Once A Year (I Still Dream Of You) by Zero

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Once A Year (I Still Dream Of You)


AUTHOR’S NOTE: An alternate title to this one is: In which Zero once again shows off why he is in therapy and should have gone to therapy sooner. I will say this: This is a very personal one. Lots of it is true, lots of it is also fiction. Did I even edit this one? Well, barely. I just had to get it out of my system. Be warned, not quite a straightforward haircut story. Enjoy the meeting with my personal demons, and as always comments of all kinds are more than welcome.




You didn’t know if you should leave.

At this point, it was a worn-down conversation, near verbal hands-me-down clothing, torn and stretched at every possible edge.

People around us always seemed on the verge of leaving Venezuela. Where to? Nowhere. Everywhere. Anywhere.

"Leave" I always said, out of the better, buried parts of myself.

We were long-haired university students in a country that had cut short everything else.

What else was there for us to do but leave?

You were the handsome, athletic, extroverted one with a contagious smile. The descendant of Spanish ancestors with green eyes of spring fields and rare hair of gold that made you coveted in this country.

And I? I was the introvert overachiever who somehow managed to make you laugh. The dark-haired, pale-skinned one with no talent for sports and a dead older brother no one ever knew how to talk to.

We met in sixth grade, after you had changed schools and ended up with me in this same-sex education Catholic trap I learned to escape unscathed from.

I remember seeing you for the very first time and knowing you were going to be my best friend. It wasn’t a this-kid-kind-of-reminds-me-of-me afterthought. It was something I would do anything to make it happen.

I remember the thrill and the ache of finding out everything we had in common. A love of languages, a love of films, a love of studying. How every parallel seemed to move us closer to one another, every shared laugh.

How your life mirrored mine and didn’t, because your family was perfect and mine wasn’t, your family was whole and mine wasn’t, you were perfect and I wasn’t. Your life was everything my own life could have been but wasn’t. You just reminded me, how everything was a constant almost.

Your friends, who kept teasing that I was into you. How I both ignored them and didn’t.

"Can you picture it? You confessing your love to him?"

I didn’t know why I lied so well, why it came so naturally to me, instinctively. I had lots of practice lying to myself a lot, and that made it easier to lie to anyone else.

Back then, I was the boy who laughed at and told homophobic jokes, because what else was there to do in a country like ours?

All those years, I thought I loved you as a friend. It took me years to realize I did not.

The same old story of being a gay kid and falling in love with your best friend and not knowing you were in love.

It took me sitting beside you as you drove and told me once again that you didn’t know if I should leave.

And I said once again: Leave.

Because you had everything to leave. Because your live, breathing eldest brother was already in Madrid, because you had a Spanish passport, because we were barely twenty and unattached, because it is what I would do, and most of all because I loved you more than I could ever understand myself.

"It would be amazing if we both left for Madrid," you added that night in my house, as we sat in the kitchen table.

And I had to run a hand through my hair and hold my locks away from my face, and hold my own heartache at bay.

Because I could not follow. And I knew it. And I wonder if you even knew it. Or if you didn’t. The same way you never knew my dead brother’s name.

"You know, you look good with your hair down," you said as you looked at me, cracking nuts open beside me. "You get that a lot for a reason. You should wear it down more often."

It was the way you smiled when you said it. The times you ruffled my hair or slip my hair tie out when I wasn’t paying attention. The way it almost made me think you noticed me in a similar way I noticed you. What made me put it back up in a messy bun.

I was always the one noticing your freckles and moles more often than I should, caught them peering underneath your t-shirt and wondering about the constellations of your skin.

I, who had slept next to you. As friends. I didn’t touch you. I never did. I scurried as far away, to the opposite side of the bed as far as I could go, to forget how much I wanted and feared touching you.

I, who was always looking at your lips in the way other guys stare a girl’s mouth. I, who for all my supposed heterosexuality, wondered far too often how would your lips feel pressed against mine.

So, to think, you also noticed me. Even if it was just my dark shoulder-length hair. The hair I felt sometimes made me look too feminine or too much like my brother, too much like a ghost more than anything else, too much like someone who could be loved (and I did not know if I could be loved).

It stirred in me something like hope. A thing I didn’t know how to hold.

And this country did not have a future tense for us. And I did not know it yet, but we did not have a future tense for us either.

This city of sweet oranges, beautiful women and willing men and students like us getting teargassed and shot in the head at every protest.







Back to us now.

You know what hurt me the most? It wasn’t being left behind. It wasn’t that you left, because after all I was the one who told you to leave.

It was that you did not tell me yourself that you were leaving.

Do you know what it was like?

Getting a call from one of your friends, the same ones who always joked I was in love with you, the same who made me know I was unwelcome into your circle of friends, the same who always tried to provoke me, demanding I make a reservation at the pool to throw you a farewell party.

"He leaves next Monday. We need Thursday," he spoke fast, rushed on the phone.
"I can’t. It’s impossible. I can’t attend," I leaned against the room of my bedroom as I realized you were leaving and this is how I was finding out.
"Well, we can’t do any other day! It’s Thursday or never!" he sounded like he was cornered and like he wanted to corner me with him.
"And I can’t do Thursday. Any other day is fine, but not Thursday."

I truly couldn’t. I had something lined up. A chance I had chased my entire life. I did not tell him, I did not tell you.

He hung up. And that was it. That is how I found out.

That you were doing what I had been telling you to do all these months. That you were leaving.

