Before You Wake ✓

f i f t y

THERE WAS LITTLE Andrew felt he had the option to do. This wasn't like the dreams of Elijah he had in the hospital or in the weeks before he got his sleeping disorder. This wasn't a hazy, not quite right retelling of Elijah. Of his easy smile or the tight curl of his hair. Now as he stood before him, every inch of Elijah was carved to the finest detail, a shell shocking imitation.

The thing was, Andrew wasn't sure this was an imitation.

"What's wrong, man?" Elijah said. "You look like you seen a ghost." He chuckled at his own joke, his laughter warm and smooth as it echoed down the street.

Andrew just shook his head, tears rolling down the planes of his face as old wounds were torn back open. Wounds that have been put on the back burner, on hold since he left Blacksburg and it became easier to forget about Elijah.

"I waited and waited for you to come back here," Elijah said, smiling as he looked up at the violet sky. "For us to stand here, like old times. Except a couple feet taller. Not in the least wiser."

Andrew frowned, looking at the house in front of them. In that second every aspect of the trippy neighborhood slid into place, pieces of a torturous jigsaw puzzle. He visualized the cul de sac in daylight and there was a sharp tug at his heart. His house, across the street with the sprawling maple tree in the front lawn. The asphalt of the wide street, scorching in the summer heat, while Elijah taught him and Janae wheelies on his bicycle. Elijah and his adoptive parents' big house with the red front door, whose backyard they were standing in right now.

He remembered Anne's eerie reply when he'd asked her where they were.

Home.

"But you never did. Until now," Elijah said, his smile widening. "I like it a lot here. There's not a whole lot of anything. There's no pain. No anger, no stress, no fear.

"Can you imagine? I live my whole life up to my knees, wading through all of that shit. And just like that," he gestured with his hands, "poof. It's all gone."

Andrew wiped the tears off his chin. "I'm glad you found rest."

"But you haven't," Elijah said. "It's like, the pain is never really destroyed. It's just shifted. And when you took my life, you ended up with mine."

Andrew sighed, the agony clawing its way up his back and over his shoulders. There were more times than he could count after the accident that he would wake up in the middle of the night, the emptiness of the apartment driving spears through his heart and he would pray and beg, irreverent to whichever God would listen to give him one last conversation with Elijah. One last chance to see him, to say goodbye, to tell him how much his life was askew without his brightening laugh and unwavering friendship.

But every second here, listening to his voice, looking at his face was a pain he never experienced, a resurfacing of every emotion he had felt from the minute he'd woken up in the hospital. A shovel taken to freshly buried ground that threw all of it back up to the surface. He couldn't take it.

Elijah regarded him for a long moment, something unreadable swimming behind his eyes. "I felt it, you know. Every single thing. The smooth, swollen stifle of the air bag, the mangled door frame buried deep in my gut. The glass shards in my eyes. And the heat, fuck, the heat was the worst. It felt like my body was growing too big for my skin, it was just this tightness.

"You know, burning feels a lot like choking. It's this never ending barrage of pain and you know it's over for you. You know you're going to die, and this panic kicks in but it doesn't take long for even that to go away. Soon all you can think about is the pain, and wanting it to stop. And then you start wishing for death."

Andrew was sobbing, deep wheezes racking through his chest. In the still night there was no wind to dry his tears.

"I never meant to hurt you."

"But you did, Andrew!" Elijah yelled, a departure from his easy banter and wide smiles. A tear spilled out from the corner of his eye. "I spent my whole life struggling," he said, looking at the house in front of them. "You were there for a lot of it. I finally got out of that mess, man. I had a shot at getting away from all the crap I was dealt and ending up like the same people who hurt me. I was so close, Andrew.

"I was graduating. I had half a dozen law school interviews. For once in my life, I had something to look forward to and that was all me who built that. Why did you have to take it away?"

"I loved you, Elijah," Andrew said. "With everything I had. You were my brother. Things rarely were going good on this street, but we protected each other from it all. From your parents, from mines' divorce, through all of it we still managed to give each other the best years of our lives.

"No one is ever going to hate me as much as I hate me for what I did. I wake up everyday with the knowledge that I cut the life of someone I love short. That's not a reality I can hide from or avoid, no matter how much I try. So I'm sorry, Elijah."

He looked at Andrew with tear-stricken eyes. "Sorry isn't going to cut it."

"It is for me," Andrew said, and when he wiped his tears away there were no new ones to take their place. Every single place his life had taken a wrong turn these past six month came to him. His injury. The sleep study. His strained relationship with Janae. Rim's smile, treacherous and foreign in the bed beside him. Frank's death. The slow decay of his sanity in that cell.

"I've been paying my dues. Not enough to make up for what I've done, and I'll probably never be able to. But there's no more room for this endless, vicious cycle in me. Not anymore."

Elijah shook his head ever so slightly, tears carving paths down his midnight colored skin. "You want to forget me?"

"I want to move past you. I need to move past you," Andrew said.

Somewhere in his consciousness the lab came back to him, and the sterile darkness of the examination room. Where he was needed. Where his future lay, not his past.

"Goodbye, Elijah."

"Andrew, no," Elijah said. "What about this house? It was just the three of us, me, you and Janae, her stupid Bobby Brown cassettes, that one endless summer. How can you throw that all away?"

Somewhere through the fabric of the dreamland Andrew could hear Rim's voice and he followed it, and the longer he did so the less vivid the colors of the Maryland neighborhood got. A muted lavender sky, lackluster rooftops. Maxwell faded into nothing but a faint white cloud.

Elijah began to crumple, his knees digging into the fine soil as he writhed. Andrew sank down beside him and cradled his best friend in his lap.

"Andrew, please," Elijah whispered as he looked up at him, tears shimmering in their places at the corner of his eyes. "Please, don't, it hurts."

"I've gotta go," Andrew said. "So do you."

Their bodies thrummed with the life of a seam, Rim's voice telling him to push, push, push.

Andrew rocked Elijah in his lap, baring all the emotions he had shouldered and pouring them into Elijah as the life seeped out of him. A world of pain and suffering, childhoods tainted with never ending screaming matches and the welts left by smooth leather belts. Young adulthoods stained with family dysfunction and drunken nights culminating in a body too young to be put in a casket.

Elijah's soul departed him and it took with it every ounce of Andrew's unresolved anger and self-loathing. On that patch of grass where they had shared sweat and tears for many years, Andrew continued to rock his lifeless body, crying out into the cosmos not in pain, not in grief, but with the crushing relief of shoulders finally made bare.