supercut — benji & yahel / superhero au

supercut — benji & yahel / superhero au Jan 4, 2024 19:45:12 GMT -5

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Post by fox on Jan 4, 2024 19:45:12 GMT -5

1982.
New York, New York.

it was the summer that you were moving, and through August i was still saying things like i'll see you again.

we were kids, eleven years old, little shitheads running around. i used to cut last period to come meet you, took the train up, latchkey kid, but your parents were always home. used to think it was sweet of them to drive me back in the evenings. now i think its funny they never let you step foot on the L.

ten years is a long time, but i still think of you.

i remember the misery of hot days in the city, all concrete, zombies shuffling through parks, and the smell of Meatpacking, something sick like refrigerator and guts and exhaust. and then, the peeling map of the trains i studied inch by inch in boredom on the trip, passing derelict lower side ghost neighbourhoods, the seventies showing like the lag of a new bruise.

and i remember the ice cream sundaes with the chocolate shells, kids cracking open fire hydrants in the haze of summer, long games of handball, and buying subs at the bodega, that little orange cat lying between aisles. you had all the latest comics on your shelf, and when it was too sweltering, we'd read about the last great hero of New York City.

didn't care that much, but you liked him, so i liked him. he was dead before our time, and gran used to say we were fine before he came along, and we'll be fine afterwards too.

back in the sixties, she remembers the funeral, how the streets poured with people as his coffin progressed down Sixth Ave, girls weeping and lying flowers down the sidewalk until the streets smelled like lilies, and then smelled like rot. the mayor gave a speech to a crowd bigger than his inauguration. it was all over the news, and the country was in mourning.

she also remembers how the funeral cost nine million. when you're eleven, you don't know what that means. just know you don't even have ten dollars in your pocket.

it was the summer you were moving, i asked you if you'd learn how to surf on the coast of California. i pictured palms and Hollywood and an endless summer. you told me you were gonna be stuck in the suburbs. you told me it still gets cold in Northern Cal in the winter.

i'll see you again, we said to each other. but the sadness of it, how the goodbye lingered, like we knew we wouldn't really. i'll write you, i'll call you. we didn't think we were lying then.

in August of 1982, i used to know your phone number like it was engraved in me.

supercut — benji & yahel / superhero au Jan 6, 2024 3:04:37 GMT -5

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Post by ines izar d11a 🖤 cait on Jan 6, 2024 3:04:37 GMT -5

[ x ]

1993.
New York, New York.

I thought crossing the threshold into adulthood would be easy, but twenty-one just feels heavy. A kind of sleeping with a cat on your chest, waking up at four in the afternoon lethargy that reminds me of the Summer evenings I’ve come to loathe. There’s something about a hyphen that makes the distance of a year seem so much more than. I hadn’t expected that.

The last superhero of the modern age died before I was born, but I knew all the stories about him. Something greater than me lived on the shelves of my bedroom, and something in the pages of those books made me feel powerful like him.

He was twenty-one, too, when he died. It feels important.

When we moved, I boxed up the comics with a tender reverence reserved for loved ones and animals. For a long time, they were my most prized possessions.

I can’t read them anymore. But that’s the thing about precious memories. They’re always with you.

After the change, I used to think New York was this protective barrier that we never should have left. I blamed my parents for moving us across the country, like they were the ones responsible for my mutated genes. I guess they were, in a way.

And at the start, I tried to think of it like a story from one of my comic books – a latent gift; I just needed to learn to harness its power. But California’s seasons changed as quickly as my sight deteriorated. Summer was light grey; Winter was obsidian black. Los Angeles stole something from me that New York had preserved for eleven golden years.

Maybe that’s why I insisted on returning. Something about the polluted city air and the harsh noise of the streets straddling the narrow line between affluence and poverty had protected me, before. It could protect me, again.

And somehow, like a miracle I dreamed into existence, it worked. A year ago, back in the world of my childhood, I saw something. A vision – a sight into the future, flashes of colour. A sky that seemed impossibly blue; faces that seemed impossibly sad. It came and it went, too fast for me to make sense of. The darkness came back, gripping my heart tenderly, all too familiarly. It would latch on for four more months before the next premonition came through. But that first time was enough to know what I had always longed to believe: I was special, and I was exactly where I needed to be.

I saw you two days ago – for the first time in ten or eleven years, I’m not sure exactly anymore, time slips further away from me. But I remember us, eleven years old. I remember rust on the cars we would run past in the junkyard, bits of scrap metal strewn across the cracked ground. We would joke about radiation poisoning and becoming supernatural beings, fantasising about how we would use our powers.

I remember stale bread and fresh honey sandwiches, sticky nectar dripping down the sides of our hands as we laughed through mouthfuls of yeast. I remember your smile, but I think I forgot it for a while. It used to be the brightest thing in the world.

I saw you two days ago, in the pastel light of a vision; I saw the world burning brighter still.

I hadn’t expected to see you again. I moved away, knowing our childhood had a life expectancy that had reached its end. Now, I wait for you, on the corner of Sixth Ave, where a memorial for someone braver than me still stands, thirty odd years later. From here, I can map the path back to the family home where we used to spend our afternoons together. My space, by definition, but I always thought of it as ours, even if you never could.

I always knew I would come back to New York.

But I never expected it would lead me back to you.