JANUARY 1993. SHORTLY AFTER HIS sixth birthday, Luuk was sprawled on the carpeted floor of his small bedroom. It was soft and blue underneath him, like a cloud, and moonlight streamed in from the small window above his bed.
It was late. But he couldn’t sleep — his room occupied his thoughts. His mama had redecorated it as a birthday present, but he didn’t quite like her choices. He thought about his classmate Jakob, whose room he had seen once, at a birthday party. It was nicer than Luuk’s. Filled not only with car and dinosaur toys, but also things that Jakob seemed to love: posters of the solar system and wall stickers of dogs, the boy even had a lamp that looked like a disco ball. Luuk was too afraid to tell his mam he also wanted such an uncoordinated, but loved, room. Once, he’d seen a miniature python statue — nature was one of his biggest interests — and he had wanted it so badly, but he knew his mam would have never agreed to buying it. His room was supposed to be neat, blue but not too boyish.
That was what he was thinking about, when he stopped being alone. Luuk should have noticed it when someone entered his room. He wasn’t often alone around his bedtime, after all. That night, though, he was particularly tired, and perhaps a bit sick — the cold was spreading around his school like wildfire — so when a man picked him up and took off his thick, woolen sweater, he barely paid any attention. Distantly, he did think that it was nice, since Luuk was never really able to sleep in sweaters anyways.
Years later, he would wonder if that had made him an easy target. His naive complicity.
As his back hit his mattress, a face appeared above him. Thick glasses, a reddish beard, green-blue eyes. It was ugly. Not really a face he would expect to see next to his mother’s. And yet there the man was, every day. He thought about how funny it would be if the man wasn’t a human at all. But a panda, bright blue and his mama’s favourite animal, taking him to bed. Wouldn’t that be better? Sometimes he made his mama put on a nature documentary, and whenever they happened to talk about pandas, his mam would turn around and say: Those big things, we don’t have them here, but wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had? Once, Luuk had read about a man in China being killed by a panda in captivity. They’re just as dangerous as other bears, he had always wanted to tell her.
So that night, and every night to come, a blue panda put him to bed. For a moment, as bedsheets itched his back, he wondered if his t-shirt needed to be taken off, too. And that wonder, as it often did, led him to many more questions. Why was he allowed to have his clothes off sometimes, but not other times? His mam saw him naked sometimes, when he was too poorly to dress himself, and the Panda saw him naked often. Surely it wasn’t that big of a deal. It even seemed a little silly, paying for thin pants and t-shirts for summer time, when it was hot enough out to just neglect clothes entirely.
Luuk often wished that he could keep his mind where it needed to be, rooted in the moment, even though he never really understood what was happening. Because the Blue Panda occasionally spoke to him, and he always got upset when Luuk didn’t answer fast enough. And yet, he was always busy looking for an escape, a doorway or an open window. He’d slip away, but he never went far. Another boy — one with his face and stature — would take his place. Sometimes, he was jealous of this child — when the Panda was nice to him, Luuk wanted the attention for himself. Other times, he wondered why the boy was still alive, why he didn’t jump in front of a train like his sister had done.
That night, like the others before it, passed in a blur, in silence only occasionally broken by noises he couldn’t quite comprehend. Always, he found himself looking away from the boy with his face. He thought of anything, except for what was occurring in his bed.
✲ ✲ ✲
November 2002. He visited his father. Luuk’s parents had been divorced pretty much his whole life, so his father hadn’t been there a lot while he grew up. His presence especially dimmed once the Blue Panda entered his mother’s life. But one random day he decided that he wanted to try being there more — and wasn’t that just great?
It wasn’t like he and his father never talked. The man lived far away, in the middle of Germany, and never got the opportunity to show up without taking a day off of work. Luuk spoke to his papa at least once a month, so he hadn’t been abandoned, or anything, just left behind. During weekends, he would wait for the phone to ring. Recalling the disappointment he felt when the person on the other line turned out to be one of the Panda’s or his mother’s friends hurt. Once, he got a birthday call delayed by a week — only after his mama secretly called his father up herself, reminding the man to wish Luuk a happy birthday.
