“ i like it when you smile . ” francis to richard!
DESPITE THE DAWNING AUTUMN, the sun was still rising during the early morning hours, casting a matte light over the dying grass and shriveling trees. I had long grown used to the thick curtains of Francis’s Boston apartment, their damask print blocking out any light from the bedroom we shared. However, Charles’s death and the new school year robbed me of any reason to be in Boston. That is, unless I wanted to consider Francis a reason to stay. He was, of course, but I had been unclear of where we stood, and what Francis wanted, and I as too nervous to ask. Much to my delight, it turned out to be a mute point. Francis accompanied me back to Pennsylvania with the intention of helping me move back into my small, quasi - rural house, but he seemed to have no intention of leaving anytime soon, and I had no intention of returning to a life without him. It seems insensitive to say, but he had turned into somewhat of a fixture in my life at the time, like a familiar lamp or clock, with an inexplicable attachment to it, a loving touch bestowed every time I flicked the light on, or checked the time. Always there because there is where it is meant to be. It took me a while to identify this as a true love.
At any rate, the sun was rising early, and Francis was still asleep when the nightingales roused me. I left the bedroom, still mostly barren, save a few boxes and luggage that had not yet been sorted through. There was the bed with its metal frame, the empty chest of drawers, two dusty bedside tables, and a framed copy of the Winter’s holiday card from the year before.
I went downstairs and put water in the coffeepot just to make myself a cup of tea, with no sugar and no honey. I stood in the kitchen, the cheap linoleum soft beneath my socked feet, and looked out the kitchen window at the cedar trees wave “good morning” to me. They seemed inviting, so I undid the tarnished bronze latch of the window and pushed it open with a rusty creak. A fragrant breeze, a mix of the final clippings of cut grass and that sweet rot of a damp autumn, blew back my mop of unkempt, slept - on hair. It seemed to wash the stress from my face. I smiled because I had forgotten how good it felt to breathe.
“It’s a wonder I remember how to,” I said, glancing at the boundary of the woods, waiting for something, before turning to Francis. His disheveled pajamas hung off of him, and his bright scarlet hair had been turned to ruby by the hastiness of the dawn. “There are things to smile about, it’s just hard to recall them right now.”
