Bruise Pristine, Part 2

Second part of a tragedy, where lust across the aisle could lead to the endangerment of one's soul.

Photo & Text all rights reserved © Saint-Lazare, 2025.

Read the first part here:

Bruise Pristine, Part 1

It was around the same time that Kit started clashing with people online. He was arguing with feminists and other alt right personalities. Each time, he ended up in rage, smashing his phone on the wall. I could almost picture him huddled on the floor, the technological debris scattered around his oversized body, sobbing that no one understood and loved him. In the span of one month, he changed of phone eleven times. One night, he posted a terrorized message. He had been arrested for doing cocaine outside a club. This is how I understood that he had broken up with his girlfriend. Kit was single. He was lost and depressed. I had to be there for him. If he seemed to enjoy my attention, he kept playing the escapist. Finding excuses not to meet me downtown or to let me visit him. He was mentioning hoes, more cocaine, more vodka, more clubs. He embraced chaos in a way that was scaring me; he seemed to enjoy his downward spiral.

Until an alt right journalist wrote a paper on him calling him a fraud and saying he was closeted. This guy said that you could spot Kit in the city’s most infamous backrooms. He also said that Kit was suicidal. His first article. His last would be about his premature death – I do not remember if they were giving details, just these four words, with their own noise, their own reality; Kit Henslow is dead, and I was feeling so numb. I do not know what the goal of that alt right journalist was, but his attack did not spark shame or despair in Kit. Instead, it gave a new rise to his brand of masculinity, of heteronormativity and of violent arrogance. This is how I discovered Kit’s girlfriend Lily. They were on and off for a while, but now they were together again. And ostensibly. He was now posting couple selfies, hiding behind the frail silhouette of this young girl with blond braids and deer eyes. I later learnt that she was barely legal. She seemed half his size. A porcelain doll in the arms of a bratty kid. On the other hand, she was so stereotypically feminine that she was the perfect cover for a closeted gay.

The arrival of the train interrupts my memories. And yet, the ghost of Kit is not leaving me alone. In a vision, I see us inside the car, talking together, sitting next to each other. I am staring at his skinny jeans while he is telling me about the violent arguments he keeps having with his girlfriend, throwing stuff to each other’s face. But I am not fully listening. I know deep down that he will never leave her. That he will never come out. The train’s vibrations are reverberating in the platform under my feet and the train’s doors close. I did not get into the train and I am not even noticing the surprised glances some commuters are giving me from behind the windows while the train leaves. Now, I am alone in the station. A voice in my head tells me that many people had jumped in front of a train in this station. My body is cold. I close my eyes and I remember another night with Kit. I was urinating in a bar’s bathroom when he entered and came next to me. I fought hard with myself not to look at his equipment. He was drunk, as always. Seemingly losing his balance, he put his left hand on my shoulder. Then, he whispered, in a laugh, “I could let you bring me home, y’know”. As someone entered, he quickly removed his hand.

“You should have used another urinal, pal, we’re looking like two faggots now!” He joked with a rough voice. “A chance my girlfriend is not jealous of you!”

I was the one who was jealous of her, I guess. In the bad days (or rather the bad nights), the wave was turning into magma, burning me from the inside. Is it how sin feel like? I was almost hallucinating. Sometimes, I was even certain that Lily was taking advantage of Kit and that she was manipulative and harmful to him. But then, I got a grip on myself and, on the contrary, I worried for her safety and her well-being. His allusion to his fights with her, even if it had slipped through my neurons at first, started to obsess me. I had a visceral reaction to violence against women. Yet, the power of the wave was almost able to numb it. But maybe none of this happened. Despite the cold drafts in the station, my body is covered with sweat. The tracks are shining bright as if they were white hot. I am not sure of what is real and what is not anymore. No, what is certain is that Kit is dead, you know that, the voice in my head says. Cling to the facts, Luke.

The article and Kit’s heterosexual response had made a buzz, and apparently, his agent was encouraging him to be even more brash. This is when his friends brought to his attention that a body positivity influencer was mocking him on her last video. Most of the time, I was avoiding the crowd that was evolving around him. They were all obnoxious boys, showing off their privileges by displaying the most vulgar attitude ever.

“You should expose this sow and tell your followers to harass her fat ass!” They requested on his private profile.