His father always asked the same questions: How old are you now? What do you like, I’ll send over a present. How’s school? And Luuk always answered, slow and timid, while distantly wondering if he was really that easy to forget.
That visit in 2002 wasn’t the first, he’d been coming around on and off since the early 2000s, when his pa suddenly moved back to Nijmegen. It was shortly after the Panda left, and Luuk’s mama started to warm up to the idea of seeing his father again — for your benefit, schat1. Those visits weren’t memorable, though. They just sat on an old leather couch and watched television shows about the police and pawn shops.. They barely spoke, and Luuk often felt a flare of anger rising up from his heart to his throat. Do you even want me here? He had to stop himself from asking, or was this just mama’s idea?
His father lived in an old flat, probably made cheaply after the tweede wereldoorlog2. There was nothing nice about its grey exterior, and the inside wasn’t pretty, either: the elevator had been built in later, an old lady once told Luuk, but it might as well not have been there — it was slow, and only the elderly residents and the lady on the third floor with young children used it. The stairwell reeked of urine, and rat droppings laid in nearly every corner. When he first saw the flat, he almost begged his ma to take him back home.
The surroundings were so depressing that Luuk began to wonder why his father had left. Surely, he couldn’t have afforded any better in Germany. Part of him felt bad for his pa, who worked in a cement factory and suffered from constant shoulder pains. But he also knew that his father could have lived a better life if he had never divorced his mama. He wouldn’t have been happier, but it seemed better to be miserable in a nice home than in a soulless flat. Quietly, his mind reminded him that he would have never met the Blue Panda if his father had stayed around. And maybe he didn’t really care that much about his father, about where the man was suffering. Perhaps Luuk’s pain had taught him how to be selfish.
But, in 2002 his father showed him something that he had never seen before: an old picture album with Luuk’s name written on the dusty, yellowed cover. His papa had found it while cleaning out his storage unit.
“I haven’t picked this thing up in three years,” his pa chuckled and handed him the book. “You were such a little thing back then, look.”
Cards were glued to the first page, some written by family he hadn’t heard from in ages, if ever, others from what he assumed to be old family friends, who he had never known. There were a few with his mama’s handwriting in them, like the ones she must have given to his papa, decorated with balloons on the cover, exclaiming I’M PREGNANT and IT’S A BOY on the inside. After that, the book was filled with images of Luuk — his first bath, his first steps, his old primary school friends celebrating his birthday — looking back at that child, he felt a deep sense of unfamiliarity. It was like waking up in the hospital without any memories, no way to know who you really were, and where you came from, and then looking in the mirror to see a stranger’s face staring back at you.
“Now, where has that boy gone?” his pa laughed awkwardly. What did his father see in him, which characteristic of his had not been there while those pictures were taken?
He automatically flipped through the pages. He saw the party his parents threw after his birth, saw himself sitting in a highchair, watched his hair grow and shorten. His sister’s eyes went from blue to green, something he had never noticed before. She was constantly there, standing next to him, hugging him, looking at the camera as if it could in any way hurt them. If she hadn’t died, he thought, then maybe he would have never changed in ways only his father had managed to pick up. Perhaps the Blue Panda would have never gotten the chance to hurt him. It made him sick, to realize how many things could have been different, how those differences could have avoided the Panda’s existence in his life.
“Luuk?” his father eventually asked.
Sometimes, when the Panda took him to bed, he could hear a voice ringing around his room. It wasn’t coming from him, or the Blue Panda — but from the boy with his face. It sounded like his own voice, but deeper, so harsh that it felt like a pressing in Luuk’s chest. An explosion waiting to happen. The sound, like his baby pictures, was unrecognizable mainly because of its similarity. It was undeniably his, but wrong.
Help, help, help.
Not right now, he’d say to the boy with his face. Can’t you see that I’m all the way over here?
