Lonerism

Forever Boy

Forever Boy

I was sitting in church, that first day. At the back of the hall, lodged in between two old ladies, I sat shakily on the hard wooden surface of the bench. I was wringing my fingers in my hands nervously, waiting for him.

Then they brought the coffin in, carried by sad men in all black suits, and looming over them were the heavy chords of a melancholy church organ. Its blaring tune rumbled through the entire chapel, and that was when I felt his hands flood over mine.

My face lifted up to greet his, and I saw his pale grey eyes and his disinterested face looking back at me. Charlie Mars. He was the perfect concoction of obnoxious, gorgeous, and carefree. My entire life's happiness was wrapped up in him like a snugly blanket I'd cocooned myself in and never wanted to leave.

"You're late," I whispered.

"Sorry," he murmured. "Took me a while."

"I was waiting for you," I said.

"I'm here now," he replied, squeezing his grip gently over my hands. I stiffened sharply, and he noticed, moving them away and keeping them awkwardly in his lap. The two of us remained in a comfortable silence after that, just like we always did.

We were both shy and quiet boys from the beginning. We were the lurkers, silently moving through the hallways of school, in the corners of classrooms, trying to be as invisible as we possibly could. We wanted to glide through our lives like we were never even there, unnoticed and unattached, far away from the real world.

You'd always see us in the background, alone or together, but you'd forget about us as soon as you'd look away. We liked being forgettable like that. We never fitted in with the real world, so why bother being a part of it?

Charlie Mars was a music fanatic who loved to read and hated the general populace. He had a silver tongue, and sometimes it got him into trouble. Most of the time, his head was in the clouds and his body was drifting around aimlessly for something better to do. Meanwhile, I was a mild sociopath with a tendency to shut down and block people out. I hated leaving the house and I hated the general populace.

We were very different people, but there was one sure thing that we had in common - we both had a morbid fascination with death. For me, I liked the finality of it, the abrupt nothingness in death. I believed that there was nothing after life, an eternal darkness, like a dreamless night sleep.

I never bothered to look into religion, because most of it just seemed like guess work to me. People created these ideas of life and how it was created, and out of hope, they created the afterlife. They tell themselves there's something better waiting for them after they're gone, some magical place where they'd meet their loved ones again, and they'd finally be free.

At best, death was freedom. And that's why we liked it. So instead of going on dates to restaurants and cinemas, we bought a copy of the local newspaper and attended the funerals of dead strangers. Charlie Mars and Oliver St. Cloud - the strange kids, the funeral crashers, and the weirdos of Foamy Falls, Newfoundland.

We liked the uncertainty in death, and the sadness that surrounded it. Charlie was a self-proclaimed Buddhist, so he liked the idea of reincarnation. I suppose he liked to think there was more to life after death - a whole new life, a whole new person he would become after he died. I wasn't so sure.

To me, death was the end, and I liked endings, so I soaked my life in it.

"Just goes to show you, doesn't it?" he asked, keeping his voice low while the church organ continued to hum from the heavens.

"What?"

"How quickly it can all end. One second, you're crossing the road, and the next-"

"-Nothing. That's all that's next."