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I’ve known Ethan my whole life.
As a kid, he’d never been exceedingly remarkable. He was as relevant as every other kid in the town, as in he was relevant only when I needed someone to entertain a game with me.
Nothing about him had ever stood out about him or had been especially notable to me, except his mother, a lovely woman. I quickly developed a fondness for her, and her shortbread. Subconsciously, he was already tugged into my life. Even if my five-year-old self had realised, I don’t think I would have acted to stop it. How was I meant to know that boy would grow into a tragedy?
I really started to take note of Ethan at the end of high school. Most people, during their teenage years, transform absurdly, turning brash and shallow in the pursuit of adulthood. That’s why kids become so unbearable during that age. I couldn’t stand it, their facades, too ambitious but also insecure. My parents had raised me like an adult, and so I was supported with the vain idea that I was better than other kids, who were, in my eyes, embarrassing lowlifes. My maturity was something to aspire, but my childish pride kept me at the same level as everyone else. Without it, I think I would have been able to achieve much more from my life.
Ethan during his high-school years… even thinking back to it now, I can’t suppress the smile that creeps onto my face. He had every trait that matched the trademark suave charm of boys his age, and amplified it impressively.
In a plethora of the ordinary, he stood out like a beacon. There was a way that he carried himself that made him uncannily memorable. His good posture was a dead giveaway, not just good, but relaxed, and comfortable. Without weakness or enemy. He talked little, without seeming curt, and when he did speak, it would be laced with eloquence, in that warm, soothing tone that was invigorating. He emanated a staggering aura of coolness and merit, and any room which contained him had its atmosphere instantly subdued.
It’d be crass to call someone perfect, but Ethan, he was definitely near to it. It wasn’t just me, of course, who picked up on it. Ethan’s nature sucked everyone towards him. I rarely saw him not encircled by people, but that suited him, a person who belonged on the highest podium imaginable. My self-centred self, believing I was also exceptional, paired us as meant for each other, which was likely every teenage girl’s fantasy back then as well.
He wasn’t like anyone I’d ever met, and so I found myself thinking about him often. It frustrated me that I was alike to everyone in the way I was drawn to him, but I reasoned that it was forgivable for a butterfly to be attracted to nectar. The truth was that it was more akin to a moth to fire.
The most dangerous interactions with him were those to be talking to him when he was alone. Around other people, he wasn’t lethal. You could keep your head above water. By himself, though, chances of surviving turned slim. It was too easy to be submerged and let the waves sway your clarity.
“I heard you were dropping soccer, Kris.” It was one of those dangerous instances. I’d been sent to the library by a teacher to collect something. As expected, the library was empty, which it always was outside of exam period. Empty, except for one person.
“Yeah, I am.” I looked around and it really was just us in the library.
“What a shame,” Ethan said. Watching him from afar was one thing. Talking to him like this, one-on-one, was almost daunting. He really did talk as evenly as he stood. “You’re really good at it. It’s straight-up talent.”
I shrugged. My sole virtue was that despite all my vanity, I’d never let praise soften me. “My mum doesn’t like it. She thinks it’s too boyish.” It wasn’t the excuse I’d made for my friends. Somehow, I wanted to give him the truth. It felt like testing how much weight a frozen lake could hold. Pressing down on the ice with one foot to see if it was safe. It wasn’t like me, to be so rash. Perhaps I wasn’t as impervious to flattery as I thought myself to be.
“I think your boyishness is cool.” It was the bluntness of his tone that left me surprised. It was a peculiar thing to say for a guy. It was a peculiar thing to say for anyone. “You’re so merciless with the ball. You don’t hold back a bit. I think you could play with the guys on the field at lunch and hold your place with them. That’s cool.”
All I could think, was how I’d been battered my whole life for something I’d perceived as a fault within me. Crystal, you’re too rowdy. I’d heard it enough to accept it as a flaw I needed shedded off. I didn’t think it could be something I could live with. I didn’t think someone would find value in it. “You really shouldn’t give it up.”
“I don’t know. I’ll see.” It’s charming to recall my mild tone, as if I don’t still play soccer to this day.
We only had a few interactions in school aside from that one. I would never have laid my pride down to go talk to him. His extremely social nature meant sometimes he’d run into me and have a good-natured conversation, but that was all.