What would have happened if Luuk had responded? Some days, he was tired of wondering, of not knowing what his own life meant, what it would — or could — bring.
The other half of the photo album was filled with old pictures of his sister alone. Many of them were obviously taken before Luuk had been born, others were taken shortly before she died, before she jumped in front of that train coming in from Zwolle. It was clear his pa had put them in the album just so he wouldn’t lose them. It made sense why his father never looked at the book. Three years prior, Luuk had been twelve, mostly ignored, and his sister had been dead for some time; so why had his papa looked at it then, and why had he never done it again?
Was it because he had missed his son, or his daughter, or the both of them? Even though Luuk had always been there, waiting for the phone to ring.
✲ ✲ ✲
August 2007. He finally left his childhood home to study in Amsterdam. He had already finished a biomedical opleiding3 in Nijmegen, but that was never something that he had actually wanted. It had been recommended by his mam and his teachers when he was fourteen, because biology had been his strongest subject, and everyone told him he was analytical enough to do it — whatever that meant for a teenager. Back then, he hadn’t yet learned that he could doubt his mother’s advice.
Back in high school, he had an acquaintance who ended up going to Amsterdam to become a social worker. She was also patient and attentive, and probably the kindest person he had met during school. They used to run into each other at parties, and she was the only other person his age who got drunk regularly. Luuk didn’t think of her often — they had never managed to become friends — but as he finished up his last year of vocational school4 he wondered if it was a route he could take as well. It wasn’t defiant to go from science to social work, or anything, so his mama wasn’t too upset when he shared his plans of going to Amsterdam — as long as he got his diploma first. Which had been part of his plans anyways, he hadn’t wanted to waste four years. So he graduated with grades just high enough to pass, and applied to ROC Amsterdam.
Never had he been away from home longer than two days at a time. And yet he hadn’t felt as nervous as he had expected. Finally, he could get away from the constant smell of the Panda — citrussy and woody — which still lingered in his room even after the thing left. It would probably be good for his mama, too. They never got the distance, the chance to take a breather after arguments, and perhaps it would be better if Luuk lived far away. Sometimes, when his mama looked at him, he could see that she knew something about what happened with the Blue Panda. In the lines of her face he could see the kind of hesitation he had only seen before in guilty people — like those mothers he saw in the news, sitting in a courthouse, waiting for brothers or husbands or fathers to be sentenced. Occasionally, the mother herself was being sentenced — for child neglect or endangerment.
But, Luuk had always found guilt hard to identify. It could have been any other feeling; sadness, the kind of shame a person feels only after being caught. An emotion that wouldn’t have been there if the person had never been confronted. It could have been anger, as well, which he hoped wasn’t the case. He didn’t want his mother to blame him, and in some way that kept him from talking to her about the Panda. Some people, he knew, got angry only because the world hadn’t allowed things to go the way they had wanted them to. Did his mother secretly hope that the Blue Panda had stayed, even if it meant that harm would come to Luuk?
Luuk did not want to live a life in which his mother did not feel sympathy for him. Though perhaps he unknowingly was.
When the Blue Panda took him to bed, Luuk could occasionally hear footsteps sounding from just outside his bedroom. He liked to imagine that they couldn’t be coming from his mama — surely, it couldn’t be his mama walking past his door, hearing the boy with his face, and choosing to walk away.
✲ ✲ ✲
March 1990. A fuzzy memory he couldn’t quite recall. Suzette, his sister, was thirteen and alone with him for a night. His mother was on yet another dinner date with the Blue Panda — who had been there for most of Luuk’s life, in place of his actual father.
