your guys' comments make me smile more than i think they should.

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"Damian."

I'm awoken to a steady shaking.

"Damian, wake up."

Huh? Where am I? The florescent lights are glaring down at me, and I tuck my head into my shirt to block them out. Too bright.

"Damian." The voice is clearer this time. It belongs to a male, but the age is undetermined. Post-pubescent, but not elderly.

"Damian, I know you're awake. You slept here all night. Mom just about had a fit."

I rub the sleep from my eyes and look up at my brother. "Shit, did I really?"

"Yeah, come on. She wants us home."

I look over at Timmy. He's still laying there, fingers intertwined with my own. I must have fallen asleep like that, with my hand in his, and head on the edge of the hospital bed. We didn't have much success in finding anything more comfortable than the chair I already had, and when I stand, my back is stiff beyond belief.

"Still nothing?" I ask, in fear of my own question.

Teddy nods. "Sorry Damian. We can come back tonight, okay? I promise."

I lean down to give my sleeping boy a kiss on the cheek. His expression remains blank; no fluctuation in his heart pattern occurs; and I find myself struggling to hold back tears. "I'll be back tonight," I whisper to him. "I love you. Don't wake up without me."

"You're really cute with him," Teddy teases as we leave. The same nurse from before is still working the front desk, and waves at us on our way out.

"Take care of yourselves, boys," she calls, and Teddy gives her a salute back.

"And I sound like a total faggot for saying this, but I'm a bit jealous."

You? Jealous of me? Since when? "There's not much to be jealous of," I mumble. "Kissing a comatose boy isn't as much fun as fucking."

"C'mon Damian, that's not what I meant. Don't be like that."

I snap at him. "Like what. Sarcastic? Am I not allowed to be sarcastic anymore? Thanks, mom, thanks a lot."

"That's not what mom sounds like and you know it. Don't be an asshole. I know it's hard for you, losing Justin and then having this happen to Timmy, but it's not my fault. I didn't put him in a coma. I didn't kill your boyfriend. All you do is mope around like nobody else has problems or nobody else gets sad and you're the only one who's allowed to be miserable. Well that's not true, Damian. Open your fucking eyes."

I don't say anything. There's nothing for me to say. Teddy's hit me right where it hurts, and he knows it.

"Let's just go home, okay? You need some regular clothes. I can't take you seriously in those scrubs."

Just pretend like you didn't just rip my heart out. Just keep pretending I didn't already have enough trouble breathing. 

But he was right. I do mope around. I'm doing the best I can and right now that doesn't seem to be much.

I'm sorry I'm just so pathetic. I'm sorry I can't be the perfect son everyone wants me to be.

I'm sorry I'm not only gay, but I'm a fuck up too.

Teddy punches at the radio with an agitated finger. Nothing seems to come on to his satisfaction, and he finally switches it over to an alternative station in what I assume is an attempt to make amends. I stare at the cars rushing by and try not to hold on too tightly to any particular lyric. They all seem far too desperate for a Saturday.

Wait. It's Friday. Yesterday was Thursday. "Don't we have scho-" I start and then cut myself off, remembering he's still mad at me, and it wouldn't matter even if we did. It's not like I go very often anyway.

"Mom called us both in sick. I'm supposed to make sure you don't do anything stupid like jump off a bridge or take a bunch of pills while she's working."

"You think I'd do that?"

"Honestly?"

"Yeah, honestly." No, I mean lie to me. What else would I mean?

"I think there was probably a point where you would. But I don't see you being that desperate right now."

"Why?"

Teddy sighs and turns the radio down. "All this talking stuff is weird. I dunno, you just seem happier. Like there's a reason for you to keep living and it involves that boy who isn't even fully here right now but he's keeping you happy still. And I don't think I'll ever understand it completely. But you seem to. So we'll leave it at that."

"He's not Justin."

"I don't think you were looking for a Justin. You're a different person now. Like you need someone to take care of rather than take care of you."

I let him twist the dial back up until volume floods the car. I'm not sure how much I want to know he's been watching. I don't want to think that someone actually might be paying attention, especially not my brother. It's not supposed to be like this. He's supposed to harass me at school and ignore me at home, and refuse to give me rides even if it's minus thirty degrees outside.

Teddy gets out of the car as soon as we pull up, but I sit awhile longer and watch the rain collect into puddles on the hood. It's almost impossible to see the house from my window by the time I decide to come inside. The rain soaks clean through the teal material and makes my boxers cling to my legs tighter than I clung to Timmy's hand.

The shower is going when I make it inside. Teddy's probably a whole lot warmer than I'll be, but I'm not in the mood to try and wash myself and only hate all the imperfections. I strip down completely and crawl between the sheets again. They remind me of the bad news I received only hours before, but it's that or lay naked on the floor, and having someone walk in on that might be perceived as a mental breakdown.

Sure I'm sad, but I'm not insane.

