We sneak up to the roof of the hospital. “I like it up here,” Matt says. “I used to come here sometimes.”
Given recent events, I’m not too sure we should be on a rooftop. The side walls are high and I can’t see an easy way over, but still. When I do leave, I’ll tell the nurse. It’s not ratting someone out when you’re trying to save their life, right?
Right. I know this. I know it.
Matt smiles into the starlight, his face gleaming in the glow of the emergency exit sign. “Music?” he says, and I pump up the volume on my phone. The tiny speakers strain to do Billie Eilish justice. Maybe someone inside will hear it and come to investigate, making it no longer my responsibility to get Matt back in bed where he belongs.
Was this a huge mistake?
Matt reaches for my hand. It’s anything but a mistake, the way he pulls me to him. The way we fit, the way we sway.
I can’t tell him anything about what’s going on at home. If this is our last moment together before Matt has to go away, I want it to be perfect. I relax into his arms and I feel at peace for the first time since … well, anyway, for the first time in a while.
“My mom loved music,” he says. It will be the last time, for a long time, that he mentions her. Here, under the stars, with our fingers intertwined, both of us feeling more alive than we have ever felt.
“My sister loved to sing. Always kinda off-key and at the top of her voice.”
“If they were here, do you know what they’d say?”
I tip my face to the clouds, scan for gaps, counting the sprinkling of stars. “That we have to go on. It’s okay to let go. Sadness, missing them, it doesn’t have to define us.” Except in the ways that it does.
“Eeeeeeeenp.” Matt makes a game show buzzer noise. “‘None of that maudlin shit.”
“What then?”
Matt shakes his head. “Dance par-tay!!!!” He taps my phone screen, changing the music from rich harmonious melodies to upbeat Panic! at the Disco.
We are gay teen boys. One of us is closeted. One of us is (or was, or might have been, or could someday again be) suicidal. And still we find it in us to dance.
We are gay teen boys rising up out of tragedy and pain. To have the world tell it, we are our tragedy. We are our pain. We are everything that is wrong.
Some days, I almost believe them. Almost.
But then our hands meet. No one in the world understands this feeling. How Matt, even at his lowest, makes me feel high. How our aching hearts only ache because life is worth living, and way down deep we know it. And it hurts. It will always hurt.
Matt pumps his hands to the sky and I imagine life with him and without him. I don’t know his pain and he doesn’t know mine but every once in a while, through the cracks in our foundation, we see each other true.
He is beautiful. He is flawed. I can’t get enough of him and it baffles me that I could ever catch his eye.
The boy I love will carry a parachute to the top of a mountain and somehow float down unharmed. He will ride his bike down a hill not holding the handlebars, his hands raised as if conducting a symphony. He will go to rehab and come back, not changed enough, and go and come back again.
Soon enough I will realize that I fundamentally don’t understand why it happens. How someone who embraces living as much as Matt does could ever have wanted to die. It will make me fear our collective minds, so full of twists and turns and lies. It will make me love him more and more.
It will hurt. It already hurts. Everything fucking hurts, and still we are bigger than our tragedy. We are not deviant, we are exultant. We are on top of the world.
We are bigger than our tragedies, all of them. Because there’s music. There’s Matt’s fingers in mine and his laugh in my ear. And there are stars all above and around us.
“How are you?” I ask him.
“What?” He leans closer.
“How are you?” I shout, over the music.
“This minute?” he shouts back. “I’m golden.”
It’s enough. For tonight, it is enough.