He barely had any other memories from that time. Even so, years later, he could recall Suzette: how she sat at the dinner table with a grimace on her face whenever the Panda cooked, how she would always bring her long, pale fingers to her face and bite the tips of them — her nails were too short to properly latch onto — while she did her homework. It made her nails look rough, like a man’s, his mam used to say. Her hair had been blonder in real life than in the pictures his father had. Whenever Luuk looked at old photos of her, he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. From what he could remember, he had always looked up to Suzette, and it was painful to realize that the only real evidence of her existence had failed to capture her essence.She managed to get him to bed at a decent time that night, after he had been given an extra cup of yoghurt after dinner. The memory was more like a collection of sensations, rather than a chronological string of images Luuk could watch play out in his mind. He felt himself sitting on a chair, felt yoghurt melt on his tongue, sticky and slightly gross, then he felt cold, fragile arms surrounding him as Suzette carried him up the stairs. Her fingers clutched at his waist so he couldn’t slip away.
Often he found himself trying to imagine how she must have looked that night. Which pajamas she wore, if she put her hair in a bun or kept the long strands curling down her back. Her eyebrows, in the photos, were so light they were practically invisible — though he could vaguely picture them being ginger in real life. Suzette had had the awkward, long arms of a teenager who had not yet grown into herself.
Then he felt his bedsheets beneath him, soft and recently cleaned. This happened before the Blue Panda began taking him to bed, so he did not worry about pain, or those noises he couldn’t understand. He felt Suzette's hair tickle his cheeks, followed by the press of cracked lips against his forehead.
“You know that I love you, right?” she whispered. “And that I’d never hurt you on purpose?”
“Ja5,” he mumbled, not quite taking in her words. It had been a tiring day of playing and watching television. “Slaap lekker6.”
The night ended there for Luuk, he did not think of Suzette as he fell into a comfortable sleep. The next morning, everyone woke up a little later, except for his sister, who had to leave for school. Earlier in the year, she had asked their mother if she could go to school alone, since she only had to take one bus to get there, anyways. After a few days of begging, their mama agreed, as long as Suzette agreed to leave the house quietly so the rest of the family could sleep. If you want to be so independent. His mam took him and the Blue Panda to church, even though they weren’t religious. Later, his mother would tell him that she had known as soon as she woke up; she felt the loss of her daughter as a pressure beneath her collarbones, threatening to break her. She had only needed a call from Suzette’s school to verify that Suzette had left during morning break — which wasn’t allowed — and never came back. Luuk tried to remember how far his sister’s school had been from the central station. He’d gone to a different school himself, closer to their home.
The call came while they were still at church. After that came many other calls, from funeral directors and distant family members, some from the police because at first his mam couldn’t quite believe that Suzette hadn’t been pushed. Luuk asked his ma why she never called the school herself, if she had known the second she opened her eyes that morning, and she told him that she wanted a few extra moments in which her fears were only in her head, not facts she needed to tell people and things she needed to solve.
While his mam and the Panda got ready for church, Luuk sat in front of the television. On the news, he did hear about a body on the train tracks and that many trains had to be redirected. He knew that a body would get hurt if it got hit by a train, but he couldn’t quite comprehend how the injuries would be different from a person getting run over by a car. His mama once had a little cat, Spinner, who got flattened by a car. She often told him about the thing, about how she found it herself. How it had been as thin as a pancake.
When he got older, he learned that the person on the tracks had been his sister. Luuk wasn’t able to imagine Suzette as just a body, an unknown person only identified by the ID she had put in her pocket, laying on the tracks. He was only able to imagine her as his sister, pale as an angel, someone who would never hurt him.
✲ ✲ ✲
August 2007. He saw a flyer for a party during his first week in Amsterdam. It hung on a streetlamp near his soon-to-be school.
For the past week, he had been stuck in his flat. Which was overfilled with other students, some who lived there, others who had friends who did. The walls of his room were nicotine stained and his shower had no hot water. Which would take at least another week to fix. When he saw the flyer, he knew he had to go, just to escape for a little bit. School hadn’t started yet, and he was still on the lookout for a job, understandably.. He had terrible dreams about Suzette, bloody, her hair knotted and pulled out in places, as flat as a pancake. And the Blue Panda, who wasn’t a panda in his dreams, which he tried to ignore.
