by Nash Summers
****
When I awoke the next morning with my hand pressed against the cool sheets on the other side of my bed, I knew Ancel had already left. I lay in silence, blinking rapidly into the vacant space next to me, willing my heart not to break.
He was gone.
The morning light was streaming through my plain, white curtains and seeping onto everything in my room. The shadows it cast along the sheets did little but remind me of the absence of the man who’d spent the evening with his arms wrapped around me as he whispered into my hair. Everything in the daylight looked different now— strange and unfamiliar. I stood up and glanced around my bland, lifeless room, my eyes eventually catching on a piece of paper placed on my desk that had been torn from my notebook next to it.
I went to it, I picked it up, and I read it.
Rust,
Heaven isn’t enough.
Ancel
I spent the remainder of the morning packing the last few bags of things I was bringing home with me. Most of the furnishings in the apartment were packed, but the few things that were too big for me to take home with me, I’d already sent months prior. Slinging my bag over my shoulders, I took one last look around my apartment. The walls looked even more strained now than they ever had before, and the noises I could hear through the paper-thin walls were louder than ever. I’d never had an emotional attachment to this place, and had only a handful of happy memories while living there. I wouldn’t miss the city, or any of its buildings, pollution, or busyness. I was ready to shut the door on one chapter of my life and begin the next.
I was ready to go home.
I locked the door behind me, dropping the keys off in the landlord’s mailbox on my way down the staircase.
The walk to the train station was uneventful. My mind wandered, not to what it naturally wanted to wander toward, but of home. I thought of the field I missed so badly, my parents, walking down the main street and smelling all the new, freshly potted flowers.
Heaven was the warm embrace I needed just then, the reminder of the things in my life that had blessed me.
Without talking to anyone, and keeping my head down, I purchased my train ticket, boarded, and sat on one of the vacant seats next to a window. I watched people waving good-bye to their loved ones on the landing, smiles on their faces.
When the train began to pull forward, I brought my legs into my chest and wrapped my arms around my knees. Pressing my forehead against my knees, I took a deep, barely controlled breath, and thought of Ancel.
I thought of the way his eyes became dull when I asked him if he’d been with other men, and he told me no. He’d looked stricken by the question, hurt even. It had taken him out of my bedroom and pulled him someplace dark, and far, far away. When I looked at him, I could see the demons he battled every day— he wore them on his skin as noticeably as I wore my heart on my sleeve.
I thought of how his father had yelled at him, hit him when we were younger. Now that I was older, I knew those awful words he’d said to Ancel had turned into scars that were still as fresh as the day they’d first been inflicted upon him.
Ancel would never look at me the way I looked at him. But it wasn’t because he couldn’t, it was because he’d never let himself.
And then I started to cry.
I cried for most of the train ride home, while we passed by meadows of nothingness but grass and wheat, and in the distance, trees flickered by.
I didn’t cry for what Ancel had done. I knew he’d leave because he was never mine to keep. He’d never promised me forever, even though I’d begged him for it when I was at my weakest.
I cried because even though he’d broken my heart three times, it still belonged to him.
