Scraped Knees

I had never noticed it before. How loudly people laughed in public spaces, as if they were in some kind of contest. Who’s the happiest? Who can take up the most space? I couldn’t understand how they found the air to make such a sound when there was hardly enough in this little coffee shop for me to breathe. Each sound changed the shape of the letters on the menu above, making them into something else. Something not for me. Something to separate me further until I wasn’t sure that I was even here. Next to the line I had placed myself in was a balding man with narrow shoulders hunched over the glowing letters of his laptop. Those, too, I could not read. He was writing something, a book maybe? Strings of black text across the whiteness of his screen. As if communicating in Morse code to the laughing girls at the next table over, his thumb kept jabbing into what I assumed was the delete key. Perhaps it was an SOS because their giggling was also changing the shape of his letters, or perhaps he saw me floating along, unable to read, and wanted to help me. His good deed for the day, helping a stranger—a someone.

Was Damien still someone?

Hush, don’t think about that. Focus on the menu, on the loops of what had to have been letters, until they translated into something I could read. I had to. I placed myself here after all. I could have told Patrick no when he invited me to get a coffee and to offer his support. What kind of support could he offer me really? There was no air here. No gravity for me to fall. If my feet fell away, I’d just float away. The least he could do, though, would be to read the menu to me, because I still couldn’t decipher what any of those swirls and lines meant. Coffee. Surely one of them meant coffee. This was stupid, and I was being pathetic. It was a menu. I could read the thing on my own.

There was a woman in line ahead of me. She was gone now. Not off to the side or sitting, from what I could see. Just gone. Like the space itself had shifted and pulled her in. Consumed her. Or perhaps it was me. That wasn’t possible, of course. I was just being melodramatic and, frankly, a bit stupid. She had probably ordered something simple, so she didn’t have to wait, like one of those pastries out of the display case and I had just missed her and been too focused on the weird shapes of the menu and the tap, tap, tapping of the delete key trying to expunge the girls’ giggling.

I missed a lot of things. I missed Damien as well.

A pretty girl with strands of blond hair hanging in front of her face waved me to the counter, calling me to remove the void left where the woman had been. When she smiled, a set of perfectly white teeth gleamed at me. Teeth that probably never touched coffee. What was she doing here? Was she like me, an outsider who didn’t belong? No, I belonged. My teeth were stained, as they should have been, except I still couldn’t name any type of drink that I would have ordered at a place such as this. Maybe there was a black hole somewhere in here, one that stole the woman from earlier, my memories, and the stains on the girl’s teeth.

“Welcome to Beanz, what can I get you today?”

That’s right. I was supposed to order something. She was waiting for me to order. To smile back, though the muscles in my lips wouldn’t work—atrophied from the lack of gravity, the lack of Damien. How was it that he ever saw the good in me?

I gave up on the menu. None of the shapes would form themselves into words. This was a coffee shop. Just say coffee and hope she asks nothing more, and if she does, I’ll just order one of those cookies in the display case, and then I too will go away like the woman from before, and somehow, that would be normal, things a normal person would do.

Or I still could just leave. It might look odd to turn around without a single word, but who cares? Chances were I wouldn’t come back here again. I would have to message Patrick. Tell him something came up, or that I felt sick, or… He’d understand, given the circumstances and all. Circumstances! I can’t believe I let that word drift into my head. Everyone used that expression when the actual word had a certain sharpness to it that left cuts in the mouth.

Dead. He was dead. Damien had died.

My fingers dug into the wood-grain counter. Underneath, there was a splinter, and I liked the way it pricked the tip of my finger, like the way the word dead pricked my tongue. Both were real. It was hard to tell what was real anymore.

“Coffee,” I forced myself to say, and before the girl had the chance to open her mouth, I motioned to the brightly lit display case. “A cookie too.” Might as well stay a step ahead.

The cookies were flower-shaped, decorated with white and pink icing, and it might have just been because the light was so bright and moisture had bled through the icing, but they looked like they had sparkles. She reached for one of the most beautiful cookies. Perfect icing on each of the petals, not a crack or misplaced crumb. “Not that one,” I said. Next to the perfect one was another, a broken one, its petal missing, its Damien gone. Her hand remained frozen within the display case, and though I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face, I imagined that she must have raised an eyebrow. What was wrong with me? “Never mind. Give me the normal one.”

On the counter sat my coffee—black like a starless sky, or perhaps it was the black hole that swallowed everything up—and my unbroken cookie. Neither I really wanted. They were just there. To give me shape. To make me like the rest. Something heavy and warm wrapped itself across my shoulders and drew me into its gravitational pull, then spoke softly into my ear in a voice that might have been Patrick’s in another world. “Hey buddy, good to see ya.” What was I thinking? Of course, it was Patrick. My body had already collapsed in on itself, and I had to remind myself that this was my friend and I had no reason to shrink away.

Then he added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Sorry? What was he sorry for? I was the one who had missed Damien. Not him. I wanted to ask him why he used the word sorry and what exactly he meant by loss, because what did I lose? Damien, yeah, but it didn’t happen because of his death. I lost him long before.

I didn’t ask him any of that. Instead, I mumbled a dry, “Thanks,” and when I reached for my bag to pay for the black hole pretending to be my coffee, and the cookie that I regretted being whole, Patrick stopped me and offered to pay.

On my way to the table where he told me to sit down and relax, I pressed my finger and thumb against one of the petals of my flower cookie and it broke with a tiny snap that seemed to echo off the warmly decorated walls and let the cookie’s Damien crumble to the floor.