It was that same affable demeanour that made him the ideal of the female gaze. This has always made sense to me. Ethan was perhaps the pinnacle of the female desire, what every woman wanted. Soft, strong, earnest, emboldening. He had always been the target of many women’s pursuit, of a great diversity of status, character, appearance, and also age. One time I’d strayed behind at school for too long and walking past the classrooms, and caught a glimpse of Ethan and a teacher talking. They were standing close together and she had her hand run down his chest in a cloying manner.
So Ethan had many women in his life, the frequency of it so jarring I felt as though he cycled through them.
It’s strange, though. I’ve never entertained triviality a moment in my life. I would never pursue anything that wouldn’t have benefitted me in the long-term. And I knew that Ethan played this game tritely. Even so, I dated him for a while. I guess it couldn’t have been avoided.
It was a little after high school. We’d graduated as vague acquaintances, but the two of us were the only ones who didn’t leave our small town as soon as we could. Ethan was amicable, so it was easy to become close with him. It was also easy to kiss him during the yearly fireworks. Honestly, I don’t think you should do something just because it’s easy.
Dating Ethan had never been fulfilling, but it was exhilarating in a way that I can’t describe. In some way, it was the best time in my life. There was a reason women would cluster to him so helplessly. He was so sweet, unfathomably sweet. Finding a man like him was like finding a needle in a haystack. Some nights I’d lay twisting restlessly in my bed, unable to push my heart down from my throat. In his absence I would crave him so much that it would leave me feverish. My days were enhanced with him in it and went sullenly without. Like a beacon of warmth in my heart.
I had many foolish thoughts back then. Originally, I was captivated by the idea of a man who matched my station, someone on par with my qualities. But, I realise now, that I was being arrogant. Ethan had not once in his life been even remotely on my level. In fact, he had always been too good for me.
I wasn’t short-sighted, or foolish. I knew that whatever was between us would never amount to anything, and I despised wasting my time. But I was afraid that my heart, that had become familiar with the warmth, wouldn’t be able to recover if it lost its beacon.
Within an astonishingly short amount of time, he became one of he most important things to me. Even then, I wasn’t lovestruck, not that I believe in such a thing, only lunacy. Throughout the time we were together, I picked up on little things that bothered me. I kept my mouth shut about it for as long as I could. I didn’t want to seem emotional, sensitive, thinking it would make me weak. But about eight months into our relationship, those little things became unbearable too.
He often misspoke, saying something so radically unlike his bright self it scared me. He’d try to amend it with a jaunty comment, but there was only so many times you can get away with the same trick. And, sometimes, when he stopped smiling, he would often dissolve into silence, staring at nothing and with such a harrowing look in his eyes that it made me nervous. One time I came home earlier than I should have and found him fumbling with a cigarette, although I’d never known him to smoke before. It was as if I was loving two different people entirely.
But I wanted to be loved, so I let the needle I found leave pinpricks all over my heart.
“That show you were watching today. What was it about?” Ethan asked. It was late one night and we were in bed. I was laying on his chest. His hand was in my hair, stroking it softly.
“It’s an action-thriller. The protagonist finds himself in a novel as its only reader, and he wants to change its ending.”
“Oh, really?” he mused. There was that warmth in his tone that burned my heart. “That sounds fun. Waking up in a world as a kind of messiah. What would you do in that situation, Kris?”
“I’d want to save as many people as possible,” I declared softly, my palm pressing into his collarbone. “It doesn’t matter what I have to do. I want to guarantee a happy ending for everyone that I can.”
I felt his chest rise under me with his inhale. He let out that breath after what felt like a long time. “That’s cool,” he said, unusually tender. “You’re such a cool person.”
“What about you?”
“I don’t know.”
Eh…? How many times had I heard that from him? It might have been the hundredth, or the thousandth. He would hardly answer my questions. Like he had this impenetrable fortress around him. It then occurred to me that I didn’t know anything about Ethan at all. It was no better than lying on a puppet.
That spring, his mother sent me a packet of shortbread, and within it I found strength.
“Let’s break up.”
