The Road Home

“Well? What has broken your heart today?” his friend half-jeered at him. Adrian pressed himself back into the soft settee and didn’t answer Cyril’s provocation.

“Well, say something,” Cyril said in encouragement which would have made Adrian confide most of the time, but which sounded too sarcastic and dripped in honeyed pity to be genuine. Adrian hated it.

He told his best friend anyway.

“I miss my home,” Adrian stated, gulping another mouthful of his drink. It was beer, he thought, but Cyril had ordered it for him, so he wasn’t sure. His taste buds were too far gone by now to tell.

Cyril paused in extreme confusion, then half-laughing, he said with a softer tone, “But which home? Certainly not your childhood orphanage – come on, we both know you hate that place.”

But Adrian knew that better than Cyril, “Not that home.” He dared to speak in an annoyed tone.

“It’s not like you have any other,” Cyril said playfully, but his words were sharp. Adrian flinched inwardly.

“No,” Adrian agreed. But yes, he thought.

Muttering about Adrian’s incomprehensible speech, Cyril moved to get himself another drink. Adrian stood up and left during this pause, setting down some money to pay for his drink that Cyril had paid for.

He trudged back to his dorm in the flurrying snow. Distantly, as his thoughts had already gone out of his control, he thought that he could tick one more activity off his “want-to-do List” – walking at night alone with a trench coat and flurrying snow.

He hadn’t anticipated it to be so lonely. He had no expected that even the crunching of the snow was nowhere close to a companion. He hadn’t expected it to be so quiet. He felt as though somebody had put a jar top-down on him, encasing him in a bubble of his own world but not much of anyone else. He tried to clear his ears but suddenly they were ringing and his stomach felt weird. His breath felt like laboured gasps.

Is this hyperventilation? He wondered. It probably wasn’t. Cyril would’ve laughed at him for thinking that.

He got to his dorm shortly and shimmied off his coat and pants and crawled into his bed for comfort. He didn’t like alcohol. He didn’t like the pub. He didn’t like Cyril. He needed Cyril. He liked…

He felt lonelier than ever before as he stared at Cyril’s empty bed across the room. I hate being alone, he thought. I hate being with company, he thought again.

Time passed and it came to the hour where the most steadfast would come to fanciful dreams and wishes. It seemed that Cyril would not be coming back tonight, and Adrian didn’t know if he should relieve or not.

He lay there, unmoving.

Just as his heart rate was decreasing to a comfortable level, he started up, clutching, clutching at the stretch of road that appeared ahead of him – the road home – the road pointing towards the red bricked house with a magenta roof –

“No,” he yelled out loud, and felt intimidated and frustrated at how his voice disappeared quickly, “It isn’t my home – it’s not my home- “

But deep down his heart jeered at him in Cyril’s voice, you know it is. You know you will have to return. And suddenly Adrian wept. He felt as if his spine had been turned to a stalk of reed and that he was blowing in the wind, in the storm. As the storm passed, he felt he was alright again. But he wasn’t. His hands trembled and he felt as if he would vomit.

He stumbled out of bed, stumbled to his bag, opened the zipper with twitching fingers and opened the small notebook he extracted.

He needed to do something to relieve himself. He needed to chase this memory out of me –

The whooshing of a stick seemed to come down on him and he flinched back with a cry. He gripped his pen harder still and tried to direct it onto the page.

He’s sure he will be cringing at whatever he wrote tomorrow, but it would be necessary – oh – necessary – so that he wouldn’t stick his fingers into his head and try to claw the horrible memories – memories! Memories! – right out of his mind.

“I feed it with my blood tonight.
Its roots dig into my hand
I feed it with my flesh tonight.”

He needed to know it was still blood that he had.

“I feel its limbs taking me hostage
And I sit there as it clings to me
I feed it with my blood tonight.”

He needed to run from people who hurt him, not go closer.

He threw down his pen in shame of what he’d wrote but picked it up just to add some others.

He was not mentally right. Run! Go find normal people.

“I cradle my arteries in my fingers
As slim strands take their place
I feed it with my flesh tonight.”

I miss home, some part of his brain told him, I miss the beatings.

And he stops there, unable to go further. He thought about what he had wrote. He slowly arose from his kneeling position and restored himself on the bed. Oh – if his family was different –

His kind, loving mother who never touched alcohol would find him and comfort him, his caring, soft father would converse with him, his family would be filled with soft objects, and he would be equal to his parents and they would eat in happiness their dinners, pray together, love and laugh…

Or if he was indeed an orphan like he said he was. If he was not child-on-the-run, still hunted for by yearning demons of parents. If his mother had found him a psychiatrist, or better, ignored him when she formed his humbling poems, filled with blood imagery and dripped with tears, if his father had not struck at him every so often, if he had not succumbed to the beatings.

He quieted himself down, telling himself nice stories, singing some comforting song until he realised it was Eponine’s Death from Les Misérables.

He laid himself down and promised he’d be better tomorrow. But tomorrow never seemed to come. The night’s vigil was long, and he didn’t know what to do. He felt a strange pulling in his heart. He knew he was twisted. He knew he was doomed.

The road home was shown to him again in his dreams. It was decorated with pink bunny balloons as smiling clowns made them for him. The dream-him accepted the balloons and stepped into the house, and presented himself to his parents, smiling.

He took the road home.