BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 07

TUESDAY
05.11.1996
DORIAN

               He didn't show. Though it wouldn't have stopped it from happening, I shouldn't have agreed to this party (which turned out to be anything but small). I shouldn't have got my hopes up. The chances were always minuscule. Just because I bumped into him at a party, doesn't mean Isaiah goes to every single one in the city. He might have Bonfire Night plans with his friends... with more than friends.

Sleep is something I won't be getting tonight (my best hope is for everyone to head to clubs later which might grant me a few hours of silence), but maybe I can get some work done. I leave the corner of the communal space I've clung to for the past twenty minutes to return to my room and that's when I see him.

Isaiah rests against the wall in the no man's land between the joined kitchen and sitting room. It's been a month since the last party and his presence incites the same bedlam. Will glimpses of him always feel like blessings — flood me with love but tarnish it with the knowledge that it's ephemeral, that I'm already stretching my luck, that any one of them could be my last?

He's wearing the same shirt and jeans but his locs are loose, silver cuffs accessorising the ones that frame his face. He scans the crowd though doesn't seem to be looking for anyone in particular (you didn't come here to look for me, this is the last place you'd come to look for me), and appears equally dissatisfied to be here even if he came of his own free will.

I tread my path to him. Shuffle on the spot three feet away.

'Why aren't you dancing?'

If he's surprised by my presence, he doesn't show it. Still slumped against the wall as he watches the celebration, he shrugs. 'Not my music.'

He's lying through his teeth. That's not what guts me — it's the fact he knows I know and he does it anyway.

There's no such thing as "not his music"; Isaiah will dance to anything. I'll never forget the time by the river when he forced me to line dance with him — You from Suffolk, cuz, you gotta know how. He held my hand throughout the whole song though the whole point of line dancing is to not require a partner.

I'm lost to memories for a moment until the present-time Isaiah corrects himself.

'Don't dance no more.' His tone is bored, like he's not ashamed of being caught in a lie but it turned out less of a thrill than he hoped so he might as well try the truth.

Before I can pry, he turns to me and the why decomposes on my tongue. He's exhausted. Isaiah was tired the day I met him but his eyes always soaked with life. Now though, the earth of his irises has leeched to infertile dirt. He's too fatigued even to mimic the loathing of our last meeting. (Has he had a flare? Is he in the midst of one? Why is he here then? Should I say something, offer Paracetamol though we both know it might as well be a TicTac?)

He looks me over only once, gaze lingering on the embroidered white kippah on top of my waves. He doesn't filter his surprise, though I can't tell whether it's the colourful birds and flowers that take him aback or the fact I'm wearing one at all. He isn't. After growing up in Halsett, the violent anti-Semitism of the rest of the world is a train crash.

'What you doing here?' He means the party — a party. One is implausible, two is absurd.

I turn to the blur of silhouettes lost in globes of iridescent light. They morph into each other, people lost into people and people lost into colours. How do they do it? How do they connect with such ease? Why was I born in a titanium coffin that keeps a cleft between me and everyone else? I can reach out but a millimetre is 3.3 million square miles of the Sahara desert and a person crosses it only once without dying. That was with you.