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When I thought of Brian dying, and I did, I always sketched the events in my mind in a similar fashion. We were older, but not old, middle aged or thereabouts. We weren’t together, not even speaking, not even living in the same city. I would get a call from Michael or Debbie or Lindsay and I would sit quietly in a bay window with tear-stained eyes for days remembering how much he’d shaped my life and how deeply I’d loved him. I’d fly back to Pittsburgh, spend a few days with the people I once considered my family, mourn the loss of my first love and then fly home. Home seemed somewhere coastal, I assumed southern California, perhaps outside of LA. Judging by my dress I was successful and my demeanor indicated I was happy and in love. My life had turned out beautifully.
After Brian’s cancer I had these dreams, visions really, for nearly a year. I’d rearrange some details, move the timeline out and back, kill him off in various ways, but the outline remained the same. In a way the thoughts saddened me deeply because I wondered why I was so sure Brian and I wouldn’t end up together when I felt so completely sure we were meant to be.
In the end I guess it’s completely ironic that he would die early and tragically and while we were very much together.
It was late May, Brian and I’d moved into a new loft together (bigger and badder and more bachelor-esque than his first) just a few months prior. We both owned this one and nothing in my life had felt better than how sure I was about us. Brian was still Brian and our relationship was still unconventional in all the ways you would suspect, but I didn’t doubt he loved me any more than I doubted the sun would come up each day. I felt secure and happy and needed.
Brian’s agency was soaring, he was doing so well it was disgusting, working 90 hours a week for that success but secretly loving every minute. I was writing movie scripts and being commissioned to consult on film projects after Rage and its sequel had been box office successes. We were living the high life, if there is one in the Pitts, and reveling in every second of it.
I remember that morning like it was moments ago, not years. He’d been out of town calling on a client for a week and had flown in after I’d gone to bed the night before. He woke me up in the morning with a hand on the small of my back and a “god I need to fuck you now” in my ear. I’d laughed and rolled over, kissing him and saying “welcome home dear” in my most endearing voice.
He fucked me with the passion and abandon of a 19-year-old, some things never change. I distinctly remember gloating silently about the fact someone I’d been with for more than six years still wanted me with a newness and an intensity that some people can’t hold for more than a moment. I soaked up his need and his eagerness that morning as if I sensed it were something I might lose. Of course if I’d known what the day would bring I would have never let him out of bed.
In the shower he gave me a painfully slow hand job while he told me about this cowboy who entertained him down in Texas. He used a shitty, but charming, fake southern accent to whisper the tale of the ranch hand with a nine-inch cock in my ear. I can still hear him saying “and then he got the lasso out the back of his pick up truck” just before I came.
It was a Friday and he was, of course, headed to the office. I was working on sketches of a new character for a comic Michael and I had conceptualized just a few weeks prior. He kissed me after he stole a few deep gulps of coffee from my cup. I swatted his ass and pretended to be pissed off. At the door he turned and said, “Tonight?” As if I might have had other plans. Occasionally he liked to pretend that I actually considered going out and picking up other guys, even though he’d accepted that I’d stopped years prior.
“Tonight,” I’d nodded with a devilish smile. While he was out of town I’d found a new toy that I couldn’t wait to break out after dinner.
The crazy thing is he wasn’t drunk or high or getting his dick sucked or talking on the phone or burning his tongue on a non-fat latte or screaming at some prick in a Mercedes who thought his car was better than the BMW Brian broke down and bought because I loved it. He was simply going through a green light at Grant and Ross going maybe five miles per hour over the speed limit when a jackass in an SUV who was talking on the phone and was burning himself on a latte and was screaming at some asshole in a Mercedes ran a red light doing 60.
They say he died instantly. They say the impact broke his neck. They say there’s no way he lived long enough to feel any pain. These same people believe democracy is infallible, justice always prevails and jelly doughnuts are an acceptable breakfast food.
I wish I could say that my life has moved on and that I’ve found happiness elsewhere, in other things and with other people. But, that would be a lie and I’m too tired to tell lies anymore. Brian was it for me. As fucking lame as that might be and how much he hates me from his grave for saying it, it’s true.
He died young and beautiful and perfect to me, I have no choice but to deify him and worship at the altar of a dead man for all my days. Down on my knees the ground breaking my thin skin, hating the world for all of the what ifs I can’t keep from running around in my brain.
These days I’m back to playing out death scenarios in my waking dreams, but now they are my own. I’m old and alone, living in this same loft and spending sleepless nights in this same bed. I rearrange some details, move the timeline out and back, kill myself off in various ways, but the outline remains the same.
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