The One Who Stayed

He heard it in a dream once. Or rather felt it, as it isn’t possible to hear in dreams. The sound of the crowd, and the sound of her gentle voice; both saying, “I love you,” all at once.

David saw the train meander past them as it pulled up to the station platform. It sat there, as if it were waiting for him to let go of his lover’s hand and to jump aboard. The sun illuminated his face as he glimpsed what appeared to be the back of his head through the train window. An illusion, perhaps of where he wanted to be. Before he had a chance to react though, the illusion disappeared, along with the train. He felt another hand squeeze his. Gentle, but with enough firmness to get his attention. He looked down to gaze upon the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Golden brown eyes he could fall into. A grin that made him both nervous and calm at the same time. Energy that encapsulated everything that was good in life. He saw his fiancée, Isabelle.

“Are you okay?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“I’m fine,” David lied. “I just…it’s a a lovely day, isn’t it?”

The couple looked around to take the sleepy town in. What it lacked in events and population, it made up for in it’s quiet charm, natural beauty, and peace.

“It is,” Isabelle agreed. “But I think it’s about to rain.”

David saw the clouds roll in.

“You know what that means?” Isabelle said with a grin.

“That our washing on the line at home will never dry,” replied David, grinning back.

Isabelle leaned upward to David’s lips and kissed them.

“It means,” she said, her lips barely leaving his, “that it’s perfect weather to cuddle me underneath a warm blanket, with some hot tea-“

“And a good book,” David finished.

“Exactly,” Isabelle said, grabbing David’s hand a she started to lead him home.

“What more in life could you want?”

David remembered the day well. It felt less like a memory though, and more of a dream. The sight of Isabelle from the train as it left the platform. It started to rain not long after. The drops from the heavens falling as hard as the tears from his eyes. He remembers thinking of what they would be doing if they were home. Under a blanket on their couch, that they got from the side of the road. He smiled at the memory of Isabelle’s joy when they came across it.

“Perfect. It was strange as to why anyone would leave it.”

He’d probably be reading a play whilst she read one of her smut novellas which she insisted had an actual plot and wasn’t just a mish-mash of raunchy scenes. They’d be so cozy, and warm.

David didn’t know if he would feel that kind of warmth again.

From the train he managed to find a small room above a laundromat. He spent the next year living on nothing but peanut butter toast, black instant coffee, and ambition. It was a long year, the longest he’d ever lived. Filled with auditions, rejection, and longing. Hoping that his sacrifices would pay off. He would have felt lonely if he had ever stopped for two seconds to reflect. He knew this though, so he never stopped.

In between struggling to make rent, and auditioning for roles that he would never play, he dreamed. Yet they felt more like memories. Scenes of back home, in a life where he never left. He did his best to recall them, but they were fleeting, illusions of a perfect life. The dreams started to occur less though, once he got that long awaited phone call. The one that told him that his life was about to change. The call that gave him his first acting role.

“You were smiling in your sleep last night,” said Isabelle, as she finished taking a long sip of her coffee. “It must have been a nice dream.”

David tried to recall what it was he was dreaming about as he looked at the sunrise from their porch. The sun cracked and spilled over the mountains that faced the back of their house. Isabelle looked up at him, waiting for an answer as she curled deeper into his arms. The dream was on the edge of his memories, but the mind movie escaped him. Just fragments, scenes of him on a large movie set.

“I think I was shooting a movie, but I’m not sure.”

“Well, sounds better than mine. I dreamed I was trying to escape a giant ginger bread house.”

“Did you try eating your way out?” Daniel said, kissing her on the forehead.

“That’s exactly what I did!” Isabelle yelled. “You know me too well.”

They didn’t say much else as they watched the sun rise together. Perfect moments rarely need words to fill them.

David arrived early to his classroom, his second coffee for the day in hand. Evens, his teenage student, stood waiting out front, same as he did everyday. Yet today was different. His face would have been buried inside of a play, often one that Daniel lent him. Yet Evens had a smile that stretched from ear to ear, and instead of a book in his hands, he had an open letter.

