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THE ANAMNESIS OF HELIOS,
- SONG MINGI.
One may act nonchalant as Hemingway has all his life, behave unnervingly to his family, and hold the motto his grandfather had brought him up with, yet even the most sane man loses his vision in the path of fervid infatuation.
Call it what you may, because this little piece is a small part of my life that I never wished to unveil to anyone beyond my conscience, yet this small part consists of a boy. A boy, a student in my class.
Now, dear reader, I will keep his name out of the tip of my pen as I wish to let it drip of its sanctity from my lips to his ears. I’m selfish in my way.
I had been in many relationships during my time in university and high school, along with a failed marriage with my girlfriend at the age of twelve. Thus, it was odd for my id to seek out a particular twenty-three-year-old boy with long, smooth hair, a sultry smile, big, brown eyes, ivory skin, and slender, dainty hands which were always adorned in silver ornaments every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; the days I would teach his class. He had equally long arms and legs, a true work of art. The boy wasn’t a part of the literature department at all, in fact—he was majoring in music composition—yet he had opted for my class as an optional sixth subject at the last moment. He would laugh as he reminisced about it with me in the locked space of my office after hours while laying soundly on the L-shaped couch with his laptop resting over his broad chest.
His mind intrigued me, and continues to do so. Despite majoring in an entirely different stream, the assignments he would submit would be nothing short of eloquent. Be it The Plague of Thebes, Cisneros’s Modern Rework of the Legend of La Llorona, or a mere character study of Beatrice in La Vita Nuova; the boy’s work would beautifully incapacitate mere words and weave the most melancholic scenes into a compelling read of his own. How a student of music managed to write assignments with the lowest percentage of plagiarism than most literature majors was always beyond me.
And perhaps, this was the beginning of my doom.
It would become a habit of mine to invite the boy into my office on the days he would be unoccupied and converse with him about anything and everything. The line between a chaste student and teacher relationship slowly became a blur when minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days, days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months.
Four months.
Four months since I had invited that boy into my office, our first kiss two days later—well... not our first kiss. In the name of a first kiss, we kissed each other three separate times before a phone call from his roommate interrupted our sweet halo. Two weeks later after clandestine kisses in the same space, I claimed him in the comfort of my apartment with dim lights and the city lights of Rome shining onto sacrilege flesh.
I am a man, after all, and I’m no better than a sick, corrupt one who is bewitched by a boy almost a decade younger. He had made his way into my office when the clock struck three in the afternoon—it wasn’t a surprise he knew my schedule after all this time—with his sweet smile on the face I had begun to adore over the months, a loose sweater gracing his soft body with baby blue jeans, and just one ring on his right hand, a silver waxing crescent moon graced delicately on his ring finger. Even with his black hair a tousled mess, it radiated a glow of a thousand suns combined. The epitome of sunshine, a muse with no poet to unravel the truth about. Yet.
That night in my apartment... just days ago, I recall the sweet conversations we had over a glass of scotch. His nose would twitch adorably at the almost seaweed taste of the drink, I couldn’t hold back a chuckle of my own at his little grimace. Bright exchanges got scattered once our lips slotted against each other’s, with the boy seated comfortably on my left thigh, wandering hands grasping onto the first fabric they could clutch on as the scarcity of air didn’t dull the fierce, tantalising dance of our tongues.
Reader, I miss his presence the more I recall the taste of the strawberry gloss on his pretty, plump lips which left a lingering sensation on my lips. No other pair of lips could make me use my pen on the first sheet of paper I can find to still the continuing burn of my heart each time I recall that angelic boy’s habit of grasping the back of my neck, digits holding onto my hair as we kiss each time. Our clothes shed just as quickly as the slow music on the recorder dissolves into my bedroom, I hadn’t closed the blinds of my windows that night so the dim lights showed our silhouettes waltzing a dance only we knew. Tongues exploring the warm cavern of sweet, plump lips with hands gripping onto my skin as quickly as they could find. The boy’s fingers kept winding up to hold my platinum hair with no intention of letting our lips part. It amused and lit a fire inside me that he wanted this just as much as I did.
Nestled in between his thighs, firm grip on his hips with mauve bruises adorning his pale skin—I ruined him.
A ray of starshine he is, holding the worth of an entire galaxy with him when he smiles your way. He could be reincarnated as Helios in the body of Aphrodite, and my mind would refuse to see him as anyone else. A beautiful mix of masculinity with feminine choices of clothing and style, he looked ethereal. He continues to look ethereal. But he was a sight for sore eyes when he was pushed to sit on his knees, a hand in his hair as spit-slick lips were coated in globes of white with my cock hitting the back of his throat. Tiny rumbles of moans would be pushed back just so he could look up at me with round, glimmering eyes as I forced my seed down his delicate pipes. Utterly and simply beautiful. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
People would muse how Rome was a safe place to reside in. A place of wonder and thrill.