His ma had called hours before he saw the flyer, and so had his pa, surprisingly. She hadn’t wanted anything from him, she just wanted to hear his voice again. His papa had wanted to come over sometime to see Luuk’s new flat, which he hesitated to agree to. For once, his bedroom was all for himself, and he did not want someone invading his space. Finally, he could go to bed without worrying about the Panda, or about his mama sneaking in to make sure he hadn’t snuck out to go to a party. Even after the Blue Panda left, Luuk still thought about him, because he was still sleeping in the same bed, the one which the boy with his face used to lay on.
So, the Saturday before school started, he went to the party. It took place in a flat near his own, in a big common area that the organizer had rented for the night. He’d been to parties before, mainly during high school, and he had gotten drunk as well, but it was different at twenty. The last time he drank a concerning amount was when at seventeen, not during a party, but while he was working on getting his diploma. The hangover that he was left with made him miss an important test, and after that he decided that it was probably for the best if he never touched another bottle of alcohol again. As a teenager, he partied because there was nothing else to do, but as an adult he had things to worry about, things more important than that test — he would have to pay bills, for which he would need to get a job, and for the first time he had to deal with a broken shower and missing school books that got mysteriously sent to the wrong address cities away. All of these things he would have to fix by himself.
There were things he could have done to set up his life in Amsterdam, and instead he went to that party anyways. Didn’t he deserve to have a little fun before school started? At first, the party was boring, and uncomfortable. There were clumps of people who had already met, talking and laughing, but none of them attempted to include outsiders like Luuk — made worse by the fact that he seemed to be the only new person to the city. They were all either younger, in the middle of getting their first diploma at a vocational school, or older and pursuing higher education. He felt both like a wise old man and a foolish lamb. He had been mediocre at school, and he knew nothing about his new opleiding3 — except for the jobs that it could later get him. He couldn’t brag about being the best in his class, nor could he complain about research projects or workplace disputes.
The common area looked depressing, with a few mildly coloured balloons floating at the ceiling. There were tables with cheap drinks and bland looking snacks, and two couches with a few chairs near them. Nobody had bothered to sit down, except for two men, sitting closely together. From the previous parties he had gone to, filled with underaged drinking, loud music, and dancing, he had expected something else. They were all adults there, though, so perhaps nobody else felt like they had to be loud in order to be fun. Maybe the party wasn’t even about having fun, but more about gathering with others in order to feel a little less alone in the big city.
Just as Luuk was about to leave — it was foolish, to willingly stand around in a room full of people who did not care about him — someone finally came up to him. A man, seemingly not much older than him, with blond hair that made his head look a little flat. He looked like someone Luuk had met years prior, though this man’s eyes were green, not brown, and soft, rather than annoyed at Luuk’s general presence.
“I suppose you’re new to the city, too?” the man asked, holding his hand out.
✲ ✲ ✲
December 2002. He met Kristiaan at a party. Luuk never had a big friend group in high school, but he met a few people during forced school trips to amusement parks or zoos, and got close enough to them to occasionally get party invites.
He was fifteen, nearly sixteen — the nearly sixteen had been important, a promise, meaning nearly legal or old enough — and he couldn’t even think about how old Kris had been. He had known in the moment, and the months after, but as the years passed he realized that it truly didn’t matter if he had been eighteen, twenty, thirty, or even fifty; all that mattered was that Luuk had been fifteen, nearly sixteen.
Just like with the Blue Panda, he couldn’t exactly pinpoint when the bad things started happening, and he also couldn’t recall when the bad things — the little, easily ignored things — started becoming horrible. It was like he had been waiting for the pain to hit his whole life, and when it finally arrived he could barely pay it any mind. That December day, shortly before Christmas, he was meant to meet Kristiaan, and the suffering that came after was sent to him by God, or whatever else was out there.
