the cold. I shake my head even when it makes me nauseous.

I've heard the statement more times than any other, spat out of every mouth in this God-forsaken town, and it has long since dulled. The wound has calloused. But Dorian strikes right through the armour.

'Of course, it's real.'

'Not to me. I don't expect you to understand it because you don't have a family but...' He shrugs once more. 'Blood's thicker than water.'

A laugh wrestles out of my throat. 'Well, so's yoghurt. It don't mean nuttin.'

'We don't make sense in the real world.'

The dry fire in the corners of my eyes combusts to consume my entire body in one flash. I shove him. 'Glad to know you've got the luxury to live in some fairytale, but I sure as fuck have been in the real world this whole time.'

I shove him again, and again, and again, but he refuses to warrant me a reaction. In the back of my mind, I know I'm yelling, I know anyone who happens to leave dinner early will hear me, but I don't care. I don't care.

I need to crack his ribcage open. I need him to feel the searing agony I do.

'Cause you're rich and go to boarding school, everyting's a holiday till you get to "real life" at eighteen? What am I to you, the scenic route? Fuck your best friend so you got sum to tell people for truth or dare or never have I ever at uni, so in twenty years when your kids call you boring, you can think to yourself, "if only they knew"? Fuck you! You know it's real. It's the realest thing we'll ever fucking have.'

Dorian refuses to reflect my anger and I hate him for it. How is it so easy to hate him? It's summarily injected into my arm with Muma's second-hand needles and it peaks faster than any of her drugs.

'It won't work, Isaiah.'

Isaiah. He says my name like my mother: with the crack of a belt. God never intended for me to be saved. You never believed it either, did you? You were never going to save me. I was never "darling" or "gift", just a stepstone to lift you above sin.

I was never permitted in the Garden so I must be torn from it. Though I always knew it would happen, I made the mistake of thinking it would be at some indefinite time in the distant future. Time is a trickster that way: it gives the illusion of forever exactly when it speeds up. No wonder God embedded apple seeds with cyanide — don't test me, I'll do it again if I have to. This is my fault, I did it to myself.

I scrub tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand. 'Of course, it'll work. We can make it work. Who d'you reckon decides? God? You choose, Dorian. You choose.'

He says nothing.

I scoff a laugh. 'Hope you like real life, Doron.'

He doesn't call me back or run after me and though I refuse to look, I don't hear his footsteps retreat. He must be staring at the grass; I would feel it if he was staring at me. He doesn't look at me and I hate him for it. You killed me; the least you can do is try to resuscitate me even once.

I unclench my jaw only when I sit on the curb at the bus stop. How I despise the green that surrounds me. Why won't it wilt with me? Must the Garden taunt me from behind its gates?

As I wrap my arms around myself, the scent of cypress releases from the striped brown jumper I wear under my jacket. I hate that it still warms me. I wish the cashmere would disintegrate into dust.

At the first hint of chamomile, I break down. Pain ravages my body in a way it never has before. It must be fatal — please, be fatal. But no, every second I think I'll die only to be dragged on living.

God must hate me. There's no other explanation. God hated me the moment I was born and this was all a punishment delivered surreptitiously.

If you heard me think that, you'd say something like "Judaism is fundamentally a belief of doing your best and forgiving mistakes. This fear of punishment is only the result of Christian hegemony warping our perception of our own religion." But why should I believe that when my mother has been right about everything else?

I cry until my head bloats from oxygen deprivation. I cry until I lose sense of direction. I cry until I'm sure I'm going to be sick. I'm going to vomit out my heart. Expel it from me. Get it out of my body, I don't want it! I knew it had grown too large; the only option left was to rot.

It must be torn out like wisdom teeth. Get me a scalpel — no, a saw and a fishhook. It's too late for anaesthetic and I want it gone. I prefer for the pain to be delivered in one savage ectomy rather than consistent cuts — rip off the plaster at once.

I'll toss the scraps onto the tarmac, stomp them into a bloody mush, and leave them there for the birds to pick at. At least it'll feed someone. I imagine my heart in the stomachs of beasts. I imagine my heart in your stomach. I hope veins got stuck between your teeth. I hope it'll take weeks to pick them out.

I can't believe I'm this stupid. I should've known better. I knew it was too good for me. I was never a real option to you. You were never going to choose me. Why did you let me think you would?

I always refused to read cynical love poems. Pessimistic drivel is praised only by people with the privilege to find beauty in suffering — in other words, people who've never suffered, people who don't know how often it is ugly, and how it is always bland. Pain is plain toast, forced down your throat without a sip of water, unwashed and overcooked rice that you have to choke down for every meal. There's nothing poetic about it.

I shouldn't have judged so soon. Isn't this precisely what they all wanted to warn me against? Isn't this precisely what Muma warned me against?

How will I ever go home and face her now? I'll slip into the house only for her eyes to nail me to the door like a butterfly. She'll know in an instant, recognise the fracture between two lungs and turn away, the sight too pathetic even for her to deliver an earned: I told you so. I imagine her hugging me, whispering that she knows, she understands my pain. Would it be funny or cruel if this was what ended the animosity between us? For the first time in eighteen years, we have something in common: being abandoned by the lovers we thought would hold us forever.

Maybe it's my father's fault. Humanity is doomed in loops of history, the past is a noose around our necks.

Maybe I was the only lover and Dorian was loved. I don't know if I ever will be again.

I always knew you'd be the death of me. I didn't think you'd be the one to go in for the kill.