David knew what he was going to say before Evens said it. He felt a moment of pride as his student opened his mouth to tell him the good news. Underneath it however, was a slither of jealousy. Not enough to stop David from congratulating his student on getting into the finest acting school in the country, leaving this quiet town and moving away to chase something bigger than himself. A dream that he let die only a handful of precious days ago.

The conversation with Isabelle still echoed in his mind.

“I don’t want to be the reason you don’t go,” she whispered.

“You already are,” he said, trying his best to smile.

Judging by Isabelle’s facial expression, these words did not comfort as much as David thought they would.

“And I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he managed to push out.

“I love teaching my students, and I love putting on shows at the local theater. I like making the props. This year we’re building a castle backdrop. There’s a lot to look forward to.”

Isabelle’s face changed to one of guilt and panic, to relief.

“It might be smaller than the dream I once had, but it’s still a great dream, because you’re apart of it. I couldn’t dream of anything better.”

And yet he did.

The first film barely paid. An indie with not much of a budget. However it was the director that gave David excitement and hope. Everything he touched turned to gold, and this film was no exception. Before he knew it he was getting more roles, as the first film went on to win a myriad of awards at different film festivals. One success lead to another, which lead to another, until he achieved the busyness that he needed to keep other thoughts, and people from his mind.

Success arrived to David, and it felt every bit as good as he imagined it would. He had no reason to chase anymore, all he had to do was act, and the roles would find him. The years were kind to him, with every day being a gift that allowed him to do what he loved. The only regrettable part was the fame itself, and along with the grueling press tours. The interviews were often mundane, with ulterior motives behind each question. It was obvious that most of them barely cared, the other half were just trying to create drama from nothing. It was not what he wanted, but in a way it was what he signed up for. Compared to other things he had to sacrifice, it wasn’t much, he often told himself.

“What drives you?” a journalist asked him one day, on a press tour for his third international hit.

“The roles I haven’t played yet,” he’d respond. It was a well crafted reply. Something he had rehearsed to perfection. On that day though he found himself hesitating. Only for a brief moment. He’d doubt that the interviewer even noticed. But he did.

Fame had a rhythm that David found hard getting used it. It was quite the stark difference what he had back home, in his sleepy little village with Isabelle.

Back in his home town everyone knew you, and they really did know you. Where fame was a different kind of knowing. A false kind that felt hollow and strange.

But fame had a rhythm also, and he found himself dancing to that rhythm soon enough. Shoot, press, sleep, repeat. He learned to speak in sound bites, to cry on cue, how the politics of the industry worked, to connect with people he barely knew.

On set he was electric, off set however he was beginning to burn out. A star starting to fizzle. He felt an exhaustion that he’d never known.

Sometimes he’d take walks alone just to escape the bland living of hotel life. There were times he’d see glimpses of couples walking past him, sitting on park benches, getting coffee together at a café, and his heart would ache. A phantom pain that still had not left. He started to dread sleep, for that was when the phantom pain was strongest in his stomach. Dreams taking him to a place he left behind, where his heart still was.

Back home, in the quiet he had chosen, David stared at the castle backdrop he’d promised Evens they would finish by the end of term. The cardboard had warped in the damp. The paint looked like the sky after a storm: patched, uncertain.

Evens came early, same as always, letter still folded like a secret inside his pocket. He was taller than he had any right to be, voice deeper, eyes bright with leaving.

“Do you ever miss it?” Evens asked, not looking up from the ruler he was using to score the edges. “Whatever it was. The thing you almost did.”

David smiled with half his mouth. “Sometimes. Usually when it rains.”

They worked in silence for a while. The hall smelled like dust and varnish and someone else’s old applause. When the bell rang and the rest of the class came in, David clapped his hands and told them to start from the top. He watched them become bigger than themselves. He felt pride pull at him like a tide and under it something thinner, and sharper pulled; like a thread that never snapped.

That night Isabelle took him to see a touring company at the town hall. The actors made the small room feel larger than the city. David laughed at the right places, sighed at the others, and at the end he felt empty and full at the same time. Outside, the rain had started. It made the street look like the inside of somebody’s memory.

“Are you okay?” Isabelle asked, already knowing the answer.

“Fine,” he said, and he meant it for her. “It’s a lovely night, isn’t it?”