Kris had been a friend of someone Luuk vaguely knew, some girl he had talked to a few times during local parties, but then stopped talking to when he discovered that she had been interested. He didn’t want girls to be interested in him, all he really wanted was a boy to love. The kind of love he saw other gay boys write about online, love full of youth and wildness, faster than light. And back then Kristiaan had seemed like the only person who could give it to him.
“How long do you think it will take for her to fall?” was the first thing Kris asked him, nodding towards a girl wearing insanely high heels. They looked good, Luuk thought, and he felt bad for laughing. Kris hadn’t even bothered to introduce himself, he just came up and started talking. Luuk, fifteen, nearly sixteen, had found this attractive.
After the party, the man quickly became a consistent figure in his life. He hosted parties at his flat and mainly invited Luuk and his own, older friends. He took time out of his life to pick the younger boy up from school. After the Blue Panda left, Luuk’s mother yelled at him more often about things that weren’t really his fault: all of her relationships, including the one with his father, had failed, and she hated her job, and she wished they lived in a better part of the city. So he barely noticed it when Kristiaan started yelling, too. But when Kris complimented him? That he did notice.
1, schat = literally means treasure, a term of endearment like dear.
2, tweede wereldoorlog = second world war.
3, opleiding = literally means course, in this context the course is educational and meant to prepare a person for a certain career path (or for further education).
4, vocational school = Known as MBO in the Netherlands. Here students follow an opleiding, after MBO somebody can enter the workforce or further their education. * Whenever I refer to ‘high school’, I’m referring to VMBO, this prepares students to follow a MBO course. (Ages ~12 - 16).
5, ja = yes.
6, slaap lekker = sleep well (literally means “sleep tasty”).
SEPTEMBER 2007. HIS FATHER HAD been adamant that Luuk visit. So, even though he hadn’t found a job yet — he would have yet another interview the next day, at a restaurant he didn’t really want to work at — he got on a train. Though he could only think about Alex during the ride to Nijmegen.
They started messaging back and forth after the party. His first week at school had ended, but he hadn’t been able to focus on it. Alex had not wanted to pursue a higher education, so he already had a fulltime job that kept him busy. Meaning that they mostly spoke later at night. Ever since the party Luuk had gone to bed giddy, his chest bursting, excited to go through the next day quickly so he could chat with the other boy. He was falling in love too fast, he knew it. He was once again head over heels for a man he met while slightly tipsy. After Kris, he hadn’t dated anyone, because how could he trust himself after having made such a terrible decision in the past?
Still, he felt the need to befriend Alex, who had been so kind to him, who unfortunately lived two hours away from him — he’d only been in Amsterdam because he had some friends there. To him, the other seemed like a promise. A future without someone slipping into his bed or hands pulling at his thin hair. A future in which he would never have to see the boy with his face again. Even so, he really wanted a boyfriend. The life he yearned for was not something he could have on his own, it relied partly on others.
His father hadn’t moved since Luuk began visiting. So he was left following the same familiar route from the train station to his papa’s flat. He tried to think of the man, instead of Alex, to feel excited about his visit, to figure out what he would say and how he would act. Luuk wanted to be a good son who made conversations easily. Even though he barely knew much about his father, despite their efforts to rebuild their relationship.
“Hey, Jongen1!” his pa exclaimed, as always, when he opened the door. “It’s good to see you again.”
As he stepped inside, he tried to remember when he had last visited. Sometime after his college graduation. “Good to see you, too,” he mumbled, taking his shoes off.
He was led to the kitchen. His papa lived four floors up, and the weather was nice that day, so the living room would be impossibly hot. Luuk felt a bit childish as he jumped to sit on the counter, but his father did the same thing, so he supposed it was fine. They were quiet for a moment, and his mind wandered once again to Alex. Last night, they had talked about childhood pets, and Luuk never had any so he brought up Spinner and his mam’s obsession with pandas, and the fact that he used to be afraid of butterflies. Alex used to have a Maine Coone that passed away not too long back. It was the cutest thing Luuk had ever seen, and he wished he could have met it.
His father broke the silence.
