Chapter Text
He can't seem to care enough to figure out how long he's been lying in the dark, not since his phone ran out of battery a while ago and took away the only reliable measure of time with it.
He can't sleep.
For several nights now, it has been hard for that natural lethargy to come by. His body is tired, he knows it is, if the headache digging through his temples is any indicator, but exhaustion seems to be ignored somewhere beneath his skin, never puncturing deep enough to drag his mind down to unconsciousness not more than two to three hours of mercy.
His new room is not nearly as suffocating as the ground floor bedroom he had in their old townhouse. This one is at the first floor, has a large window, an even larger en-suite, more total space than he knows what to do with when he is on his own.
But somehow even with all of the space nothing could get rid of the tightness off of his chest.
He can't find in himself the willpower to connect the cable lying on top of his bedside table to the long-dead phone still resting in his hand. The charger is barely an arm’s length away. It would take almost nothing.
But there is nothing he will miss anyway.
Nothing that important.
Important, he thinks, can refer to a lot of things.
Some people might say being healthy is important. Or being happy. Being successful, being rich, having enough money to never worry about the future. He agrees, obviously. He is not stupid enough to pretend those things don't matter.
He just would not place any of them particularly high in the ranking inside his own mind.
And his mind is a busy place.
Thought after thought, or even better, one thought stacked directly on top of another until he can no longer tell where one begins and the next one ends to the point the matter starts to merge and diffuse together before separating into multiple pieces again.
But right now, all he can think about is himself.
He turned twenty-three not too long ago.
Closer to thirty now than he is to fifteen.
The thought makes him feel colder despite a blanket covering nearly every inch of him. He shifts, trying to find the physical warmth that will never work against the cold in his chest.
Adulthood is an exhilarating experience, indeed, he believes that people who says otherwise is definitely lying to themselves.
Over the past couple of years, he has developed an interest in so many new things. Music, fashion, business, projects that were created by him and belong only to him. He has discovered parts of himself he did not know existed when he was younger, sitting through carpentry school and supermarket register, back when the limits of his future stretched no further than the back seat of an old minivan and whatever video they planned to film that week.
Despite the amazing course of life he had, the ranking in his mind has never changed at all.
Perhaps it is naive of him to have ever believed it would. Naive to think that one day he might put something, or even someone, above them.
Them.
Sometimes, he thinks there has never really been a 'him'.
Maybe it has only ever been 'them'.
'Them' is the easiest, most natural, and most comfortable thing to ever rolls out of his mouth.
Who are you going with?
Them.
Who do you live with?
Them.
Who do you want beside you?
Them.
Yet somehow, recently, it has become increasingly difficult to say it.
Recently is one way to put it.
Because was it recent?
Does recent mean days? Weeks? Has it been months already? Maybe even years, accumulating on top of another, adding on little by little each day that only now he realize the dead weight that already settled over his entire body?
He can't seem to pinpoint it either, but tonight merely feels like one of those hard nights. These hard nights which he has been acquainting himself with, seems to come more frequently too.
But he guesses when you are older, you have hard nights sometimes. He can't remember when did it happen the first time, but he had not felt such nights when he was younger.
He is older now.
They are older now.
More adult, is maybe the better way to put it.
Adulthood is not all that exhilarating.
So maybe he has been a liar all along.
Being an adult, as much as a twenty-three-year-old can claim to be one, he cannot be more grateful for the amount of work his younger self decided to do.
Or, more accurately, the amount of shit that seventeen-year-old version of him decided to put on the internet for the entire world to see. And all of that stupidity has granted him an incomprehensible amount of privilege now that thanking God everyday still doesn't feel sufficient.
But he can't help the growing dread in his stomach that has been sitting for quite some time now, quietly twisting harder.
For a moment, he genuinely cannot tell whether he is about to throw up or wail.
So much for privilege.
He was seventeen.
They were seventeen too.
