Page 77 of I Dreamt That You Loved Me
Across the top it said:Read this while I’m gone. I’m going for a walk to clear my head.
Sure, just run away, Gabriel.
But curiosity got the best of me, so I carried the notebook out to the fire escape and sat in the spot where he’d been sitting.
The sky was a buttery yellow and the railing was warm against my back as I read.
When Gabriel was in his teens, he used to get a lot of headaches. His dad took him to see doctors who all said pretty much the same thing. They were psychosomatic. Stress-induced.
They’d insinuated that Gabriel had brought them on himself. Finally, his father got fed up and told him he wasn’t wasting another dime or another minute of his time catering to Gabriel’shistrionics. He’d called him a nutcase, an attention seeker and a hypochondriac.
The summer after he graduated high school, he had a really bad headache and hallucinations. Not drug-related, he’d written.
He said he had no memory of what he’d said or did, but his father had him locked up in a psych ward.
The psychiatrist evaluated him and diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. They put him on a cocktail of drugs. Antidepressants and anti-hallucinogens and a load of other “shit drugs.” Some made him nauseous; some made him feel like a zombie, and he said he was in a “really dark place.”
When he was finally released, he ditched the prescription drugs and took off to LA with the band. Music, he knew, would save him. While out there, he got another evaluation from a psychiatrist who said he did not display bipolar tendencies.
Now he was done listening to doctors’ opinions regarding his headaches.
At the very bottom, he wrote: Now you know all my dirty secrets.
Oh, Gabriel.
When I finished reading, I hugged the notebook to my chest. Maybe it was uncharitable to hate a dead man I’d never met, but I detested Gabriel’s father. How could he have treated his only son so horribly?
My heart ached for Gabriel.
If I’d known all this before, I never would have pushed so hard. No, that’s not true. I still would have worried, and I still would have insisted that he see a doctor.
I thought he needed to see a specialist. He needed to advocate for himself and not give up until he got a proper diagnosis.
But I already knew that he would stubbornly refuse to see any more doctors.
Gabriel returned a little while later and joined me on the fire escape. He sat opposite me and looked out at the rooftops while I looked at him.
He was wearing a white V-neck T-shirt with plaid shorts that he called his old man shorts and beat-up Converse high-tops with lyrics he’d inked on the canvas and soles back in high school.
And I loved him so.
I crawled to him across the fire escape and climbed into his lap, straddling him. Wrapping my arms around his warm neck, I kissed his lips and he kissed me back.
Butterflies.
His tongue swept into my mouth, and I tasted him. Sunshine and the strong Spanish coffee from a little café on Avenue C. He always ordered in Spanish. Two coffees and cake for the “muchacha bonita.”
I cradled his face in my hands and pressed my forehead against his. “I love you.”
His hands were in my hair, and we breathed the same air.
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Our faces were so close together that I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him. His heartbeat so strong and steady. His strong, calloused hands holding the back of my head. His abs and hard chest pressed against my stomach and breasts.
The flutter of his lashes as his eyes drifted shut. The warm skin at the nape of his neck and the sun-warmed waves of his hair sifting through my fingers.
Two bodies pressed flush against each other, trying to erase every sliver of space, and get as close as humanly possible.