“Do you want something to drink? Is it also so hot back at your place?”
He shook his head and wondered if his pa had found it weird that Luuk hadn’t invited him over. His fingers grazed his lips and he reminded himself that he shouldn’t bite them. It was a habit that made him look unkempt. He wanted to say something, but his mind was full of blond hair and green eyes. His papa didn’t know him too well, but lately the man was able to notice it when Luuk was stuck in his head, even when they were just calling on the phone.
"Luukje,” his pap hummed, trying to lighten the mood. “We should walk by the kanaal2 sometime, there’s nice flowers blooming. I don’t think it’ll last long, though.”
His stomach flipped at the mention of the kanaal2. “Pa,” he sighed. “I think I’m gay.”
Never had he spoken a word about the Blue Panda, and he certainly never thought to tell his father about it. But the man vaguely, somehow, knew about Kristiaan. Maybe his mama had mentioned the man once, in passing, and his father might have gotten suspicious. So he hadn’t expected the news to elicit any kind of surprise, nor had he expected his father to be angry. If his father disliked homosexuals, he would have made it clear earlier on. But he also hadn’t thought that his pa would hug him. He couldn’t remember receiving one from the man before. His arms felt cold and unfamiliar, nothing like those of Kristiaan or the Blue Panda. Luuk had to do everything not to swiftly remove himself from the embrace.
“That’s fine,” the man chuckled. “I don’t care, you know that. As long as you don’t love someone who hurts you.”
How often had his pa hugged Suzette? She had been ten when he left, and Luuk wondered if he reminded his pa of her, even though they no longer looked alike — because he had gotten older, and his hair was no longer blond because of the sun.
✲ ✲ ✲
July 2008, they were moving fast. After Luuk finished his first year of college he and Alex decided to move in together.
Moving too fast might not be the proper way to describe it. He and Alex weren’t dating, they just quietly enjoyed each other’s company. The move was really just Luuk slowly integrating himself into Alex’s space, day by day, until the man said you know, I have a guest room. You could just live here. It’ll be good for us, money wise.
He had wanted to point out that the lack of guest room wouldn’t have stopped them; they started seeing each other regularly on the weekends since February — before that, they mostly kept talking online, with visits every once in a while — and whenever they spent the night together, whether at his place or Alex’s, they slept in the same bed. Just so they could talk to each other for longer, or so Luuk told himself. It was exactly how he had imagined sleepovers as a child. There was something growing between them, quiet and inexplicit, something they had talked about but decided not to name until both of them were ready for it.
For the first two weeks, he cried in bed at night. He had been right about not needing the guest room — all of his clothes and the little possessions he wanted to keep were immediately stored right next to the other man’s stuff — and he felt a little embarrassed to cry next to someone else. Living with Alex was hard in the beginning, nerve-wrecking, because Luuk had nightmares sometimes, once a month or so, and he got overwhelmed easily when he wasn’t given enough space. He couldn’t handle people invading his space, not after the Panda, but Alex was patient and never crept too close while they shared a bed. In the mornings he was quiet, unlike Luuk’s mom, who had never really cared about waking him up. Every night he cried because he was afraid that the pain would return soon. He was so close to living the life he had wanted , a life in which he was normal, in which he had a loving partner like nearly all of his classmates.
In that way, being with Kris had hurt less. The man hadn’t been kind for so long, it took about two weeks for him to yell, a month for the first hit to come. Alex’s loveliness was in its own way cruel, because Luuk was certain that it couldn’t last.
Alex never brought it up, he just laid next to him and kept his hands to himself. He didn’t fully ignore Luuk, sometimes he traced circles on the pillow right next to the man’s ear, letting his fingernail produce a soft, lilting sound. As if he was trying to hypnotize him. Only by the end of the first week did either say anything.
“I should sleep in the guest room,” Luuk whispered. “If I keep going like this. I don’t want you to go to work tired.” He didn’t mention that he went to school tired himself; all that mattered was that he didn’t want to disturb the blond in his own home — the flat didn’t feel like his yet.
