Pan
By W. Jade Young
There was a logic in his belly that made everything he said the truth. He used it to build people into heroes, to make them feel glorious, to draw followers to his empty church. I fell into the rhythm of his tatta-tat cadence without noticing I’d begun to march. I was nineteen, he was older.
The first words I said to him were, “I will fucking cut you.”
This pleased him. He laughed from his gut and told me we would be friends.
And so, it came to pass.
His friends became my friends. He told me beautiful half-truths about them, made them gods. He told them beautiful half-truths about me, made me their equal.
*
We were pretenders; it was our bread. We were actors and storytellers and fakes. We wrote backstories, wore costumes, painted faces, spoke in voices that didn’t belong to us. Once, twice, three times a month we were not ourselves. We were fairies or monsters or sorcerers or knights. We wielded swords made of PVC pipe that left black bruises for days, shot each other with 25-pound bows and padded arrows that left welts. We killed each other again and again.
I was always a different me, but he was always the same him.
*
When we weren’t pretending, we were reliving our pretend lives. We ate dinner together, everyone, after we went back to being us. At dinner, he would spin our straw stories into gold, make us grander than we were. We knew they were lies and exaggerations, but who was harmed in the making of heroes? Who benefitted from the dulling of our adventures? The listeners were treated to the bard’s performance, and the heroes were made to feel invincible, infallible.
I began to love the other mes more than I loved the me I was. Those mes were daring; they were just, instead of just me.
*
We took his words with us to other games, other groups, other friends, and told them for ourselves. They were never as shiny, but they filled us with warmth. We sprinkled the borrowed words like fairy dust on our same-old lives and thought happy thoughts.
He was Peter Pan. He taught us to fly.
We stopped searching for our own truths because his was all we needed. It was good to have someone as all-knowing so we didn’t have to ask any questions or form independent thoughts. It was a relief to know my opinions were wrong, that he would help me form new ones.
*
He was fat, his truth-belly spilling over his belts. No matter the level of physical exertion, no matter the weather, he sweated through the pits and down the backs of all his shirts. The reason for this last was because of the incomparable pelt of thick, wiry hair that covered him from neck to ankles.
He had two girlfriends, both young, beautiful, smart, strong. They were girlfriends with each other, too. This, I was told, was polyamory, but whatever name they gave it, I never understood the physical draw he had. He was another Pan, old Pan—half-god, half-goat—patron of sexual energies and fucker of innocent things.
I never wanted anything more than his stories of me.
*
I had seen the other side of him, the monster-man who whipped words around himself like a lasso and tied people wrist-to-ankles. They were deserving of his dark power. They were terrible or mean or damaged or misguided or weak or confused or easy.
He knew the tender places inside a person just by looking. He knew where the foundational fissure would be, where to place pressure so the structure came down with one strike. He left people dazed and wondering why they hated themselves and how he had known. They left less than human, stripped of their skin, bleeding disgracefully.
He told their stories, too. They were villains. They were conquests.
They weren’t us, so it was okay.
*
It was sudden when the luster wore off, or else it was bitterly slow. We were give-and-take, he and I, ten years of together. We were colleagues, coauthors, roommates, best friends.
I had come to him already shattered by the one man who should have protected me above all else. I had been collecting shards of myself, trying not to cut my articulate fingers on my own sharp edges. I’d been a ghost, and he had performed my séance. He showed me the fractures in my own foundation and told me they were not irreparable. He helped pour concrete for a new one, helped secure beams, hammer in hand.
Sometimes I cry when I think of how much better he made me before he broke me.
*
There is a depth of sorrow that, when you reach it, you stop being the same person. You make inhuman sounds. You make inhuman faces. Your body forgets how to move like you, your mind forgets how to think like you.
You descend into a singularity of every weakness, every inability, every flaw of your own character. The crying goes on for days, but feels like moments. You can’t remember the last time you bathed or loved or felt anything other than nothing. You are a mass of tears, held together by raw heartstrings only. Your soul evaporates, illusive heat-vapor on tarmac.
It leaves you only shards.
The blessed never know this. Me, I’ve known it twice.
W. Jade Young is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.