The Pairing

by Casey McQuiston

it’s hard to ignore how Kit travels the streets of Paris like he was born in them. It’s one thing to share someone’s life and then find yourself spectating on it, and another to watch him live the dream he left you for.

The problem is, we’ve only ever been everything or nothing to each other. I don’t know how to start being something to him.

As far as I know, there are two ways to get over someone: Surrender to the anger that’s already there, or invent something to get angry about. Sometimes it was always wrong, and the only thing to do is stop believing it was good to love them in spite of it. But sometimes they were good to you. Sometimes you go looking for kindling and find that green leaves won’t burn, that the garden was watered too well. Sometimes you have to rearrange the truth into something you won’t miss.

“I like reading E. M. Forster because it’s always gay, even though this one is about a man and a woman,” he says. “Do you know how sometimes when you read or watch or listen to something, there’s a … resonant homosexual flavor? Not even in anything the characters are explicitly doing or saying, but in the voice, or how the flowers are described or a character looks at a painting, or the way they see and react to the world. Like when Legolas and Gimli walk into Minas Tirith and immediately start criticizing the landscaping.”

Everyone thinks I need to be saved from myself, like I don’t know I’m a fuckup. I know. I know. Every day I wake up in the town I grew up in, and I put on my boots and roll up my sleeves and work so hard to be pretty good at a few things, because I know I’d fuck up anything bigger. I would be so much braver if I was someone I could trust.

On a long tour, days have a way of stretching impossibly beyond their edges. So many things spread out over such short hours, one after another, until it seems unimaginable that the day could have begun in a different place at all. Like there has only ever been here, and then here, this fountain and that drink and this sparkling pane of glass, each trapped in an instant happening in the memory forever, each instantly replaced with the thing after that. Perpetual fleeting everything, worn-out body and blissed-out brain. That’s how this day goes on.

“Every tour I enjoy the people, but on some tours, I meet people I think could be my friends,” Fabrizio says. “And I want to bring you to my home and introduce you to my wife because I hope that after this trip is over, we can stay in touch, if you like. I hope we do not become strangers when we leave Palermo.” There’s something so admirable about his directness. I like you. Stay in my life. It’s perfectly simple, when he says it like that.