“We’ll see you soon, okay?” she had said. “We’ll see you soon, moyo soltnse.”
Because surely, the son she had raised would make the right choice.
It had haunted him for six months, the simple phrase of affection he’d heard his mother say so many times, the one he would likely never hear again. Moyo soltnse. ??? ??????. My sun.
It had been so quiet, losing his parents. They hadn’t even asked questions. NoHow long have you known?They hadn’t asked whether he’d talked to the church, whether he’d tried to receive counseling. Alexei had thought he’d at least get a talk about that.
He might have, he thought now, if he had been younger. Perhaps it was the fact that he was a grown adult, admitting this forbidden thing, that had made his parents so bereft.
But when his father had looked over his glasses at him and said, “You know what this means, Alexei, if you choose to live this way,” Alexei, immediately,hadknown. Of course he had known. He should have known from the moment he walked into his parents’ house that day, naive and determined. He had been living away from home for too long. Had been playing too much D&D. He had learned a surprising amount of queer people played D&D. Getting to know his fellow adventurers had made him feel more normal. Like maybe itwasn’tthat big of a deal. Bit by bit, he’d forgotten. That no matter what, it always would be to his parents.
Details of that sunny afternoon seemed foggier in his mind by the day, but if Alexei had to guess, he’d say the whole conversation took less than twenty minutes.
Alexei clenched his jaw, staring fiercely at the blank page, resisting the urge to curl into himself. This was why he had come here. He could do this.
He wrote:
Cake down my pants.
And then he realized how ridiculous it sounded, resisted a scream, and quickly scribbled it out.
Okay, well, and now the page was ruined.
With a huff, he ripped it out as neatly as he could. Crumpled it into a ball. Wrote the heading again.
Good Things
Maybe he could glide past his parents, specifically, for now. Maybe he could focus on bigger picture things, all the things he had loved about his church and his community as a kid. The comfort of coming together every week. The closeness of their shared Russian heritage. The softness of the leather hymnals under his fingertips, well used and well loved. The way a particularly emotional hymn made his body shiver. His hands on piano keys in his teen years, when he accompanied the choir. The power and peace in those songs, in those buildings, high ceilinged and holy.
Half-heartedly, instead of a list, Alexei doodled a piano. Black and white keys, even and smooth. Doodles felt easier than words.
Except Alexei had never been an artist like Alina. His doodles looked childish.
He was starting to feel anxious, and the knowledge of this, his hyperawareness of how his mind was drifting unproductively, made him even more anxious in turn. He closed his eyes and rested his head on his forearms.
Eventually, Alexei gave in and thought of Alina. Just Alina, their parents shoved away. Because thinking of Alina always made him smile.
She had always worn her hair long, the blond a shade darker than Alexei’s but still bright as sunshine, often in a braid. Preferably, a French braid done by Alexei. He had gotten rather good at it, he thought, after years of practice, separating the silky strands into three proportionate sections, making the loops tight and clean. It was what she had been most upset about when he left for college. “But Alexei,” she’d pouted, like an actual child, even though she was a high schooler by then. “Who’s going to do my hair?”
Alexei opened his eyes and wrote it down, under the appalling sketch of the piano.
Braiding Alina’s hair.
He chewed on his thumbnail. There was probably something he could have done, over the last six months, to make things less awkward between them. He still wasn’t 100 percent positive how Alina felt about the gay thing, but at least she didn’t seem repulsed by him. Most of their interactions in the last six months had just been…weird. Alexei felt guilty he’d put Alina in an uncomfortable position with their parents, guilty he was making anything hard at all for Alina, whom he was supposed to protect. Alina, in turn, felt guilty Alexei felt guilty, that there wasn’t anything she could do to salvage it, that she still talked to their parents. It was a mess.
Still. Alina wasn’t lost. Alina was, hopefully, the one thing he thought he might be able to keep. And he worried, the more he wrote about her in this journal, this journal he wanted to use to remember and grieve and heal, the more it would feel like she had left him, too.
With a sigh, Alexei closed the thing and shoved it to the corner of his tent.
He had thousands of miles to hike. Surely this would come more naturally at some point.
He withdrew a battered, dog-eared paperback from his pack.
“Leeeeeeeeeeeeeex.”
Ben’s whine broke through the silence, sending a signaturebuzzall the way to Alexei’s toes.
“Yeah?”