I wonder if he would have followed my advice if I had sent him a private message to discourage him. Probably not. He was a grown-up. I could not tell him what to do. So, I simply commented, “I trust you to do what’s right”. And of course, he did wrong. He sent his horde after the unlucky influencer. I could just sit and watch the horror unfolds. She received hundreds of hate messages. Death threats. Rape threats. They found her address. They found the name of her doctor. They made her lose her job. She was a complete stranger to me, and I did not like the video in which she poked fun at Kit, yet I started to be hit by a series of coincidences that became a real eye-opener. Apparently, she and I had the same tattoo artist. We seemingly attended the same literary event in 2014. I could have been the target of Kit’s fans too. As time was passing, I was feeling more and more nauseous. I could not stand to read his interactions with his friends or the articles that were written about him. As he was spending most of his time with Lily, we naturally distanced. I was just keeping an eye on him. An invisible, silent, and distant watcher. Yet, someone wrote the word fascist on the door of my dorm room. My friends turned away from me. I started smoking pot, drinking more than I used to. I knew that Kit had resumed his partying habits but I was still going to the bars and clubs he liked. I also started to go to more gay places. Somehow, I was hoping that this journalist was right and that I would stumble on my crush in a backroom. The memories I have of that period are blurry. I have flashes of purple lights with loud electronic music. Leather couches and dirty floors. Bottles of alcohol and drugs. Wet torsos, wet hands. Letting myself go. Pain. Then, I remember a worried drag queen picking me up on the pavement of a dark street and telling me it was going to be okay. Brighter lights, people in blue rushing me into corridors. A hospital maybe. Then again, it was only darkness. You have to understand that I was drowning. I was sinking into the depths of an ocean of darkness. It seemed bottomless, and a part of me was okay with this. Yet, I suddenly hit something hard that stopped me from falling; the shock awakened me.

This hard surface is the next clear recollection I have. This safety net is the cold bench I was sitting on at the back of the courtroom. The atmosphere was a little bit surrealistic with all these journalists, the clicking of the keys on their phones echoing in the silent room. I had my eyes on Kit’s back. He was of course in the front row. The defendant. I do not know if he knew I was there. He never looked back. I realized I was destined to see his back and his back only, running away from me. Then the lawyer of the influencer he harassed projected a screen capture of the social post that had started it all, with the comments of Kit’s friends encouraging him to bully the plaintiff. I had a shock. I could see my own comment on that big screen. Everyone in the room could. They had covered my name but my miserable attempt to believe he was better than he actually was, this was fully visible. My comment was used as evidence in a trial. I was shaken. Disgusted. How could I have been involved with such a heinous situation? I was a good person, an idealist who wanted to help others, not to hurt them. Now, I felt like I had been poisoned by Kit’s anger and his self-destruction. And what for? I had almost lost my life for him, I had lost the control of my body, of my mind and of my good nature. And what for? Nothing. Or rather, for an aftertaste of revenge. I learnt weeks after that Kit had been found guilty of harassment and narrowly avoided prison. But I did not care anymore. Well, this is a lie. I cared too much. My blood was boiling. I was pacing my room at day and lying awake on my bed at night, unable to calm down. The wave was now a constant flood of heavy, dark blood and it was spurting out of my heart without running dry. It was incredibly painful. I kept stalking him on the internet. I had the obsession to hurt him. Because I was hurt.

I started inventing scenarios. I would follow him and wait for us to be in that deserted area, next to the freeway, to hit him on his shaved head with something hard. A hammer. Or I would put something on his drink in a bar and pretend to be his designated driver. He always ended up tied in a secluded place. Then I would beat him to death with a club. Remove all of his tattoos with a scalpel to avoid identification. Stab him. Cut him into little pieces with an industrial saw. Put him in several trash bags. Throw him in the harbor. Burn him. Dissolve him in an acid bath. I dreamt to destroy all evidence of his existence. Of the shame I had to have been involved with his hateful behavior. Of the guilt I was feeling for what happened to this girl. Of the taint I was still feeling in my soul. I wanted to annihilate Kit. I needed to obliterate the ideology he embodied, as well as his body and the effect he had on me. These ideas were rotating in my head, days after days, nights after nights. I was stuck in bed with a fever, forgetting to eat, unable to live. The delirium was so intense that my urge to kill Kit was erasing reality. Sometimes, the murder seemed real. I was even seeing headlines or crowds cheering me for being a hero, because I had killed a Nazi. I was never a Raskolnikov. And now, it is true; they have found his corpse. Kit Henslow is really dead.

One day, the fever went away and I realized that nothing was oozing from my chest anymore. I was wave-free. At last. I was able to leave my bed again. I could sometimes still feel the secondary effects of the withdrawal (songs I could not listen to anymore, silhouettes in my dreams) but I was starting to feel light again. And clean. I got myself a small job, I changed my major – something far from romanticism. I made new friends. Some of them were activists and I started getting interested in useful fights. The body of Kit disappeared from my mind. I had made it alive, and the bruises were gone.

The next train is entering the station. I will not jump in front of it. I smile, suddenly relieved, as if a ghost has been shooed away. I entered the car and reached for my news notifications as soon as I sat. There was a new article. Lily has been cleared from Kit’s death. Justice said she acted in self-defense to protect herself during a violent fight in which she was destined to be the casualty. She had grabbed one of her boyfriend’s guns. And now, she was free. I breathe. I am happy for her. And also, a little bit for me. We are both safer and happier. It is over. Putting my phone in my pocket, I look around. In front of me, there is a cute guy. He catches my look and smiles at me. I feel a shiver down my spine. Oh please, I think, don’t do that. Don’t think I could be your type. I am not your type. I am the bad type. I mean… am I? Maybe it feels more natural to paint things black. As a matter of fact, we are finding satiety in nightmares.