“I don’t want you to be alone like this,” the other man shifted to face Luuk. Day by day, his eyes seemed to be getting greener. “I don’t mind. You can’t help it.”
“I’m still sorry.”
“You can tell me what’s wrong, you know that right?” Alex muttered. “I care about you.”
Luuk closed his eyes, a familiar pressure formed behind his ribs. Most of his nightmares now consisted of telling Alex, of watching the man’s face shift into disgust. He felt a hand, placed carefully, on his neck and the cold fingers reminded him of Suzette, who would never get to fall asleep next to someone she loved. The thing about relationships, he recognized, was that he couldn’t quite control them. Whether or not he would get hurt again depended on Alex. All Luuk could control were his own actions, which were possibly too generous — he could have reported Kristiaan, but he hadn’t. Because he hadn’t wanted to ruin the man’s life, even though Kris had basically done that for himself when he decided to get involved with a teenager.
Sometimes he tried to figure out if there was something about him that made people naturally dislike him. Men on the street bumped into him without apology, kids in his class used to laugh at him whenever he got called on for answers — Miss, tell him to speak up! — and even now he had people in his class, adults who should know better, who giggled amongst themselves whenever he got an answer wrong. They talked behind his back, too, about how he walked, about what he probably liked to do in bed.
How was he supposed to talk to Alex, without explicitly mentioning the root of his problems — the Panda, and what happened to him?
“I know that,” Luuk sniffed. Gently, the blond laid his head on his chest. “I know that very well, but I don’t think I can tell you.”
“And that’s fine,” Alex hummed. Luuk was reminded that the man probably already knew some things, based on past behaviour. He worked in childcare, and his diploma had required subjects that could help him understand humans a little bit better. “As long as you know that I’d let you.”
✲ ✲ ✲
August 2008. They fell into a routine quite easily. The crying eventually stopped, but every night Alex continued to lay his head on Luuk’s chest. Sometimes, slowly and with knowing movements, the blond would hug him. Luuk liked having the weight of the other man against him, it was just enough to ground him, but not enough to make him feel like he was being trapped.
As long as you don’t love someone who hurts you. Luuk knew that if he were to call up his father, the man would be glad that he had found Alex. There wasn’t a proper relationship between them, even after a month of living together, but he didn’t feel like he needed a label. They woke up together, even though Alex started work later than Luuk started school, they prepared breakfast together — he would put slices of bread in the oven, the blond would put the butter and cold cuts on the table, along with crackers and jam — and they ate together. It was special to him, because he never ate breakfast with his mam, except for Christmas or Easter. And most importantly, they loved each other. By the time that Luuk would leave for school, Alex was sitting on the couch with a book. Never did he feel bad about the fact that the other man woke up earlier just so they could spend the morning together. Back with Kristiaan, he felt bad constantly.
School was tiring — he sat through class after class about suicidal people, addicts, abused children and the abusers themselves — and most days he would have to work right after, he was a cashier at a local craft store, which was alright because it wasn’t too busy, but boring for the same reason. So it was nice to come home to a clean flat after being gone for most of the day, which Alex provided with ease. Alex’s job was tiring, too, so Luuk always tried to stay out of the way.
Back in his old flat he had a habit of mindlessly fluttering around like a bird when he had nothing else to do. Or when he had nightmares, or when he knew that his mama would call him that day. With Alex, he tried to keep this at a minimum.
Some days he felt wound up and ended up sleeping in the guest room. Sometimes he knew that a nightmare or a sleepless night would come his way. Usually when he fell asleep there, he would wake up with Alex tucked underneath the blanket beside him. The man didn’t seem too fazed by Luuk’s nightmares, or any of his other habits, which hadn’t lessened in frequency ever since he moved in, but they might have gotten less intense. It was nice to wake up with the blond beside him, and for the first time he was quite satisfied with life.
1, jongen = boy.
2, kanaal = channel.