“How’ve you been holding up?” Patrick asked me while letting his chair scrape sharply against the tiles. The two teenage girls who sat at the table across from us glanced in our direction. One smiled and moved her hand to shield her mouth while whispering something to the other girl that I could not hear, or my ears refused to let me hear. The man with the laptop, he too had vanished. Or maybe he was never there. Or my black hole also made him go away.

Swirling my coffee to see if any stars might get displaced from the black hole in my cup, I mumbled, “Okay,” which must have been the correct response because Patrick’s smile reflected on the black surface of my drink.

“Good to hear, buddy.” That word again, buddy. It meant we were friends, and I should stop obsessing over the black ripples within my hand and look up at him, and if I could manage, pretend to smile. He really was trying, and I should too.

“Your friend,” he continued, and I fought back the urge to correct him with his name, Damien. “When was the last time you hung out with him?”

There it was. The way one measured the depth of friendship. Time between last meetings. Unimportant, but also, everything, which made my answer of “Ten years” all the harder to force from my throat.

I knew what would happen: the shift in his face would come. What’s that emotion called? Surprise? Ten years. Truly I had no right to be acting like this, to be this sad, this messed up. This fact wasn’t lost on me. If anything, the gap was the point. Best be careful, my coffee grew a shade darker, and if I didn’t know any better, it looked as if it were interested in the girl sitting closest to me, scrolling through her phone.

“Wow,” Patrick said. “So, it’s been a long while?”

“Yes.” A normal response. A true response. Good job.

“At least you have lots of good memories with him, yeah?”

This was the point that I should have agreed again, because yes, I absolutely did. The time he picked flowers from his neighbor’s garden, only to give them to me, the time he bought himself a mug with my name on it, and kept next to his bed—so that my name was the first he would see after waking up—and the time he held me up on his skateboard, even though his own knees were scraped to hell. All good memories. All the reasons why I looked not at him, but always at someone else. Too weird, too honest, too Damien. Back then, I didn’t want Damien or even my own name, but things like normal and cool.

In the end, I did not agree with Patrick, because it itched on my tongue, the Damien begging to be seen, to see me. That thing called honesty. I gave him something ugly instead.

“I broke his heart, you know, Damien’s. A lot.”

Hands along the ridge of the table, Patrick pushed himself away, his chair again making that loud scraping noise that drew the eyes of the girls across the coffee shop. It looked as if he were considering leaving. I wouldn’t blame him if he did. I’m not sure if I would even care much. Because if he wanted to leave, then he should have. I’d prefer it if he didn’t pretend. But he remained in his seat and, from lips that almost seemed to twist, he said one word. “Oh.” Not that there was anything else for him to say. If I were in his place, I would have done the same. I know saying something like that to Patrick was unfair. He didn’t have to be here just as much as I didn’t. It would have been better to have kept that last statement to myself, and on any other day I would have. But with the void, the missing petal from my cookie, the words were sucked out of me like a vacuum in space.

Clearing his throat, Patrick said, “We all make mistakes. I’m sure he knew you cared.”

“One time, I told Damien I couldn’t be with him because I planned on leaving town once I graduated. I assumed he’d stay here in our hometown. I never bothered asking.” More things I should have kept to myself. The words should have burned out along with me. They did for Damien. But I couldn’t, no, I didn’t want to. If Damien could be Damien. Maybe I should be me. Even if I meant I was horrible to another, all over again. “I never bothered asking because it didn’t matter to me, at the time at least. I was interested in someone who got good grades and didn’t wear the same dirty band T-shirt every day to school or walk around with scraped knees.” Those last words hurt, especially after they tumbled out.

“You can’t help who you’re attracted to,” Patrick said.

That wasn’t the point. I wanted to tell him that. Damien would have wanted me to as well. Because it’s you, because it’s true, he would say. What a dork. What a weirdo. What a beautiful thing. He never seemed to mind the ugly parts of me, and boy, there seemed to be plenty of ugly. I wonder if maybe, even though they stung him each day, those parts that Damien loved just as much as whatever I had that might have been good.

We sat out on my front porch one summer day. He had actually waited out there all morning for me to come out of bed. In his hands, a tattered black notebook, his journal, he told me. He didn’t even blink, just handed it over for me to read. He wanted to see mine too, to better understand me. I watched as he read the parts about me loving someone else. I’d like to think that I felt guilty as I read, that it was cruel and I should have told him to skip those pages, or even rip them out. It’s been so long, but I think that he only smiled, then asked me to join him on a walk.

“Maybe that’s true, that I couldn’t help who I was attracted to.” A tremor broke through my voice. I wanted to hide that too, but I couldn’t. Damien would have wanted that too. “But I was horrible to him. Wanna know why?” I didn’t wait for Patrick’s response. “Because I thought I was better than him, because I followed the rules.”

“That’s not true,” Patrick said.

“But it is.”

“He wouldn’t want—”

“Don’t pretend like you know what he would have wanted.” Both girls from the other table looked up from their phones, and one of them stifled a giggle. “And what’s worse is I can’t say that I know what he would have wanted either. And that right there, that’s the point. Being himself, that’s what I hated so much, because he wasn’t normal, wasn’t cool. I should have told him sorry ten years ago, and now it’s too late.”

My face burned with the heat inside my chest, and a tear that pushed past my eyes dripped down into the blackness of my coffee. A star. Not all black anymore. The girl at the other table giggled. That was okay. What did I have to hide, to pretend? Let them see the ugly, like Damien saw mine and never looked away. After this, maybe I’d go and buy myself a mug with his name and stop hiding away the scrapes on my own knees.