#it has been 2 (two) calendar fucking years since i've written a single goddamn thing and i'm a different person now

[cockymclaughlin]

re: deconstruction

Sometimes finding your roots means burying old gods and reinventing the way you look at what the extent of being alive means.

Sometimes being alive means digging up new gods and learning that you can shape them into being exactly what you need them to be. Their hands are warm just like yours, just like his.

And gosh, but his are warm, aren't they?

It's over lunch one day, sitting across from each other, and Link doesn't know how to resist the desire to ask him if he feels different.

"What?" he asks, like he doesn't know. But his eyes are crinkling in the corners, reminding Link of how long they've been laughing together. How many of those Link put on his face for him. The way he can be found, scattered across Rhett's body.

"You know," Link insists. "Do you feel any different, now?"

He feels different. Reshaped and repurposed into something new, shinier and more tender in places he used to not be, but he figures finally settling into the same skin he's worn for decades leaves room for being a little uncomfortable.

This is uncomfortable, but.

But that's all it is. The discomfort of it almost feels like home, like the Carolina summers and the feeling of a wooden pew underneath him. The discomfort feels like his Nana's living room, feeling his chest grow bigger and bigger and bigger with every single laugh they shared and not understanding what it was.

He knows now. He still feels it, except it's not Nana's living room anymore, it's their office that smells like tobacco and feels more like home than the Cape Fear River ever did, and Rhett's laughing so loud that it takes up all the space in the room. He feels it, his face hurting and his eyes burning as he laughs, too.

And all the righteous fury he used to hold within himself, all of the refusal that nestled its way into his bones to replace everything else inside of him, none of it was enough.

This is uncomfortable, but the discomfort has tethered him to himself. It's tethered him to this.

To him.

"No," and Rhett's answering him honestly, Link knows it like he knows the way his secrets sound against rushing water. "I'm still the same me."

How could he be? How could either of them be the same as before? Link feels new. He feels like something pulled out from the echoing carcasses of the gods he buried behind his Nana's house, to keep safe in case he needed to face them again one day.

And Rhett, when he touches him later that night, feels like a promise he never knew he made.

"We're still the same," Rhett insists, two glasses of wine in, "We're just different, now."

"That doesn't make sense, man," but Link thinks he gets it anyway.

Moreso when Rhett shrugs, gives him a look that says Link should, if he doesn't. And Link's too busy trying to imagine reshaping himself back where he used to be, about burying himself in Nana's backyard again.

But he's frantically digging the soil out from his chest cavity when he says, "I'm not the same. I couldn't be the same, not this me to that him."

"But you're still him," Rhett insists, using his hands to gently pat that soil back into place. "Or you were, which is the same thing. And I'm still me then and me now."

And Link's planting seeds there, now, sighing around a, "You're not understanding."

"I loved him, too," Rhett says, burying himself right next to Link.

"I loved him, too," Link echoes.