Burn Like Stars

Gerard stays in bed until well past noon. It’s not that abnormal for him, in all fairness. Sometimes, if he doesn’t feel the need to pee, he won’t get out of bed until dinner. Usually not the case, but it has happened. He put a TV in here, so he can watch his soap operas, and when he’s got the TV and his phone, why should he need to get out of bed?

Except, today. He woke up closer to nine and he’s been lying in his bed all the while. Just thinking. It was one of those long nights. The kind that seem to take forever. He didn’t get a whole lot of sleep. There’s a certain feeling when your eyes are too heavy to sleep. When your bones are so full of drowsiness that you can’t get to bed. Last night was that, only coupled with spiraling thoughts that wouldn’t go away even when he tried. It was the kind of disparity that even jacking off doesn’t do a whole lot to help.

He’d fallen asleep maybe at about six in the morning, but that didn’t last long. Gerard rolls over a couple dozen times, playing this app or that app on his phone, until the need to pee reaches a breaking point.

For most people, you just get out of bed and walk to the bathroom, but it’s not that easy for Gerard. Two minutes of rolling around in bed, trying to grab his chair which is somehow just out of reach, and then pulling himself into it. Doors are always very tricky, especially when they open inwards, which the door to Gerard’s room does. Then there’s the hallway. It’s a process. It’s become easier with time, but for nearly thirty years of his life, Gerard has been able to stand up to get to the bathroom and that was all he needed to do. Times have changed him.

During and after, a tedious process that no one save him should ever need to know the intricacies of. Ultimately, he ends up looking at himself in the mirror, only his head and shoulders are in the frame of the big bathroom mirror, because the accident took a couple of inches off, namely, however long his legs were. He doesn’t look very good, but he never does nowadays. He could shave, that’s for sure. He’s gone much longer than this without a haircut, but his hair is kind of gross. Gerard has never been big on showers, they’ve never really been for him. Harder now, he’s more of a bath guy. He doesn’t take those that often either. It used to be a bi-weekly thing, but now, Gerard’s close family and friends are lucky if it’s a weekly thing. It’s a lot of work to get yourself into a bathtub when you’re handicapped. Stronger and smarter people than he have no trouble with it, but Gerard has kind of given up hope for anything in his life.

He looks at the razor next to the sink. Then he looks at the toothbrushes in the little cup. He looks at the hairbrush. He decides to forego all of these options to go eat toast.

He rolls himself out of the bathroom, which is far easier said than done. The bathroom is easily the most difficult room to get out of, because this house is probably about sixty or seventy years old, and it was definitely not built for people in wheelchairs, so all the hallways and doorframes are narrow, but the bathroom specifically is so small that you can’t change your mind once you enter it. Once you’re inside of the bathroom, you’re inside of it, and you can’t turn back around, and that’s when you aren’t in a wheelchair. When you are in a wheelchair, there’s no space on either side of the door to get it open, so he has to take the door head on, and it’s a nightmare every time. And that’s after the renovation. It’s still an impossible room to get in and out of, but hey at least the bathtub is easy to get into. Honestly, sometimes he just holds it in so as not to go through all the goddamn trouble.

After several moments of arguing with the door, Gerard manages to get it opened. He wishes he could kick the door, but his feet don’t work so he just smacks it on his way out, which is not smart, because it is an inanimate object that happens to be made out of wood so his hand hurts now. He rolls himself in the direction of the kitchen, thankful to have the house to himself right now, while Mikey and Pete are both off at work.

Or at least that’s what Gerard had thought until he rolls into the kitchen and Mikey is sitting there, laptop in front of him. It feels like that moment when he was a kid when he faked being sick and started singing and dancing around the house, but his mom was down stairs the entire time, and he got taken into school in his pajamas that day three hours after school had started to teach him a lesson. But this is not his mom, this is Mikey, and no offense to their mom, but he’s probably just slightly more important. Mikey was his best friend for his entire childhood, and still is today, and yes, his mom did offer to let him stay with her after the accident, but it was far less demeaning to live with his brother than his mom. And Mikey is also his single favorite person on this planet, even though it didn’t really seem that way last night.

