the lingering fear of finding out that no one feels the way you feel
The cigarette had burned down to the filter twice before Larry spoke. Anastasia did not push him. She sat with her back against the low wall of the rooftop, knees pulled up, watching the city below them go through that strange stillness that only happens between four and five in the morning. The sky over [REDACTED]) was the color of a bruise turning yellow.
"I always felt very lonely growing up," he said.
He was looking somewhere past the edge of the building. The third cigarette glowed orange when he pulled on it.
"Most of the kids around me had older brothers. That wasn't my case. I wanted someone, you know, to help me navigate uncharted waters as I got older. Someone close enough to point and say, go that way. When I felt unsure. Which was often."
Ana did not say anything. She had learned that with Larry the silence had to be real. Anything she said now would close a door he had only just opened.
"So when I first could answer the harder questions about myself, the ones about who I actually was, I felt this huge pride. Because it was mine. Whatever I had figured out, I had shaped with my bare hands. No one handed it to me."
Something like a laugh came out of him. Not quite.
"And of course this comes down to music. It always comes down to music with me. I think my taste is something totally unique. Unreproducible. I curated it on lonely nights, alone, with that CRT screen and the names and the letters and the colors of the websites I used to dig through. You remember what that felt like? Sitting in front of one of those? Half the room dark, your face green from the monitor."
She nodded once. He did not see it. He kept going.
"When I got older, sixteen, seventeen I would sneak out. We had this steel door at the back of the building. You had to push it up and slide under. I got good at it. And then I was free. After one in the morning there wasn't a single soul on the sidewalk. Once in a while someone living on the street would say good night, and I would say good night back. That was it. That was the whole encounter."
He flicked the ash off the side. It fell and disappeared into the gap between the buildings.
"I would walk for hours. Earphones in, the cheap ones, the kind that hurt your ears after twenty minutes. The songs I was listening to, Ana, I can't even describe them to you. The ground under my feet felt liquid. I'm serious. Like I was walking on something that wasn't quite solid. I never did any heavy stuff. Never had to. Those songs took me to places I couldn't have imagined on my own."
She finally moved. She rested her chin on her knee and turned her face toward him. He still was not looking at her.
"One night I stopped. Right in the middle of the road. No cars. No school the next day. No classes. Nothing waiting for me anywhere. And I felt this dread, out of nowhere. Heavy. The kind that sits on your chest."
He paused. The end of the cigarette was trembling a little. Ana noticed and did not mention it.
"I thought, what if no one else feels the way I do right now? What if no one ever understands what these songs do to me? What's brewing inside me when I listen to them? And then I started walking home, and the loneliness was right there waiting for me. Like it had walked the whole way with me. I just hadn't seen it."
He pulled hard on the cigarette and let the smoke out slow. The sky was getting lighter. The buildings on the horizon were starting to draw their edges back in.
"I'm scared, Ana. Of not being understood. I've been scared of it since I was a kid. It's been ten years and I'm still scared of it. Maybe I'm just crazy. Or maybe that's the whole answer and I've been going around it for years."
He stubbed the cigarette out against the concrete.
"I'm still looking."
Ana looked at him for a long time. She did not say anything. She reached over and put her hand on top of his and left it there. The first real light of the morning was coming up behind them, and somewhere on the street below, a taxi driver started its engine and pulled away into the day.