SATURDAY
15 DECEMBER, 1990
DORIAN

               Heathrow Airport is so bright and noisy, I think I might be sick before I make it through the bag drop. I'm not, though by the time we arrive at the security check queue where my parents will no longer be able to follow, my fingers are numb and pins pierce my palms. The floor is cracked ice; one wrong step and I plummet. How can I, looking up from rock bottom, still be afraid of falling?

Aba squeezes my shoulder in a way I know he believes to be reassuring. His smile is the same one he wore before my piano recitals when I was a child and still deserved casual encouragement. 'You'll excel at this.'

I stare at him. The little breakfast I managed to force down lurches in my stomach.

I don't want to excel at this. Yet part of me wonders if I'll be able to stop myself. I have been trained to be exceptional at everything I do, to never settle for less. I've become such a perfectionist that if conversion therapy were ever to work, it would be with me.

All I can muster for my father is a tight smile that lasts a single second. Then my mother does something she never has before: she hugs me.

I'm taller than her and she rests her forehead against my shoulder while I stand there, unable to reciprocate. When she pulls away, her hands frame my face like a painting she wants to hang on the wall.

I wonder what she had to do to convince Aba to marry her. After all, from the little I do know of her childhood in Jamaica, she was poorer than Isaiah and I can't imagine my father doing more than curling his lip. Thoughts of magic love potions flit at the back of my mind along with the question that, if she wasn't my mother and we weren't born on islands on different sides of the ocean and into different generations, would we have been friends? But whoever Ima was back then is long gone.

'We'll see you when you're better.'

The worst part is that she's sincere.

Perhaps it's that which finally breaks the film over my tear ducts, allowing my eyes to well until her features blur. 'I don't want to go. Please don't make me go, Ima.'

She merely continues to smile and caresses my cheek. 'You know you have to...'

'I love him.'

To anyone observing, we look nothing out of the ordinary, nothing but parents farewelling their child for what might be the first time and the parting makes them all a little teary. They don't see the blood, the hole in my chest like a shotgun wound, or the red hands my mother embraces me with.

'You won't forever, Dorian.'

The words are a caution sign and after nearly eighteen years, I finally understand. Dorian, doron, gift. The name was not given to me because I'm her gift, she chose it so that every time she called me, I would be reminded that she's the one who gave me the gift of life and she can take the gift back anytime she wants. Dorian. Dorian. Be grateful, Dorian...

Hours later, when I board the plane, I'm relieved to find I have a window seat. It minimizes the social interaction I'll suffer in the next ten hours.

My gratitude is premature. I've hardly crammed my bag under the seat in front of me before the woman in the middle nudges me. She takes in my miserable appearance (my eyes still red and puffy). 'Don't fly well?'

As much as I want to ask her to leave me alone, I try to mirror her demeanour, relaxed but also attentive. 'No. I'm not great with planes.'

It's not a lie but I don't normally have breakdowns.

'So what's taking you to The Big Apple.' She tries to say it in an American accent but it's a hideous attempt. Isaiah would say it perfectly, either in a southern drawl or in the Hispanic musicality of the Bronx. I wrestle a scowl.

'Umm... school.'

She smiles and goes on about how lucky my generation is to have such ease at travelling, that when she grew up in the fifties, the closest anyone who wasn't an international business tycoon or in the army got to a plane was seeing it in the sky. Her words muddle in my ears. I stare at my hands, gripping my knees to stop them from shaking until the engines turn on and I flinch.

I attempt to smile as I pry my QFC cassette recorder from my bag. 'I don't do well with the noise,' I say in imitation of an apology and clamp the headphones over my ears.

The woman turns instead to the man in the aisle seat who, thankfully, seems happy to join the conversation with a story of the first time he ever flew. It was a small propeller plane from Sri Lanka to India and he spent the whole time regretting that he didn't take the ferry.