“Hey,” Gerard says, because he was the asshole, so he should say something first. Not like Mikey wasn’t also an asshole, but Gerard sure did start and then further escalate it. Gerard gets angry when he’s angry. And he’s always fucking angry. Full on Hulk all hours of the day.

“Hey,” Mikey says, and he closes his laptop screen. He doesn’t sound particularly angry, like he’s clinging onto the argument like he did last night, and Gerard is very grateful for that. There was a time when they would almost compete on how long they could hold a grudge or still be angry at each other for. Mikey embarrassed Gerard in front of his girlfriend at the time and Gerard didn’t speak to him for two weeks. Gerard forgot to pick Mikey up after school one day and it was nearly a month of silent treatment. They were professionals at it. But they grew up, because it’s harder to get away with shit like that when you pay taxes.

“I fucked up, Mikey,” Gerard says, stopping himself in front of the table where he usually sits, because they pulled away one of the chairs that used to be at the table so that Gerard could slot his wheelchair in there.

“Yeah,” Mikey says. “I kind of did too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know, and I am too.” Mikey says. It’s still super uncomfortable, but at least they’re not screaming at each other.

“You shouldn’t have taken off work because of this, Mikes,” Gerard says. Mikey has already missed so much work because of him. Though to be fair, Gerard’s not really one to be giving Mikey life advice.

“I wasn’t really in the state of mind to go in,” Mikey shrugs. Gerard thinks that for a lot of his life, Mikey has had to be the level headed one. Because they’ve both struggled through some shit, but Gerard’s the one who’s allowed to be loud about it. He gets to make a scene and be overdramatic and sad, and Mikey kind of has to keep it together. Paraplegia gives you a couple of rights so as to make up for the fact that it takes most of them away. All of a sudden you have a good reason to complain about things and be depressed whenever you want.

All of that sort of came out last night. Gerard’s externally combusting, and Mikey’s a little more internal.

He can’t help but to look back. Mikey is everything to him. How he could ever have said the shitty things he said to him will haunt him forever, because god does Mikey means everything to him. He’s never had a better best friend, not even Ray comes close. A year ago, it seemed like things were picking up for the both of them.

“I never meant for things to get this bad,” Gerard says.

Mikey lets the room breathe for several seconds. Maybe even a few minutes. He looks at the table, not quite at Gerard, his eyebrows wrinkled together.

“You’re not doing well, Gerard,” he says finally.

“I know,” Gerard nods.

“You’re like… do you ever look at yourself?”

“I try not to.”

“It would probably make you sad. As sad as I am when I see what you’re doing to yourself.”

“I know,” Gerard says, because he does. He does know.

“You know, right after it happened, I was talking to the doctor and he told me it was rare for people not to find a therapist after things like this. She assured me that you’d want to do that. Because she said it was important, that you’d need it. But every time I’ve asked you, you just keep putting it off. Well, Gerard. This time, I’m not going to let you put it off anymore. You need help, and I can’t give it to you. I don’t have the tools, the knowhow, I don’t have it. And I want you to stop hating yourself.”

Gerard takes a deep breath. Those are some of the softest hard words to hear he could imagine. Mikey isn’t telling him to pack his bags, he’s not saying he hates Gerard, or that he doesn’t care anymore. He’s saying he cares a lot for Gerard, and wants him to get better, but it’s still really hard when someone says that they see your cracks.

“You understand what I’m saying, right, Gee?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gerard nods. “It’s not that I disagree… It’s just, it’s hard to hear.”

“I know it’s hard, Gerard. I hate, I hate admitting when I need help. Pete will attest to that. I’d keep a bullet in if it meant avoiding asking for help, and I know you’re the same, cause you’re my brother. So, like, I know it’s hypocritical of me to say I think you need help, but like, I’m not a therapist, and I don’t know anything that comes close, and you need someone who can actually help you, and that’s not me.”

“I understand,” Gerard says. He’s found a little grain of wood in the table to look at. It’s just him and that grain of the world, a staring contest at the end of the world.

“Gerard, you’re not looking at me?” Mikey says.

“I’m just… you know,” Gerard makes a hand gesture and hopes that Mikey understands.

“Yeah,” he says, because he does understand. “What I wanted to talk about yesterday is kind of… well, along similar lines.”

