Catharsis || Lashton AU - boyxboy

31. azatum

"So I walked through to the haze
And a million dirty waves,
Now I see you lying there
Like a lilo losing air,
Black rocks and shoreline sand,
Still dead summer I cannot bear,
And I wipe the sand from my arms."
-Foals, Spanish Sahara

two things to know before you read this:

1) this song takes the chapter to a whole new level. listen to it.

2) i wrote this chapter on one of the worst days of my life. because of this, i would appreciate it if you would resist the urge to make any stupid jokes in the comments. for example: a line in here refers to "ashton's size". it is clear in the surrounding context that this is nothing sexual. if you make any inappropriate jokes i will block you without a second thought. thank you.

l.h.

Ashton was always something completely intangible.

All those months ago when he first sat down to talk to me, back when I spent every other day out on that curb giving people the light of day who had had been ingrained with the idea that they didn't deserve it. When he came to me, breathless and heaving for air like he had been running miles and miles before he finally reached me. When he spoke a million words a minute, never relaxing enough to stop looking behind him, like he were expecting someone to jump out around the corner and grab him. Waves of horror had carried him straight to me. That much was clear.

I remember feeling something that day. Something heavy settling in the pit of my stomach, like I had finally gotten a glimpse into the daily trepidations of those around me. It was the first time I realized that I wasn't the only one who suffered. I realized that the people around me faced their own anxieties and personal anguish; I wasn't alone. Yet I had always felt that way, behaved that way. Even what I did with that sign was always some level of self-seeking on my part: using other people's misfortunes to justify the notion that no one would ever understand my pain.

Every day that I was out there I waited for someone to come along with the same story as me. And it wasn't for the empathy; I didn't want someone that would be able to fathom each ineffable feeling I had felt along the way, who understood what it felt like to lose everyone you loved to unavoidable circumstances. Everything in my life had been one giant snowball effect. All I wanted was to know that my agony was valid: that I had truly experienced a never-before seen form of nature's torment.

I thought that I had it worse than anyone.

The day that he showed up with his face all bloodied and scabbed over simply because his dad had been in the wrong place at the wrong time was the day I realized that it was never a competition. He changed me.

The problem, however, stood to be that the people who change you are by no guarantees good people, and it wasn't fair to Ashton or to me to expect that they were.

That word that Miles used to describe him had bounced around my head for days and days after he said it.

Manipulative.

It's simply part of the human condition to believe that the people you care about are wholy good. This is because acknowledging the fact that the people you love aren't perfect would mean admitting that you are not perfect. And though most of us already know this, it's the kind of thing that you fold up and tuck away, only acknowledged because society tells us that we need to. We excuse it by saying: well, no one's perfect. And that's true. No one is. But we all have a quiet sense of superiority around those that we don't like.

So what happens when you find that someone you love is also someone that you don't like?

Ultimately, Ashton's size was so abstract it's what made him so intangible. He was simply so much greater than anything I had ever known and I could not, for the life of me, figure out what to do with that.