I will tell you the truth. I was pissed. Not that you were escaping Venezuela without me. Not that I was to graduate university alone now. Not that my day-to-day would now be your absence.

But that I had given you all of my language, as limited and constrained as it was, and you gave me your silence at the very end.

(Because out of the two of us, you were the one that always won).

I tried texting you, you know? I typed and retyped, erased and wrote again, the kind of messages you end up not sending anyway.

And everyone asked me about you. And I didn’t know.

I did know that you once admired how I looked with my hair down and long. And how much I did not want it to matter.

How much I did not want to be reminded of your odd generous smile as you ran a playful hand through it when I wore it down.

I did it, not much longer after your departure.

Again, my talent for lying made it easier.

And for all I knew, you always believed me when I lied. Either because I was too good at it, or because you wanted to believe I was good in the way other people were, or because you never looked too deep into me.

When I was called next by the barber in line that afternoon, it came easier than I imagined, saying that I wanted to cut all my hair off.

"How short?"
"All of it."

The words left my mouth before I understood them. My voice detached, unemotional, a rehearsal of certainty.

The barber stared for a moment. But I must not have been the first twenty-years old buzzing off all his hair he had, and shorter haircuts were always more popular in Venezuela, anyway, where everything got you accused of being a faggot.

He led me to the chair. The smell of aftershave and shorn hair. The stares of the other two customers, older than me, measuring and discussing my own masculinity in their heads as they watched, I knew, because this is a game Venezuelan men always played.

The cape snapped around my shoulders. I caught my reflection. Hair falling past my shoulders, that small resemblance to my brother, to you, somewhere in Madrid, somewhere freer now.

"Number two," I asked, with mostly an intuition of what that guard was.

You made me feel like a stranger and I decided we could be strangers then.

The clippers came alive, that low mechanical buzz that fills the skull before the sound reaches the ears.

When they touched my nape, when they met my scalp, I felt a recoil in my throat. The first lock fell, then another, and another.

It happened faster than I thought it would. My hair fell into my lap, and I couldn’t keep up with the sight of it.

Heavy mounds of deep dark waves, the ones your friends called black. The ones you always insisted looked better let loose.

What was the point of having long hair if I always tied it back?

I caught a first peek at my scalp when the clippers touched my temples. Paler than my face. A raw whiteness I had not seen in years.

I held a breath and felt the blades press again, a second time, closer. Felt the hair hit my shoulder and slide downwards into my lap.

I held my own gaze in the mirror. Remembered how I held yours through your uncertainty. How I looked you in the eyes when I said, from the depths of the heart I always forgot I had: Leave.

The hair clippers landed on my forehead last. The loud buzzing I could not reacquaintance myself with. My chin-length bangs pulled back away from my face, for the one last time. Then cut down to translucent dark bristles.

I rehearsed future conversations in my head. For when I encountered the friends you had left behind again.

The clippers hummed. One lock. Then another. My lap filled. I didn’t look.

The barber asked if it was short enough. I said yes, but I did not know the answer, because I no longer knew what enough meant.

Enough was a word this year, you, myself, always pushed to its limits. We had tested the elasticity of enough for years.

I held still and the barber lathered, shaved and squared my hairline. I had not instructed him to. I did not oppose either. Both blade and geometry, foreign in my skin.

When he turned off the clippers, the brush swept the hair from my shoulders. Then, the barber would sweep it into a pile from the floor. I looked less like a boy who fell in love with his male best friend.

I paid. I thanked him. My voice did not tremble. I am not sure it could even be heard.

Outside, the sun hit my bare neck for the first time in years. Sweat slid unobstructed down my razor burnt nape.

I would no longer hear other people compliment my long hair like you did. You had taken a part of language from me, I would take the rest of it.

I returned to the classrooms where we once sat together, where we had our names called one after the other with all my hair buzzed down and acted like this wasn’t an open wound.

There I was again, what I had always been. The overachiever student whose best friend who had left Venezuela, and who once had hair down to his shoulders.

I acted like I had not had my heart broken by you. I acted like I did not miss you. I acted like I could forget you at will.

I acted like I had not been in love with you all my life.

When you left, that year, I know you wanted to live anywhere else.

When I left, years after you, what I wanted was to know if I could outrun this country one day.





I met you once in Madrid. You had a girlfriend. I now knew I was gay and that I’ve loved you.

You still had that laugh I fell in love with. Those freckles and moles I always joked about wanting to connect like dotted lines with a marker. The green eyes I could stare into forever.

You didn’t know if you should leave when we were twenty. But I did.

I don’t think we are the boys we were. I missed you. I do not know if you missed me. And yes, we are not who we were.

This is its own kind of honesty. Not pretending we are who we were, two boys in a country that would eat them both alive, two boys in a country where everyone plays Russian roulette every day, whether they want it or not.

But that boy I was still lives somewhere inside me.

I saw him once one night. I had a dream of teenage boy with hair down to his shoulders banging on a door.

I knew him. He could not hurt me. And I could not hurt him either. And I will not play Russian roulette on your birthday texting you anymore. Or telling you I thought of you (because I think of you often).

It turns out. I still had a heart after all. Despite the years denying I had one. Despite the years fighting it. All to no avail.

I know this is the only means of dialogue, the only remaining language I can articulate in regard to you, to us.

Truth is I still dream of you. Ten years later. At least once a year I dream of you.

And I wonder if you also dream of me.

If you have found what you searched for when you left.

I did.

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