He came to me in my dream. A presence made known only by the shifting of moonlight and shadows cast against the walls in this room full of memories.
It started the first night after returning to my childhood home for my cousins wedding. The train from London Bridge to Brighton had been delayed as usual so I was late for dinner, another excuse for my mother to be disappointed in me. I ate reheated stew as she sat before me, judgment written all over her face as she questioned me relentlessly about work, my finances and finally, how my novel was coming along.
"Fine," I replied evenly. "I have a publishing house interested, but they want two more chapters drafted by the end of next month."
"And is that possible?" She asked doubtfully. "It's taken you three years just to send the first one."
"Two. And I'll manage just fine. Simon said..."
"Simon?" She interrupted, her voice rising in both volume and octave, "Who's Simon?"
"He's from the publishers." I sighed and laid my fork quietly on the plate of half-eaten food. "Listen Mum, just because I'm gay doesn't mean I'm fucking every man whose name happens to come up in conversation." I watched, feeling some small sense of satisfaction as she grimaced at my language. It was offensive I know, but after years of being unable to gain her approval for any aspect of my life, my ability to shock and offend her gave me a pathetic sense of achievement.
Recovering quickly, she schooled her features and stood from the table picking up my plate, and moved to the sink. Turning her back to me she scraped the unfinished meal into the rubbish bin and began loading the dishwasher before she spoke again. "I just don't understand, Matthew. It's not as if you never had a girlfriend. I honestly thought you would have grown out of this phase by now. If your father were still alive..." She shook her head slightly and began clearing the kitchen in earnest.
I smiled bitterly and rose to walk towards her, placing my hand on her shoulder to stop her flurry of movements. "Are we really going to argue about this again?" I asked quietly, memories of screaming rows, unshed tears and slamming doors assaulting my mind as I gently rubbed my hand over her arm.
She turned to me and smiled a little, and although I could see it did not reach her eyes, I was grateful to my mother for the temporary ceasefire. "No," she replied quietly, "It's getting late and I have a lot to do before the wedding tomorrow." She reached up and patted my cheek with her hand. "You must be tired from working and writing all week. Why don't you go and get an early night?"
"I nodded and kissed her cheek. "Goodnight mum. Thanks for dinner." I turned and walked out of the kitchen and up the stairs to my room, pretending the entire time that I could not hear my mother crying downstairs.
Sleep was hard to come by that night. After showering and getting into bed I balanced my laptop on my legs and wrote solidly until two in the morning because for some twisted reason confrontations with my family always gave my muse a good kick in the pants. But when I read through what I had written I realised most of it was narcissistic drivel and the delete button became my best friend for the next half hour.
I tried to sleep after that but my mind kept wandering back to the conversation at the kitchen table -- a mere photocopy of the hundreds of conversations we had had before about my sexuality. It's not that I hated her for her beliefs, my mother had me when she was forty and now at the age of sixty five it would be impossible to ask her to change her lifelong opinions, but what I couldn't understand is that seven years after I told her I was gay and she still couldn't accept me for who I am, still hoping and praying to an unforgiving God that this whole thing was a phase and one day I would wake up with the urge to run out and find a pretty girl to marry and settle down with. To have two-point-four children, a house in the suburbs with a mortgage and a Labrador and just be...normal.
I must have dozed off soon after saving the latest edition of chapter four because I awoke at around five in the morning with my open laptop weighing heavy on my lap and a crick in my neck. I felt the small hairs on my arms standing on end and in the over-warm room I could immediately sense that something wasn't right.
Slowly, and with my heart rate increased to a thundering in my ears, I closed my computer and placed it gently on the floor beside the bed. Then I reached for the lamp and with shaking fingers and a dry mouth, I bathed the room in light.
Nothing.
Everything was exactly as I had left it when I had retired that evening; as I had left it seven years ago. Across the room from where I lay my bookshelf was still heaving with well-read texts and above that, the model aeroplane my uncle had made with me in a failed attempt at bonding after my fathers death hung at an angle from the ceiling, the string snapped off on the left wing making the fighter jet seem more pathetic than majestic.
To my left, a chest of drawers, the stickers I had placed on it as a child, and torn off as a teenager leaving behind scraps of white, glued forever to the mahogany, and to the right a mirrored closet, the contents within now only the suit I had bought for the wedding and my old Spiderman costume, Moth-eaten and dusty with age.
My childhood toys had long since been donated to other family members, or placed on charity shop doorsteps, but the costume I understood, was my Mothers way of clinging desperately to the past; to my innocence and to a time when she was in control.
I grimaced at my reflection in the mirror on the closet door. My pale skin and darkened eyes telling stories of too many late nights staying up writing and too many early mornings getting up for work and going to a job I hated just to pay the bills.
I ran my hands through my sleep-tousled brown hair and glared at myself for a moment, brown eyes looking back at me, accusing me of crimes I had no right to commit. Breaking my mothers heart, upsetting the ones I loved. I absently scratched at my chest as I replayed another row in my head, this time not with my mother, but an argument just as hurtful, just as guilt-ridden.
Unable to bear another sleepless night replaying bitter memories, I switched off the lamp once more and lay down in my bed, closing my eyes to block out the faint glow of moonlight seeping through the curtains.
And that's when I first felt his touch. At that moment in Limbo, that relaxed state when the body is no longer conscious, but not quite asleep, he came to me. And although I should have been afraid; should have been terrified, in that moment, after everything and perhaps because of everything I had been through the past seven years, I welcomed him.
He was gentle to begin with, so soft I wondered if I was imagining it. I could feel a gentle feather-light touch on my face, a finger caressing me from my forehead, down my right cheek and across my jaw. Then the touch became firmer, so much so that I could differentiate between fingertip and knuckle as he turned his hand this way and that.
I could feel his breath on my face and a part of me wanted to wake up, to open my eyes but with every caress I was being dragged further down into this dream.
