THOMAS HAMILTON / @fydens .
HE SWEEPS HIS FINGERS THROUGH RED HAIR — this hair that had, so shamefully in him, elicited a terrible sickness, a sadness like jealousy. Not shame for the longing, but shame for the bitterness of it. The longing to touch it, to press his face against it. To move his hands through it as now he does. James’ face turned aside and resting against his belly, in the clean, crisp linen of his shirt. The warmth of him. The fan of his breath. It is as he imagined ; it is, as all things imagined, more shearing and sublime in reality, more transcendent, than the waning brain could conceive of it. Such is the world, isn’t it? Such are all beautiful things. Beyond the understanding of man, who is always striving in the dark to describe them.
He could not have described this. He could not have known the language, could not forge it anew without first feeling it, hearing it, smelling the soft, clean masculine musk of this hair, tinged with the sea-wind, so like the gloaming colour grey — but red! Redder in nearness, brighter than fire. How could he have known? How could he have known that it would be like this, so natural, in him like the a priori.
Thomas smiles, spreading his fingers across his lover’s forehead like brushing away the dust of creation, revealing underneath the thing made by God that must have joined them even before they could perceive it. ‘ Did you not imagine it? Perhaps not — my discipline has never approached yours. I did. Endlessly. So much that you would enter the room, and for a moment, I would forget that it had not happened … ’
‘ How needlessly we have both suffered. ’ He smooths the hair back from James’ face, from his closed eyes and what, behind them, he knows to be a hidden look. A secret, bottomless place. Making a dwelling of this moment. Thomas looks into his face and still smiles, leaning down to kiss his furrowed brow as he murmurs with a depth of fondness like the sea : ‘ And what a piece of work is man — ’
The thud his heart gives when Thomas unravels, ragged-breathed, ruddied before him, can compare to nothing. It both thrills and it frightens how the merging of their bodies, the marriage of their minds, moves him. He, who is wild, homeless, dark, becomes infatuated with the feathery lightness of his lover’s mind. There the world is beguiling; its perpetual ambiguities transformed into endless possibilities. Half-asleep, he wonders, if peace burgeons solely from Thomas’ ingenious hand; if the brushstrokes of his fingertips, light against his skin, is where life begins and ends. And, if not life, then he himself. As Plato would have it, Zeus might as well have split man in halves and condemned him to a life in pursuit of wholeness. For it is that he finds in Thomas — a completion and perfection of the self.
‘ It. ’ He repeats the word, chews it, as though pondering its meaning before letting it drown, muffled, in white linen alongside a bell-like chuckle. Ebb does boyish laughter merely to be replaced by a thoughtful severity: ‘ I think my stubbornness, rather than my discipline, held onto the belief that such imaginings were something to be ashamed of — and, for your sake, I neglected them.’
‘ Needlessly, indeed.’ Soothing, his kiss, soothing, his heart. James scarcely moves in fear of losing both. Only a hand wanders; slithers below the billowing shirt that separates flesh from flesh. Effortlessly, his fingers trail along every crevasse and curve until finding the targeted, cadencing beat of his heart. To feel life vibrate from one being to another like this, how could that be suffering? How could that be shameful? He sighs, half – amused by his own foolishness: ‘ In action how like an Angel; in apprehension how like a God. I wonder if Shakespeare knew a man quite as divine as mine. Had he a Thomas Hamilton of his own? A man to rival any god with his fairness? ’