Chandler is used to it. To measuring his life in spaces. In emptiness.
Window slats, to start off. He’s got blinds over the one in his room, and in the evenings, the lights from the street outside shine golden across his face. He doesn’t mind it. He had a girlfriend who was a photographer, in college, for a bit. She liked to take pictures of his face covered in gentle strips of shadow. His chest, too, the planes of his back, light rippling across his skin. Posing him with insistent hands. He liked being her model and hated being her muse.
Eventually, she had caught on to him and the way he was disappearing into himself. She noticed his eyes flicker over guys, not any in particular, passers-by, maybe, the way he noticed beauty in them, masculinity. He didn’t keep track, really — just took care never to look at the same man twice. He still noticed, though, the perfection of them. He would note it down later, seek it in himself, in the expanse of his body under the impassive gaze of her camera. They fought bitterly and when she left he quit eating just because he wanted to. When Ross found out, he hit Chandler across their dorm, trying to be friendly, to be kind, just a bit too rough, not understanding. Idiot, he said, in that clueless, scared voice of his. Chandler said, Yeah, and spent the rest of the week pressing the bruise Ross had given him.
Spaces. Chandler keeps trying to find his, somewhere. There are gaps where his body is made to fit to someone just right, in his arms, maybe, a head on his shoulder. Someone out there has a body with spaces just the perfect fit for him. Or not. These days he catches himself thinking maybe not, maybe he’s just deformed, the wrong shape, wrong size, whatever.
Emptiness. There are gaps between his ribs, again. Now. He feels them when he hugs himself, imagines he can feel the stark lines through clothing, blankets. He can’t. It’s just that it’s been so long since he had spaces, like this, to feel. He is fascinated. Be a real treat to model, again, now. He doesn’t take his shirt off in the mirror. Instead, he imagines himself draped in window-slat light.
He looks down when he walks, now, hands curled up in the pockets of his jeans or that old leather jacket he’s taken to wearing lately. It swallows him. He fiddles with loose change, a pen, flipping it through his fingers, mindless, counting steps, all the way home. He keeps his eyes focused on the sidewalk just ahead of him. There was this poem he read once, in school, maybe, or in one of those dramatic moods he used to have … still has. He can’t remember, and he can’t remember it now.
Something flowers … concrete. He keeps his head down.
His hair flops over his eyes and he just lets it. Someone, the other week, someone at the office was telling him all about his hair, how he oughta cut it, and quick, too. Or maybe it’s too late. He already looks like a fag. Chandler just looked down, rubbed the back of his neck where his hair curls up into a little ducktail. He’s sure he said something witty. He can’t remember now. But the words, the word, comes back to him, pushing up through his ribs like the weeds cracking the concrete at his feet. Little things. Little vicious things. All his life.
Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. He puts his head down and walks to work and walks to lunch and steps out for a little smoke break, a cigarette, two, three, he said he would quit but it doesn’t matter, really, he puts his head down and he walks home. To Joey. And he closes his mouth around the emptiness, around everything he wants to say, has wanted to say, for ages now. He shrugs off dinner and leans out the window for a smoke.
Just the way things are.
Today, Chandler walks home a little early. Successful, that’s what he is. Got everything done and asked his boss so nicely. He stops by a little corner store on his way back, buys a pack of cigarettes even though he already has one in the inner pocket of his leather jacket. And then he goes back in, to buy a pack of zebra cakes. And then another. Because why not? Celebration, thinks Chandler, bitter, even though he doesn’t know what he’s celebrating. He doesn’t like the feel of the words in his throat, so he goes with celebration. Says it aloud, like a completely normal man.
“Celebration,” he mutters, thinking he’s going insane. His voice is hoarse. No one looks up as he passes.
The coffee shop is bustling, and the apartment is still. Joey’s off at an audition or something, Chandler doesn’t really know, but it means he has a little time to himself.
He hates it. Hates to be so codependent, that alone in the apartment, he feels like he’s suffocating, drowning inside the prison of his skin. Joey on his mind and on his tongue when he comes shuddering in the dead of night, biting his pillow so he doesn’t say it aloud. Joey, with his eyes shimmering under those damn racy eyebrows, dark enough to look like camera lenses. Joey. Everything sounds beautiful in his voice. Even Chandler.
God.
Would he look beautiful reflected in Joey’s eyes? He’s pathetic for even asking himself the question. He knows the answer and he sure doesn’t like it.
He walks into the bathroom, slowly, sits in the empty tub, hands as cold as the porcelain.
He opens the zebra cakes, eats them slowly. They taste like cardboard and sugar and maybe a little like Joey’s cologne, the fancy new kind, the one Chandler thinks he may be allergic to. Joey’s been drenching himself in the stuff lately. Chandler hates how the scent has settled across the apartment, thick, forcing Chandler to think of Joey all the damn time. It’s insensitive, Chandler thinks, indecent. But then again, he smokes, and he knows that’s worse. Disgusting. Disgusting, but it doesn’t matter.
Chandler pushes, hard, at his Adam’s apple. He feels sick and he leans into it. He lets it all come up, all of it, everything, in a mess of bile and tears and one terrible confession, that he’s been looking, he’s been looking, he’s so fucking sorry, he knows he’s a fag and he’s been looking, and he shivers on the bathroom floor until the streetlights have flicked on outside and Joey’s footsteps patter through the door, excited, and Chandler finally feels empty.
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