He had been making dinner. Along with his many qualities, he was also an excellent cook. It was probably rude to do this before eating, but I realised suddenly that I wouldn’t be able to stomach his food. I was nauseous just looking at him.
He had been chopping something, but he stilled and I heard the knife skid. Ethan turned around and stared at me. There was a slit down his finger, blood beginning to pool. “What?” I couldn’t blame him. It was probably out of the blue for him. But I’d been pondering it for a month. When he saw my face, serious, he became quieter. “Did I do something wrong?” I thought that I caught a flicker of someone else, someone who was totally foreign to me.
I stood up from my chair. “I’m sick of you.” Maybe it was too harsh. Maybe it was too honest. “I don’t want to see your face anymore.”
For a moment, I watched a miracle. I don’t know how else to describe it, except the way a flower would have its petals wither and peel off. Just like that, he melted, every ounce of the nuanced, collected, beacon-like man I knew. Melted like snow might, that is, grow soft and asthenic, threatening to dissolve altogether. Out of all the faces he could have made, I didn’t think he’d make that one. Fearful and stricken. As if he was about to lose everything. I didn’t even know he could pull such a face.
“Please don’t break up with me.” It was so soft, feathery, and he seemed susceptible enough for the wind to blow him over. “If there’s something wrong with me, I’ll work to fix it.” I believed him entirely. That Ethan would readily acknowledge his flaws and then amend them in an admirable manner.
It only made bile rise in my throat, and I thought that I was so sick that I would never be able to eat again. “That’s the problem with you,” I said, and it was the hiss in my tone that made him cower. Or maybe it was the way I deemed him faulty. “I don’t want you to change, or become better. I only ever wanted you to be honest. Can’t you see? I’m in love with you, but you won’t even give me the real version of you. Ethan, how many times have you actually been authentically yourself to me? Has it been once? Has it even been once?” As Ethan became weaker, I got stronger. “You’re pretending. I don’t know how long you’ve been pretending. You hate the real version of yourself, so much that you bury it from the world. But you long for someone to love you, because you want to prove that your perception of yourself wrong.”
It sounded like a feasible interpretation, but really, I was speaking as I was thinking. I wanted him to know precisely how I felt, but my spite turned into something else when I tried to push more venom out of me. As I spoke, the little bits and pieces fell together, and all those little errors in his demeanour started to make sense.
All the women that loved him left him. It wasn’t because he was discourteous, or unloyal, but that they all ended up in the same position I was standing in right now. Facing a man who’d carved himself ceaselessly in order to appear desired. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the children around me in high school, using a front because they wanted to spurn their real self, and it made me angry.
I hated fake people, but what I hated most of all was the possibility that his sincerity, my beacon, was also fake, that I never really had been loved.
I compensated for the tears stinging my eyes with fury in my voice. “Everyone always ends up walking out, and you think, I’m still not good enough. Never, never has a woman ever wanted a man to be good enough. All she wants is for him to treat her well, and she would devotedly love every bit of him tenfold, every single bit, regardless of quality. The reason women leave you isn’t because you’re imperfect. They leave you because they were ready to love a real you, and you didn’t give them that privilege.”
Really, I wanted to end my life right there, in front of him. Because I felt as if I was making a terrible mistake, as if I was losing everything that mattered to me. I kept mustering false contempt, even knowing I wouldn’t be able to hold it. “How can you expect to be loved when you hate yourself so insanely? The truth is… the truth is that you’ll never be loved.” The last sentence was aimed at him, but when it fit me so jarringly, I resorted to falling quiet.
Ethan looked bewildered. I wondered if anyone had done this before, painted out each of his flaws and then asked him to interpret the final artwork.
He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then, “You really are merciless, and don’t hold back.” He was smiling bitterly. “But that’s why I think you’re cool.”
I stared at him again, at his hunched shoulders, at his pathetic expression, his face downcast with sad, miserable eyes fixed on me. There was not a shred of the man I had loved in him. It was strangely gratifying. I wondered if this was the real Ethan, the one he’d been so careful to repress.
A new emotion swelled in me, overwhelming and irrepressible pity. Because I knew the truth then. That Ethan was completely and utterly unloveable. The man of many talents, who was of borne of a different calibre altogether, was incapable of being loved. Not a single person in the whole world existed that was sweet and patient enough to love someone like him. And he wanted to be loved more than anything in the world.
