i / will

i was leaned over a wide windowsill, propping myself up on my elbows with my head and shoulders sticking out the kitchen window. three floors down i could see the dirty old tiling of an amazingly crooked and narrow alleyway. it was the middle of the night, i could almost swear it was sometime after 2am, and vilius was giving me a haircut with his electric razor. there were two other people in the kitchen and both of them kept repeating ‘this is a bad idea’ and ‘you’re insane’ to me, because supposedly letting your new friend touch up your pixie cut out of boredom was not an appropriate pastime activity somehow. one day, many days later, vilius told me that his dad used to cut his friends’ hair in the army; i always thought that analogy was charming, somehow.

and then vilius dropped the razor, and it fell all the way down, all three floors, and it hit the ground with an unpleasant crashing sound. the two of us rushed outside to retrieve it, or what we were still expecting to find left of it, and once we were stood in that same dark, smelly, crooked, narrow alleyway, examining the razor, we saw that it had sustained only one very minor injury, and it was still working perfectly. that was how i ended up getting a haircut in the diagon alley. we both agreed we’d call it that, and that was how i knew i wanted to keep this person around.

the first time i met vilius i ended up drinking hot chocolate at his place in stupidly wee hours of the morning; he used to add grated coconut to hot chocolate. the second time i saw vilius we were at this guy’s birthday; his name was pranavan and i still have no idea how old he was turning then. we were at this guy’s birthday party, we were standing in the kitchen, surrounded by happy, intoxicated faces, and i remember someone asking if vilius and i had come to scotland together. i remember that clearer than a lot of things that happened in between then and now, because in the meantime i’ve grown to understand that our sharp edged jokes and polygonal remarks somehow bent and softened to better fit each other and the first time we talked on the phone i could have sworn i was talking to a friend and not someone i’d known for two days, but i was too immature to value that. i took too many things for granted.

vilius was a bartender at a casino and everyone called him william for convenience purposes; sometimes he’d call me at 5 or 6 in the morning, right after his night shift, because he knew i was always hanging out with my aunt insomnia, and so we would go for walks together, breathe in the coolness of the world together, smoke cigarettes in little gardens surrounded by university buildings, or just talk. about nothing. but together. i don’t think he ever had any clue as to how calming that togetherness was to me.

we’d have movie nights a lot, sometimes. vilius had a projector and we would get a bunch of friends together in a room and drink cheap beer and make dirty immature jokes and eat junk food and complain about university and chain smoke and watch movies. and when i was around vilius, i learned to sit unnecessarily close to people because i was 19 and i had just made a million new friends and that’s what i was supposed to do; i learned to let hugs linger and slowly stretch because i still had all the time in the world, i learned to pay attention to how people feel in the moment instead of afterwards, i learned to not be afraid to hold hands just because we felt like it, i learned that if four people try to sleep on a double mattress, chances are they’re going to end up eating cookies and complaining about how hot it is the whole time.

vilius would sprinkle compliments on me like glitter and i would still find them sticking to the ends of my eyelashes or my fingertips even days later; i must have not had very good friends before, because i was only then learning to be okay with that. first be okay with it, and only then appreciate it. he would validate me with his words and his time, but he would always balance that sweetness out with sarcasm and pinches of brutal honesty here and there. and honest curiosity.

he had the biggest collection of incense oils i’ve ever seen (or maybe the only one i’ve ever seen) and he used to keep bottles of booze under his bed; he wore skinny ties and he used to do parkour; he quite possibly had the biggest arsenal of inappropriate, offensive jokes out of everyone i’ve ever met and he would always whip up a cocktail for me whenever i came over. if he stopped talking for long enough then he’d start playing with his tongue piercing. he had a tattoo on the left side of his chest and even though he’s not a hand talker he’d sometimes start gesticulating way too much. he had little wrinkles around his eyes from every time he smiled and he always carried himself with dignity that i haven’t really witnessed in that many 20 year old guys, if any at all. and sometimes he was so crystal clear it was almost too confusing to bear.

i always catch myself thinking of vilius when someone mentions the lord of the rings; he once made me watch one of those films, and that’s the third most annoying thing he’s ever done to me. the second most annoying thing he did was stopping to talk to me for two weeks once. because of some stupid little fight. that i was just as responsible for. and then he called me one night from work during his smoking break.

‘so… what are you up to?’ i remember him asking. and i remember being silently scandalised by his casualness and total and complete lack of any acknowledgement of that being our first conversation in two weeks.

‘not much.’

that particular phone conversation might have been one of the shortest yet slowest i’ve ever had; i remember feeling offended almost, as if he had no right to just call me and completely disregard us not talking and ignoring each other. but then i learned that friends sometimes do something strange – they talk; they push words off their tongues if they have to, they labour for it.

‘okay, i gotta go back to work, my break is over,’ he finally said after a few forced, quasi-friendly questions and answers that made up that conversation.

‘okay.’

‘look,’ he clicked his tongue and sighed. ‘we haven’t talked in ages and it’s stupid. i just wanted to say i’m sorry. but understand me too…’ and then he explained his point of view of whatever we had fought about.

for some reason that’s a memory of him i don’t think i’ll ever lose. i don’t think i’ll ever forget the feeling of learning that someone with as much pride as vilius would be willing to swallow all of it for me. not only that, he also probably wasted his entire cigarette break on me.

for some reason, life was always happening crazy early in the morning with vilius. or rather, life was always stopping crazy early in the morning. this last memory might have no significance to it at all, but i remember sitting in a wicker chair in front of a big window facing the tay the morning after vilius’ 21st birthday. he was sitting on one side of me and his then co worker noro, who i’m pretty sure was from slovakia, was sitting on the other side, and everyone had either just left or scattered around the apartment and fell asleep, but we still sat there smoking cigarillos, and i was listening to the two guys talk about facial hair. come to think of it, this memory really does have no significance at all, but i’ll hold on to it for sentimental reasons.

it’s been more than a couple of years now since i last saw vilius, but i’ve met him in my dreams a handful of times since then; and it always picks at the strings of my heart somehow, it always does. and i feel like i shouldn’t even be saying that out loud, i feel like some rights and privileges are lost if i keep my eyes shut while friendships slip right through my hands without so much as a tangible ‘goodbye’. and yet, here i am.

life seemed a lot different when i thought i was infallible. i hope someday it’ll make sense to me. i hope you found your sense, too.