To All the Boys I've Loved Before [Saturn DP]

TW: Suicide, Rape

All the pain that's inside
That I let you see
I know its nothing
But I was just hoping
For something more

You’ll be okay.

He’s ash and dust now, worn apart by the anger and hate sitting thick and humid through the air. They had every right to hate him, too. Saturn Rhodon was a face for their hurt and anger; it couldn’t make sense that a boy like him could be loved, and so he wasn’t. Not by the same ones with hurt in their hearts, those that saw only skin deep. To see anything else would’ve meant they would have to know him, to walk the dusty earth and accept that a heart is not as simple as pulsing blood beating or its brokenness.

He wishes that Exover didn’t try to lie to him. Saturn never truly did love him; he had borrowed his strength, and seen his kindness. They were thrown together by chance, graceless and lost, until the darkness they’d fought had torn them apart once again. Exover is a blur of grey and white, then, as distant and cold a star as all the others that had ever spent nights breaking a box spring with Saturn. He hated how pleasing Ex’s smile had been, ripe and fresh, warm and endless – genuine.

But a boy like Saturn was never supposed to find happiness. Not from love.

He tries to take in another shallow breath but feels his throat fill with fluid. Wheezing and crackles came next, and still he fights, body shuddering. He was torn apart into pieces, but then, this was the one constant for Saturn Rhodon, enough that he can find comfort knowing that things were ending exactly as they were meant to. He sees blobs across his vision, bodies shapeless and fading, delirium setting in against the cinders of the tattered big top.

They are ghosts now, Ambrosia, Ronan, the ones that tore his body to shreds and left him to die.

He wasn’t worried for his soul –

He has always lived in darkness, after all.

He’d known some things were decided before he was born.

A father that believed in strength more than spirit. A mother that wanted to set an example with her first born.

His earliest memory was when he’d fallen and scrapped his knee on the pavement outside their old rancher. Hands pressed against the pavement, he couldn’t stop himself from crying, the searing pain in his knee a shock to the young boy’s system. His father’s shadow cast long over him, words rumbling like a storm. I’ll give you something to cry about, He remembered, words menacing, My boy isn’t going to fucking cry over scraped knees. He learned that to be a man was to press down the feelings in his heart, like leaves trapped between pages. Make them brittle, and fragile, safe to look at but dried of life.

We’re only doing this to make you stronger, was the common refrain, as though cruelty could somehow sow the same strength as love. They may have sculpted the same but one was rendered hollow and empty, prone to fractures that would soon be reduced to rubble.

Maybe his father had been right all along. Dying would have been a lot easier if he believed that cruelty was a cure.

You’ll be okay.

The words echo like static.

We tell our children that they’ll be okay because we believe, truly, that any hurt can be managed. But there was no making this okay. No treating the wounds that emptied him, ended him.

Rather than love one another, Saturn saw the truth, that the world was made up of those that would rather hurt another to feel better for themselves, than to dig deeper, to understand and love his difference. He’d always rather they hated him than not understand, but he knew this prayer went unanswered. Only Damaris dared to learn the darkness he carried, had ever dared shoulder the burden. The rest were lost in a fantasy of crowns, of believing fate was slicing open his stomach and leaving him lifeless. When they wished loneliness on him, told him he was deserving of hate, of cruelty that left him broken, he learned what he always knew.

He supposes cruelty has always been the point.

Not because boys and girls are born wicked. That would be too easy an explanation (reductive, and escapist). Too many saw the world in black and white for comfort – Ronan and his quest to make him into an example – and they used it as a cudgel against the pain. But that was the secret most didn’t learn, that the people of this world were rarely so distinct. They were more alike in heartbeats and hopes than their hatred.

Damaris had taught him that they were broken but not bad; two souls weighed down in darkness, they fought to surface against something they never chose to make an enemy.

But she had died, he knew, just as he would die soon. Cruelty had a way of winning out over love when so many chose to believe a stranger they never knew was wicked. All the easier to kill when he was soulless, an abomination.

And so he imagines in the last of his moments that he’d never so much wished his life had ended so much earlier. Or at the least, faster than the slow and empty pace of what they’d done.

A part of him wished the rope he’d tried to hang himself with had held out for a little longer, and that all of it had ended on his own terms. The ones that would still be alive, chasing their useless dreams, unbothered by his existence. Maybe Damaris would’ve still been alive, then. Maybe it was the combination of vital organs shutting down, but he felt his heart beat heavier. He’d gone and fucked up so many lives – an agent of chaos and carnage – he was no different a person than when he’d set foot in the arena, was he?

Darkness sets upon him and he is terrified. Of the pain that twisted like knives under his skin, of the shadows that swam across his eyes, of knowing that at any moment he would see nothing, and no one.

Out somewhere is the man that raped him, alive, existing.

Saturn smiles, because there’s no forgiveness, no epiphany. Only a broken body sprawled out under a set of stars.

But he is tired.

He wants to die, because it’s as close to never existing at all that he can get.

Maybe he didn’t deserve love, he thinks.

And chokes.

And is gone.

Going Thru, Christian Alexander