I made him leave that night, without offering him a chance to finish making dinner. He obeyed me without complaint. Our final exchange was at my door, not tense, but some other feeling that left my chest taut. He had his hands buried in his pockets. He asked, “Can I hold you one last time?” It came out so weakly. Even if it killed me, I don’t think I could’ve refused him.
His arms felt familiar and safe around me. Desperately, I wanted to be a dreamer and to shut my eyes tightly and enjoy it. But I had only ever been a woman of rationality, and the sensible thing to do was to face that it was over. So I stayed stiff in his arms.
“I really did love you, Kris,” he mumbled, trembling against me. “I really, really did.”
Although I enormously wanted to, I didn’t believe him. That needle that I’d found had pierced a hole straight through my heart.
-x-
Getting over Ethan seemed like an impossible task for a while. But of course, I moved on. It would be useless brooding over one guy. Time would pass anyways. So I worked hard, something I really could do, and started making a name for myself. And then I got married, and had a little girl, who resembles her father with each day. It should be a habit to count one’s blessings. I don’t always remember what an enviable life I’ve been living.
It was on the streets one day where I was grabbed by the arm by a stranger on the way home from work. It was already quite dark and the man was tall and rough-looking. I thought that I was about to be attacked by a thug, and started gauging whether the business pants I was wearing would allow me enough stretch to land a strong kick.
However threatening his face, though, his grip was unthreatening. “Are you Kris?” he asked, looking serious, but not hostile. Even so, I snapped my arm free and stepped back. Seeing the cautious regard, he added, “I’m Silver,” punctuating it with a soft bow to prove his harmlessness. “I’m a friend of Ethan’s.”
Most places had closed by then, so we went over to a nearby convenience store. He bought two cans of a drink I wasn’t familiar with, and we stood under the cheap fluorescent lights outside to talk.
He offered me one of the drinks, and I thanked him. Before I opened it, I glanced over. “How do you know me?”
He looked amazed, and then began laughing. It sounded something like the engine of a reliable old car, a deep purr mixed with a slight wheezing. “You haven’t changed, huh?” He popped the can open and took a sip, faint amusement in his eyes. “We went to the same high school,” he said.
Satisfied enough, I opened the can and drank as well. “I’m not friends with many people from high school,” I said.
“Yeah, me neither. But that’s because high school really wasn’t my peak. Ethan was the only guy that wanted to hang around me,” he admitted.
I didn’t know how many years it had been since I last heard that name. I’d expected that I might crumple up and lose my senses if I ever did hear it again, but I didn’t. In fact, it hardly made me stir. I surprised myself when I said, coolly, “He’s like that.”
He stared down at his can darkly. It was strange that he’d stopped me in the middle of the streets, and I thought he might have something to say. He was silent for a long time. “Ethan hanged himself.” His eyes flickered up to me. “Huh? You’re not surprised?” he asked, astounded. “Did you know already?"
I wasn’t surprised, or even slightly moved. Eerily, it made perfect sense to me, for someone like him to find such an end. Still, I couldn’t help but think, what a shame.
I had many things to be grateful for. A job. A family. My independence. That made me fortunate. Because people didn’t receive things according to their calibre. If that was the case, Ethan would get everything I had and have it multiplied infinitely. His qualities deemed him meant for the very best kind of life. Nevertheless, he was always meant to meet this end, but it was still pitiable.
I left Silver shortly after. It would’ve seemed curt. But I had nothing else to contribute. Ethan was dead. Knowing it feels profound, although I don’t know why I feel this way. Thousands of people died every day, but I never waste time to mourn them. It should be the same. He didn’t mean anything to me.
I like your boyishness. It’s cool.
Where would I be standing today if I hadn’t been told that? And all the other things he told me. The man who was meant to save me, in the end, couldn’t save himself. He didn’t mean anything to me. But there’s this ache that forms when I think about him, this depressing feeling. Sometimes I catch myself thinking we were never too different, but of course, that's not true.
I resolved to work harder. I resolved to give more time to my family. I resolved to play soccer more. Knowing that the last tendrils of light from my beacon had been snuffed out, I decided to live my life with full determination.