A Purple Winter

Prologue-3

Minutes have passed. Maybe hours. I’m sitting in my bedroom. The one in the Verdun apartment I grew up in. That lonely basement bedroom I always hated. It smells musty in here, almost real. I know this is only an illusion. I haven’t lived in that apartment since I was a child. All my books are still on their shelves. Animal Farm. And this one, Lord of The Flies.

My G.I. Joes are lined up by the window sill. That window still looks like a ship porthole. I feel like I’m sitting in a submarine, leagues under the sea.

What is going on up there, at the surface? Is it quiet? Or is there a hurricane blowing across the water?

I’ve tried climbing the stairs to leave this suffocating room many times now, but always end up right back here, sitting on my narrow single bed with this tattered paperback in my hands.

Aunt Fran says I’m in a coma. A coma. How do I get back to my life?

You don’t. Not for now, at least. Will you listen to me?

From the bed, I glance up to find Aunt Fran standing in the doorway. She’s dressed in that blue blouse that’s missing the top button. The one she had on the night Nick and I danced to Elvis songs in my living room that long-ago winter of 1987. That was the winter I fell in love with Nick, even though I was only a child of twelve. Oh, he was my whole world. I lived and breathed only for him. My Nordic prince with the icy blue stare.

Aunt Fran’s eyes are fierce now. She means business, I can tell.

I have to leave, Aunt Fran. I have to wake up and be with Nick.

No, not right now. You’re still hooked up to a ventilator. Your brain is swollen but the oxygen levels are good. You could make a full recovery, Derek. You’re gonna need to want to come back.

But I do.

Honey…deep down inside, you’ve grown dissatisfied with your life. You need time to understand what you have. How blessed you are. There are things you must put at rest.

Again, something is tugging at me, a forceful presence storming around the edge of my soul. Now I know it’s Nick, somewhere on the surface.

If you want to get back to him, you’re going to have to fight.

What? How?

If you could return to any place in time, travel down the spine of your life, to a moment where your strength faltered, and change the story, where would you stop? Derek…without hesitation. Speak.

1987. The year Nick left for Vancouver with David Pinet.

Ah, that’s good, my little enchanter. That winter. Yes, that was the one.

I’d never let him leave, Aunt Fran. I’d make him change his mind. We spent almost twenty years apart after he left that year. They were the longest and most miserable years of my life.

Then go there. Go to that winter now and set your soul at ease.

But I was twelve years old. A mere boy. Nick was seventeen. Wild. Angry. And he had a lover, David. They took off together. How can a twelve-year-old boy stop that kind of reckless passion?

He can’t. He couldn’t.

So what’s the point in going back to revisit one of the cruelest years of my life?

Because you’re not going back as a child. You’re going back to that winter as a young man. Beautiful. Gay. And willing.

Memories of that year, that winter of 1987, surge up like icebergs in a devastatingly cold sea. What lurks beneath? How tremendous are those memories? What power do they hold?

The trick is, Derek, you won’t remember who you are now. Your future is the present and it goes on while you sleep in that hospital bed. And there are no guarantees on what your mind will conjure up. Some things will be the same. Others, won’t. You may have aged, while others have remained the same age as they were that year. Do you understand? It will be a parallel world in which you can’t allow yourself to linger too long and get lost.

Get me out of this room. Get me back to Nick.

That’s in your power.

What am I supposed to do? How do I do this? What will happen? Aunt Fran?