Home > When we were sea and stars

When we were sea and stars
Author: Elen Chase

 

ACT 1

 


Take my heart, and take it away

To where nobody knows us

Where time doesn’t exist

Where we can be together

Ageless, with no memories, with no past.

 


Sappho, Take my Heart and Take it Away

 

 

JAMES

 


The weather was hot. So hot I couldn’t move an inch. Wearing nothing but my swimming trunks, I was sinking into a plastic deckchair in the backyard, in the only spot – under the balcony – that the sun didn’t reach directly at that hour of the day. My skin felt soft and sweaty pressing against the back of the chair. The slats were going to leave a mark for sure, and I would have to hear Mary’s jokes about my back looking like grilled cheese all evening, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I had grown accustomed to my little sister’s weird sarcasm since she had become a teenager and had turned into a scathing, disrespectful brat. And to think that she was so adorable, just a few years ago. She was so proud of her big brother that she would follow me everywhere like a puppy. She’d believe everything I said and do anything I asked.

One would think that it’s normal for any nineteen-year-old brother and thirteen-year-old sister to grow apart, but our relationship went beyond not liking each other. Mary hated me. She had despised me for months and I couldn’t seem to find a way to fix it. I knew I was supposed to at least try to fix it – getting on speaking terms with Mary was one of the tasks my therapist put on the checklist she gave me before our family trip to Italy – but at this point I often found myself wondering if it was even worth the effort. Especially since I had heard her gossiping about me with her friends.

I didn’t know whether she did that to provoke me into a fight, to get some sort of revenge on me for stealing a lot of our parents’ time recently, or just for the pleasure of being mean. The thought that she could be jealous of me because of Mom and Dad’s attention almost made me laugh. It was true that these days they had to spend a lot of time cleaning up after my messes, but Dad barely looked at me, and Mom treated me either like an idiot or like a ticking time bomb. Not that they were wrong to do so.

The thing is… I fucked up. Big time. I fucked up to the point where my family could never look at me the same way. To the point where I had to drop out of school and be homeschooled until graduation. To the point where the last words Dad said to me looking straight in my face were, “I’m so disappointed in you, James.”

Was Mary jealous of that? Or maybe of the time Mom spent with me twice a week when she brought me to see my therapist? That sounded like some quality time together! Anyone would want that!

“Quality time with my family” was also one of the entries in the journal Dr. Westermann forced me to bring with me on this trip to Italy. The bare thought of keeping a journal of my “happy” memories with what was left of my family was so cringy that I was tempted to trash that notebook as soon as I got home. But it was a beautiful notebook with a blue leather cover and cream paper, and throwing it away would have broken my heart. Just one year ago, I would have been beyond excited to turn it into a bullet journal. I would have carefully designed pages and pages about every detail of the places I visited, of the people I met, of the language I heard. Italy was an amazingly inspiring country after all; warm, vibrant, with so much history and art to discover. The two days we spent in Rome after we landed had been amazing. When I saw the Sistine Chapel, it was so magnificent it almost made me cry; Michelangelo’s subjects were obviously religious but still delicate, true and heartbreaking.

When we left Rome, we traveled south. The closer we got to the tip of the boot – no wonder Italians are so stylish; their whole country is shaped like a boot! – the more colorful the landscape became. On the right side of the highway, the sea shined as if covered in crystals; white, shimmering lights dancing on an intense, deep, blue expanse of water, hitting the rocky shore. On our left, green hills and jagged mountains dominated the view, standing above us, tall and proud. Growing up in Connecticut, I was used to wide, green areas and driving for miles and miles surrounded by nothing but trees, but it was nothing like the landscape I had in front of me now; the sea and the mountains so incredibly, ridiculously close to one another, like we were driving along the frame of a painting.

For a little while after we arrived at our vacation house, I thought I could find something here. Something I lost or maybe I never had… I thought, sitting silently on the seashore at sunset, that maybe I could heal, like Dr. Westermann said. Maybe I could reflect on why things turned out so wrong in my life. I could try to speak with Mom or look Dad in the face.

If only that sense of peace could have lasted longer than my first few hours here.

The first, huge disappointment of this trip was that Mary and I would be forced to share a room, which Mom and Dad had known and never told us. They said this was the only house they managed to find on such short notice, and they couldn’t give up on it just because it only had one spare bedroom. As a result, Mary took over the room almost the entire time. Whenever we weren’t at the beach, she passed the time on the phone with her stupid friends or listening to her excessively loud R&B music.

It was to avoid her in the first place that I was melting in the backyard on a plastic chair instead of taking a nap in my room or spending some time alone with a bottle of lube.

That would be the second disappointment of the trip; settling for uncomfortable quickies in the shower, knowing that all my family was just behind the door. I was at a point in my life where the last thing I wanted was for anyone in my family to find out, guess or imagine anything about my sex life. It would hardly be the first time, but I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

The fact that Italian men were unfairly attractive wasn’t helping. They were loud, acted like they owned the world but still managed to appear charming and flawless. And – third disappointment of the trip – the internet revealed to me that South Italy was still pretty much a homophobic place, so I decided it was better not to take any chances. I wouldn’t know how to flirt or find someone anyway. I told myself that lie, pretending my cowardice was a consequence of not knowing the language.

I brought my hands to my face and rubbed my eyes, trying to shake away that sting of discomfort that was bringing too many memories back to mind. I breathed in, slowly. The warm, flowery air of the early afternoon filled my lungs and I savored it quietly before releasing my breath. My senses awakened, and I focused on listening to the domestic and already familiar noises surrounding me. There was a cricket, hiding somewhere in the trees. In the neighborhood, somebody was watching TV while cleaning up dishes. With some surprise, I noted that the house right next to ours was strangely quiet.

Our neighbors were a family of four, just like us. The parents were a middle-aged couple, who always spoke so loudly I couldn’t tell whether they were constantly fighting or if their life was a blast. I didn’t understand a word they said, but I liked listening to them. I thought that the Italian language, with its mixture of soft and hard sounds, was truly fascinating and sometimes sort of hilarious.

The first day we arrived, in the evening, Mrs. Rosa brought us a homemade pie as a gift, which was nice, but also cringy as hell. Regardless of what people say about Connecticut, we are perfectly civil with our neighbors. So we greeted her, thanked her politely, and then… she wouldn’t go away. What did she want? Was she expecting us to invite her in? What for? We didn’t even speak the same language. That moment was so awkward that she never rang our doorbell again.

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