“Really stacking everything on me all at once,” Gerard says actually looking up at Mikey. It’s sometimes weird how Mikey looks the same as him but shaped a little differently. He’s got the same nose, same eyes, same eyebrows, same everything. But it’s like two different people got all the same parts and put them on their two heads differently. Mikey’s got a thinner face, a stronger jaw, Gerard has softer eyes, a more upturned nose. They are so clearly cut from the same cloth.

“I didn’t know how much we both needed to hear it until last night.”

“Okay. Well let’s have it then.” He’s not mad at Mikey. He never really feels mad at Mikey, for a logical reason that is. He gets angry with Mikey for a lot of stupid and dramatic reasons, but not for anything real. Not when Mikey is as smart as he is, which is to say, extremely.

“I think you should get a job instead of hanging around here all day. It’s only making you worse. You can’t honestly care about The Young and the Reckless.”

“My old job… the board game store, they shut down. Fucking Jeff Bezos.”

“There are in fact more places to work than a board game store, Gerard.”

Growing up, the two of them were sure they were going to be in a band together. Or maybe write comic books. And things might have been going according to plan, in all honesty. Gerard was still just a freelancer with a job in a board game store to get by, but he was close. Closer and closer, every day. The last time Gerard interviewed there, Cartoon Network looked like they might have been softening a little bit to Gerard’s repeated applying. Mikey got a job at a record company. Things really were starting to smooth out.

We all fall from grace sometimes.

It’s harder when he doesn’t have anything, to know that Mikey genuinely loves what he’s doing, working at a record company like he had talked about when they were kids. And you can see it on his face that Mikey loves it, loves his life. Because honestly? So did Gerard. Gerard liked working at a board game store and getting to teach people how to play games on RPG nights. He liked going out and throwing his art at walls like spitballs to see what would stick. He liked that he had started writing his first comic book that no one would ever want to buy, because it was stupid and weird. He liked making voice memos of himself singing and putting that into a little folder in his mind for the band he was going to start someday.

Mikey has everything going for him. Good job, good money, a loving husband, a pretty nice house considering the fact that neither of them ever thought they’d have enough money to live in a real house. Mikey and Pete were even talking about getting a dog. And then Gerard moved in and he ruined everything. Mikey would never say it, and he may not believe it, but Gerard knows that he did ruin it. He ruined everything for a lot of people.

“I can find a job,” Gerard nods. They both know that Gerard does not need the money. He has the money to live on his own for quite a few years without needing to get a job. That’s what those wrongful death settlements will do for you, but that’s a joke that everyone has told Gerard he shouldn’t make anymore.

“It’ll give you something to do,” Mikey says, nodding, like he’s trying to talk Gerard into doing something he’s already convinced him to do. Your soaps aren’t making you feel any better.

“How are you planning to schlep me to all of these places?” Gerard asks, because it’s a legitimate question. “Therapy, work, I thought that PT was already hard enough.”

“Well, Pete and I have been talking it over,” Mikey says, and Gerard doesn’t know why it makes him feel like a child when Mikey says that. He and Pete talked it over. Like parents would for a couple. He and Pete talked it over. Gerard’s fucking pathetic. “We’re both definitely willing to work around whatever schedules we need to, but we also did a little research, and apparently Uber has like, wheelchair rides nowadays? You probably already knew that, but we didn’t.”

Gerard did know that. He has snuck out of the house more than a few times for alcohol and snacks.

“Okay.” Gerard says. “So this isn’t a half-baked plan you came up with last night, is it?”

“No, it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. You need a therapist, Gerard, Christ, we all need therapy, but you were in a car accident, you’re in a wheelchair, you lost… well you lost someone important.”

“Yeah. I really do not need to be reminded of all that I lost.”

“Fuck, sorry, I know. But anyway, it’s time to, I don’t know? Take back control of your life?”

“By letting you take control of my life?”

“I’m only like,” Mikey huffs, and Gerard actually gives him a real genuine smile because he can see the gears turning in Mikey’s head right now. “I’m trying to give you the tools that you can use to take back control of your life… by taking a bit of control of your life, yes, but only because you’re too dumb to do it by yourself.”

“Thanks, little bro,” Gerard says, and Mikey makes a face at him. Gerard decides to get gushy but only because that’s what the two of them need right now, is just for him to get a little gushy. “No, actually thanks little bro.”

Notes