Rome was especially safe during the night.
When the twilight rose to blanket mortals with a sheen of bright light emitting from the moon and its stars, it would be a safe place for its residents where no harm could be done to them.
That’s the first lie you are told. There’s a stigma in everyone’s chest, and it is sheathed with these lies.
The thrill of being caught by someone when that boy and I are together isn’t the reason I look forward to it anymore. It is now engulfed, laced, buried, and wrapped in the feeling of love.
It has now been eleven months since we had begun an informal relationship, an impromptu, friendly bond that would have judgemental eyes, yet I couldn’t care less. As long as I got to have a taste of the nectarine that dripped from his soft lips, why would anything else matter?
A mellifluous voice, he had—the one that could lull someone to sleep. Gorgeous, doe eyes that would sparkle even in the dim lights. Gentle, pale skin with strong arms and calves which clutched onto my body as my apartment would get filled with fervid whimpers, lips colliding against each other as I sought haven in him.
My bed sheets are stained by him, my apartment is doused in his scent, and my body is marked by him. Tell me that this isn’t love, reader. Convince me that you think this isn’t a clear indication that that boy loves me.
His ivory skin is a canvas waiting for my paint, the muse of a dead artist who colored my monotone irises in a hue that is only visible when we are in proximity. No clothing keeping us apart, our hearts beating in sync, wandering hands caressing the first piece of warm flesh it can reach towards. I want him to linger on my skin everywhere I go.
My thoughts run amok when he presses himself into my body as we sleep, and I can’t help but seek warmth in him—feeling him stretched just right around my cock, sleepy whimpers flooding my eardrums in harmony, the sheets barely hanging on while his hands grab onto me to keep himself grounded.
Morpheus soon tucks him into my arms, I watch him doze off into a place where no harm shall reach. As he breathes through his nose, cheeks puffed up, face lightly scrunched with an arm loosely hanging around my waist, he looks real to me. Real, vulnerable, yet so beautiful.
I hear the blood pumping in and out through his sternum when I kiss it as he sleeps. In my fantasies, I carve my way through the delicate flesh and make myself at home as I pass through his ribs; right where his heart rhythmically beats. I douse my teeth and tongue in the sweet ichor that drips when I etch my name over the blood vessels that take the blood out of his heart and to his entire body, inscribe my name over his atria and ventricles, so he can know just how much I love him.
It is the selfish greed coiled inside of me to keep his chest ripped open for me and watch the way his heart palpitated with each touch of mine, feel the ribs constrict within my fingertips while whispering sweet nothings into the boy’s ear, reminding him that it is okay, it was just me, a friend, a trustworthy man who knows him all too well, someone who he could blindly trust in a sea of unknown faces. I want to make his heart beat for me, kiss each of the valves, smear my name onto dainty arteries and capillaries as my hands bruise his sweet, pale skin, painting his body in my remnants. A circadian reminder of what the boy I held close to my heart had allowed me to do for him.
Love to be entitled holy, when the Hyades of petrichor begins to flitter a man’s chest with the mere touch of another, the vermilion shade staining one’s cheeks when an adored one were to brush their knuckles against their own,
However, love to be entitled, vile, odious, and diabolical. A nefarious semblance of love that brings meteorite knees of humans; longing, yearning, insatiable starvation that lets it wreak havoc on either ephemeral being; to simply defile, destroy, and leave it corrupted in a sinuously, tantalizing way—only to shatter it once, and to beseech into a carnal, lascivious waltz into the twilight sky of lackadaisical consciousness.
My heart is in open hands, it slips like time. Moments are linear, yet he is still divine.
I’m no beast to express my adoration in such a manner, no. I’m just a man, hopelessly and helplessly in love with a boy who I can only call mine behind closed doors and hushed whispers. Am I so wrong to want—no, need—someone who ignited a part within me that I thought I had lost long ago? No, I’m not. In all honesty, I could care less what another person might perceive me as, if they were to read this at all.
This is no Pride and Prejudice, no Emma, nor Wuthering Heights. This isn’t a fictional universe where everyone can live happily in the end, unfortunately. This is a brutal, chaotic, ruinous, and wistful reality. A reality where nobody will ever know what will happen in the next second, minute, hour.
Rome was safe, especially at night, it’s a lie.
Rome was more alive at night, that’s the truth.
It was alive with no boundaries to reveal its true self. A place where all morals and piety cease to exist. A place where all wrongdoings weren’t perceived as taboo. A place where everything could be right within the correct time frame, where no one would bat an eye on what a person could be doing, wrong or nefarious.
In Rome, I find myself.
In Rome, I find devotion. Tranquility. Reverence.
In Rome, I find my damnation.