Cicadian Rhythm III

A personal essay in three parts

Apr 23, 2024

17, 2011

When I was seventeen, I had wrists like steel
And I felt complete

Giving Up The Gun, Vampire Weekend

From the trees lining the street, the cicadas pause their nesting to watch a boy-not-yet-a-man walk into a music venue. That night, the theatre is being rented out for a ticketed college party. Something about semester kickoff. It’s an old building named after a beer company—apt given the smell of the place that evening. Its walls are covered in faded red brocade velvet and it wears a big peeling ceiling fresco like a hat.
It would be beautiful under different circumstances.

The boy doesn’t notice any of these details. He’s distracted, scanning the pool of bodies on the lookout for another boy. His Dr. Martens turn into cement blocks as he realizes the gravity of his situation: He wasn’t invited, he doesn’t go to the school, he found out about this through a Facebook post or a friend mentioning it in passing. He can’t quite remember that detail, but what’s sure is he’s not meant to be there.

This is a last-ditch effort to cling to something immaterial with dug-in fingernails, and it’s pathetic. He knows it is, but the potential of loss hurts more than the presence of shame.

The boy doesn’t remember if he drank that night or if his stomach knots were woven so tightly no liquid could pass through—either way his state is altered, filled to the brim with a jealous sadness. He can feel it sloshing around his gut like frothy waves of sea spray pulling him into the deep.

Tethered to his friend, he enters the crowd for a vantage point and some cover. The DJ yells into a microphone and plays a club hit that consists of Barbra Streisand’s name being repeated over a techno beat. The crowd goes wild for it. The school moves as one, bouncing him around like the out-of-sync outsider he is.
His friend is saying something about something in his ear, but the buzzing in his head is too loud for it to register. She knows why they are there, and he knows she knows, though, they haven't discussed it. The boy can’t bring himself to give his misery the company it desperately craves.

A new song starts. A man is yelling about somebody that he used to know, and the irony of not being able to find his now-stranger is not lost on the boy. It flips out his insides. Nobody seems to notice his heart pumping on the outside of his chest, still beating despite the crack.

After thirty seconds or an hour of the boy feigning normalcy, the pair’s friend finds them. She goes to this school and the ease of belonging oozes off of her in a cloud of beer breath. The two girls talk and laugh. The boy can’t talk, can’t laugh, he’s worried opening his mouth will cause the queasy feeling to take physical form all over the dance floor.

The second friend tells him she was just with the other boy, the one he’s searching for, and did the other boy know he was coming? She continues with a hushed voice saying she has something to tell him and she’s not sure how to. Her wincing face tells the boy everything he needs to know, confirmation by way of creased face folds.
The truth is taking shape in his body, stretching into the last nooks and crannies hope was hiding in. Breath heaving, pulse racing, sweat dripping, he is frozen in place. He can’t even look up to take in the mezzanine level.

If he had looked up, he would’ve seen the other boy’s body braided into someone else’s.
If he had looked up, he would’ve seen the other boy see him, go wide-eyed and immediately slick with sweat.
If he had looked up, he would’ve seen the other boy attempt to flee the scene before his crime had any witnesses.

The truth is taking shape in his body, and he carries its weight out without looking up.

The cicadas watch the boys exit the venue from different doors in quick succession. One of them has a tear-soaked t-shirt and is trying to catch his breath while an anvil sits atop his lungs. Ten feet away, the other is fidgeting with his phone, ignoring texts and scanning the bus schedule. He hears the crying and starts to run from it.
The crying heap on the ground notices and calls out a name. He says it over and over and over, but the other boy never looks back. He’d always been a runner, but the boy never imagined he’d run from him.

To this day, that theatre sits in front of the boy’s favourite coffee shop. He walks by it weekly and doesn’t notice the memory of that night tugging at him. All he hears now is the song of the cicadas alerting him to spring’s arrival.

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