My fingers tremble as I rewind the December tape back a few minutes. When I press play, I hear birdsong and though it's not what I'm looking for, I leave it there. All the sounds that used to serve testament to Earth's beauty are nothing but a clamour in my skull.

Contrary to what I've believed for most of my life, Heaven is not music. Heaven is the peace I felt lying next to you, the only time I've ever felt free to breathe without monitoring. (Even my breaths are inadequate to my mother — "stop complaining," she'd say when I exhaled too sharply after forgetting stale air into my lungs.) Heaven is the communion you offered me. Heaven is the way you effortlessly siphoned the dissonant noise from my head.

We were both wrong. You were always the composer, the composer and the poet. I was merely the hand.

Maybe it was all a test. I failed. I failed miraculously and now I'll never get to see Heaven again. How merciless it is that my taught excellence should fail me exactly where I need it most?

Just as the plane tilts, Isaiah harpoons my focus. 'Wah gwaan, cuz.'

I press myself to the wall and pretend to watch London shrink below us.

'I'm recording this in secret so I gotta whisper. I wanna read you suttin. I wrote it on the coach this morning so don't expect no sonnet. It's just thoughts. Thoughts about you, obviously.' He pauses as if I might respond. 'Okay. Imma read now.

There will be a fall.

Is it prophecy or pattern? Wisdom from God or maybe the geezer at the corner of the street. Did you hear it on the radio? There is always a sinner. There is always a lover. Always something torn. We all know there is going to be a fall.

Is it nature or nurture? Island-drawn, dominated by river. I am still afraid of the oceans I have never seen. The river is the route. The river is the root. Must something always drown? I could only ever float until one day I realised I could swim.

Is it hormones or Hell? Your kiss lights flames in my chest. We are dancing on the precipice of the fire, my love. Maybe damnation is sweet. Maybe damnation is a tale. Ours is a gentle sin. There was no crime when you looked at me and I smiled.

You taught me how to love without ever falling.

...Well, that's it. It's a bit short.'

By now, I'm crying enough for the woman beside me to notice (probably along with everyone in the nearest two rows) though I'm sure she attributes my waterlogged eyelashes to my fear of flying. I find that I don't care. Let everyone on the plane think I'm weird, what does it matter?

'Anyway... I love you, in every way that it's possible to love another person. I know we're not supposed to say this sort of stuff anymore, that we're all supposed to be happy alone and love is stupid, and it's old-fashioned of me, but... I don't know if I could survive without you. And if we're moving in together, I guess I won't ever have to.'

There's a moment of silence during which I know he smiles and my heart flops around like a fish trapped behind my ribs. Who knew fish were capable of drowning?

'I'm really happy, Doron. I just wanna ask you to do one thing when you find this: compose a song about us.'

Everything I've ever composed is about us. Did he not know that? Did I not tell him that? Now, I never will.

Dissolving into my seat, I conduct rhapsodies in memoriam of his wrists, of the peppering of vitiligo on the skin as if his friendship bracelet has eroded the melanin over the years, of the cigarette burn on the flat of his forearm, of the juxtaposition of robust tendons to delicate radius, which are never mutually exclusive because he is equally as strong as he is gentle.

A hum and a click announce the end of the tape. I don't move, eyes fixated on the view until the ocean opens below us and I fill with a loathing just as deep.

The ocean isn't what I want, nor the dessert. I want the wet sand always kissed by a sea that returns no matter how many times it's banished, the kind that's comfortable to sink one's toes into and mould sandcastles out of, but that wipes clean every morning. Will our love be washed away just the same? Will he have forgotten it by Monday? It's what I deserve.

People often tell me I'm bad company: I always appear like I'm trying to escape. I look for the exits in a room just as quickly as I do in conversations. Was that what I was doing even with him? Did I identify the escape routes on the day we met, keep record of them for eleven years to flee the moment his love could no longer repel my fear? Did I always have one foot out the door?

Didn't I always know it would end like this?