She slid her hand into his. “It’s about to rain harder.”

He grinned. “Then we should get home before the washing never dries.”

“Or,” she said, mouth close to his, “we lean into it.”

They walked slowly, letting the rain do what it wanted with them. Back at the house, she brewed tea and curled under the couch they’d found by the road all those years ago. Still perfect. He opened a book of plays and didn’t read it. He watched her read instead. The room felt like the kind of silence you kept because it was worth something. He fell asleep watching her reactions to her book.

The next film for David was the big one. His face on buses. His voice in trailers. He learned to joke about himself, to deflect questions, to say he was grateful. He was grateful. Gratitude kept him warm in the day, however it didn’t work so well at night, when the hotel pulsed like a humming fridge and the city tried to sleep around it.

He flew into his home country for the premiere and decided to drive the long way home.

He didn’t plan to turn down the old street. His body did it anyway.

The bakery had changed its sign but not its windows. Inside, a woman was arranging trays. She turned, and the years fell away hard enough to make his soul hurt.

Isabelle.

She looked up. The glass between them made the light into a curtain. He stood perfectly still. He could have gone in. He could have opened the door and bought a loaf he didn’t want and said something grand or small or unforgivable.

A car behind him honked. He blinked. The light had changed.

He drove away. At the hotel he pressed his fingers into the bones above his heart until the thudding calmed down. He told himself a hundred reasons why it was better this way. Ninety-nine of them were true. Words an old mentor told him years ago rushed back to him as he entered his hotel.

“The problem with reaching the top of the mountain, is that if you don’t bring up anyone along, you will often be on that mountain alone.”

These words rolled around in his head whenever he tossed and turned. He only slept for a few hours that night.

The night of the school play, the storm arrived like a crowd. The roof of the old hall sang. Lights flickered, steadied, flickered again. Parents leaned in to whisper to each other. David checked the props, the cues, the nervous hands. He looked at Evens and nodded and Evens nodded back and somewhere in the rafters something shifted, like a thought choosing its shape.

When it was time for his small cameo (he’d written it only because the kids insisted), David stepped into the pool of light that had always felt like home. He had given himself one line. It was nothing. A sentence like a hinge.

“I almost stayed,” he said, and because he had, the words filled the room.

Thunder answered. The lights dimmed and returned. In the front row Isabelle smiled at him with her whole life. He felt seen, and he felt seen through.

Across the world, under lights that had been measured with equipment and patience, the other David spoke the same line into a camera. It was written differently here, stuffed with subtext somebody else had invented, but it landed in the same place.

“I almost stayed,” he said, and because he hadn’t, the words emptied him.

Rain slammed hotel glass and schoolhouse windows at the same time. For a breath long enough to be called a mercy, both rooms listened to the same weather. Both men lifted their eyes as if somebody had said their name from the wings.

He heard it in a dream once. Or rather felt it, as it isn’t possible to hear in dreams. The sound of the crowd, and the sound of her gentle voice; both saying, “I love you,” all at once.

Then the moment closed, like a door softly.

Weeks later, after the last of the interviews and the two flights home, David stood in the school hall he still had keys for. He turned on the stage light and dust swam in it, made of every show that had ever happened and all the ones that never would. He put on the threadbare coat from the costume box because tradition mattered even when no one saw it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said to the empty seats. “Thank you for coming.”

The sound came back to him a second later, exactly as soft as he deserved.

Across the world, in a darkened cinema after an afternoon screening, a man sat alone as credits climbed an artificial night. He stayed to the end for the same reason he always had: to practice staying. He read his own name without flinching. He let the music finish and the screen go black.

He heard it in a dream once. Or rather felt it. The crowd and the voice. Both saying, I love you. He didn’t know how to make that happen in the living world. He suspected the answer was that you didn’t. You just lived both halves of the sentence as best you could.

Somewhere a train pulled into a station and someone saw his own profile in the glass. Somewhere a woman hung washing before the rain and said it would never dry and smiled when she was right. Somewhere a boy called Evens walked onto a stage three countries away and didn’t forget a single line.

Somewhere a man stayed for who he loved. Somewhere else a man left for what he loved.

In both places, both men learned to be content.