"Timmy looked awful." The voice teases me by intertwining its words with images. "He's probably going to die before you get back there tonight."

I'm too sore to argue.

"Don't you fall asleep because you'll miss the phone ringing and Teddy will have to break the news to you. Wouldn't you rather hear it yourself? Wouldn't you rather know that you kill everybody you love?"

"I didn't kill him," I whisper at the wall, and almost expect the picture to whisper something back. Justin looks so happy, sitting on that hill with his arm around my shoulders. Death wasn't a thought that had crossed his mind. "I didn't kill him either, so don't try to convince me I did. It was an accident."

"But it was an accident you know was your fault. Do you even remember why you were so upset that you had to leave in the first place? Was it important enough to trade your boyfriend's life for it?"

"Piss off." I squeeze my eyes shut until coloured dots appear. They're shooting away from me, running away from a murderer. They're not done fighting for their lives.

Yet when I open my eyes, they all disappear. I've killed them all. Just like I do to everything I love.

Somewhere in the house, the water shuts off and I hear Teddy pull back the curtain. The metal rings scrape against the pole that holds them captive with a half-hearted fight; they know they will never be freed again.

"Everything's so good at giving up. Why don't you?"

"Will you stop tormenting me already?"

"Better not let Teddy hear you talking to yourself. He might think you're losing it."

I grit my teeth. "I've already fucking lost it," I spit at the air. "Why don't you see that I don't have anything left to lose?"

The phone rings and my heart stops in my chest. I'm frozen, lying in wait. I've forgotten how to breathe until I hear Teddy pick up the line and speak, "hello?" into the receiver.

"Oh, hey mom," he says, and I suck much needed air back into my lungs. It's just mom. It's not Mrs. McKinnon. Right now, everything with Timmy is how I remember.

"Unless she was too distressed to call you. Maybe she called your mom first, and this is her sharing the bad ne-"

"SHUT UP!" I scream, and feel my throat instantly convulse in pain. "Shut up shut up shut up. I don't want to listen to you anymore. Timmy is fine. It's my fault Justin is dead, but leave Timmy alone. Just LEAVE HIM ALONE."

My brother knocks on my door. "Are you okay in there?"

"Fine," I call back, and listen as the floorboards creak down the hallway under his weight. It's an old house. I remember when those wooden planks were lava, and for some reason, carpet could repel molten.

"You miss being a kid."

"Don't use that against me- it's the one thing I have left."

"Now Damian, you know I'm not that cruel."

"Oh but I think we both know you are that cruel. If anyone is that cruel, it'd be you."

"You created me, Damian. So that means you must be cruel too, to create something like me. Something like me when you were lonely."

"But we're not questioning my cruelty. We're questioning yours."

"Is it even a question?"

"Do you ever stop talking?"

The voice doesn't respond, almost as to rebel in response to my question. Something I've created, and it won't even acknowledge I'm there, simply just to spite me. Just to show me how powerless I am.

"You're like a child," I tell it, and roll back away from the wall. The opposite side of my room seems too far away in the darkness, almost as though my room grew with the lights flicked on. Much like the way a child's fears grow with the night. We're not afraid of the darkness- we're afraid of what it's hiding. We're afraid because we cannot see, and we cannot understand what we cannot even see.

We can't understand death.

Justin smiled at me from over the top of a weathered gravestone.

"It's pretty out here, when it rains. Everybody leaves us alone."

"Why do you like death so much, Justin?" I asked, shoving my hands deep into my pockets. The rain was coming down harder with each breath we shared.

He laughed and shook his head. "I don't. I hate it."

"Then why do we spend so much time in a graveyard, looking at the names of people who are um...dead?"

"We're not afraid of the night itself, Damian. We're afraid of its ability to conceal."

"What does that have to do with death?"

Justin shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, and rose from where he was crouching. He hung over the tombstone, but not in a way that was ominous. He was showing the dead how happy he was to be alive.

"We cannot see death. It's a mental thing. And to have someone who was there before suddenly disappear, the human mind is shielded from such possibilities. We cannot grasp the idea of loss without much work at it."

"So you mean if I lost a sweatshirt as a child, I wouldn't be able to come to terms with it until years later?"

He silenced my inane question with a kiss. "You know what I mean," he said when our lips parted. "A deeper kind of loss."

I find myself missing him now more than ever. Sometimes my rambling needs to just be silenced with a kiss. Justin knew me better than anyone else, and now the only person who knows me that well is myself. And even I don't know how to get the thoughts to stop.

Reaching for the phone on my bedside table, I flip it open and type an instinctual ten numbers into the keypad. I know he won't pick up, but I just need to hope that the line might actually connect to a voice other than the message from ages ago. I need to make sure I still know how to dream.

The line switches over to voice-mail, and I choke as the recorded response begins to play.

"Hey Justy," I whisper when it finishes, "it's me Damian, calling from Earth. I just wanted to see how you were doing, and ask how heaven was."