He enjoyed every second they spent in that old van of theirs, even when some tiny, rational part of his mind insisted it was temporary, as it understood how it is merely youth allowing them to be deluded in something as silly as silly as YouTube for a while, before eventually time would drag them into the real world. They would have to grow up. They would have to do something else.
But somehow, always, somehow, they made it...
He can still hardly believe it when he sits down long enough to think about everything they have done.
But it is as much a dream as it is a nightmare.
He has only recently realized that too.
Or perhaps he has realized it for a long time. It just never occurred to him that having the same nightmare over and over again could legitimately make someone sick.
And he is sick, so fucking sick of it.
Sick of how completely work has taken over them.
It makes him sick to his stomach just thinking about how difficult it has become for him to have a single conversation with each other without getting frustrated over some stupid work-
related issue.
It makes him sick to his core thinking about how he has started preferring text messages to phone calls because he cannot fucking stand the tone of his older brothers’ voices when they talk to him about things like schedules, deadlines, plans, stuff that needs to be fixed, and tasks he has forgotten, some shit that they believe he is not taking seriously enough.
And it makes him sickest of all that he cannot remember the last time thinking about them did not make him angry.
How did it even get to this point?
He stares at his dead phone for another moment before releasing a deep breath and finally reaching for the USB-C cable hanging over the edge of his bedside table. He will need his phone to continue.
He needs to figure this out, one way or another.
He has already gone through almost the entirety of 2020 and 2021 yesterday. His eyes sting every time he blinks, partly maybe from staring at the screen for so long and partly is surely from the tears he has been shedding throughout the night.
The moment his screen lights up again, he taps in his passcode, 080103.
Well, call him stupid or old school or whatever you want for using his own birthday as the password to his phone, multiple debit and credit cards, bank accounts, and brokerage accounts, but there is simply no other sequence of numbers that holds more significance to him, though it doesn't mean much for himself but more about the two people he followed into this world.
He opens the familiar red app, before going to his own account, and continues watching the last video that had been playing before his phone died. Finding his younger self sitting behind the orange frame again, and his older two sitting behind the blue and yellow frame individually.
"Triplets test their triplet's telepathy"
He can't help the instant tears that wells up his eyes, he almost feels embarrassed, though there is nobody there to witness them.
Nothing in the video is sad.
Their younger version of them keeps yelling over one another "No way!" "Same!" "What?" from each other's answers, leaning over their own chair, hugging and ruffling the other’s hairs with giggles spluttering every other minute.
He can't find a single fuck inside him to giggle at anything right now. It feels hard to breathe.
Because it hurts so bad.
It hurts to realize how much things have changed. And he cannot even decide whether the change has been for the worse or the better.
From the moment that thought first passed through his mind, he has been trying to convince himself that this is simply what adulthood looks like.
You stop being so immature, so spoiled.
You stop wanting to talk softly to your triplets anymore, because they won't listen to you about reviewing the video before it's being uploaded. You stop wanting to spend as much time with your triplets anymore, because you see each other all the time, living and working together, surely that should be more than enough. You stop touching your triplets gently because they only knows how to fucking annoy and frustrate you in every single planning for the week and is not helping the team.
That is adulthood.
That has to be adulthood.
Because everything works out well.
Every video is well-edited and released on time, events are properly RSVP'd to and attended, time is spent with friends and families for gatherings, birthdays, anniversaries, you name it they got it. Their solo projects are successful, calendar remains full and their reputation is at its peak.
So, it cannot be for the worse then.
But it feels like it to him, and it's killing him.
His stomach hurts, as it continues to twist.
He closes his hot stinging eyes.
He can't seem to remember which part of this pain has they ever wished for, which part of their ambition has brought along this freezing coil into his stomach and this unbearable pressure into his chest.
A part of his brain is cursing him to turn off the stupid rectangle in his hand, this is not worth the overthinking and he needs to learn how to not be so fucking sensitive.
What happened today is not that deep at all, for fuck’s sake.
It was just his oldest brother deciding to spend the weekend at his boyfriend's and forgetting that he had promised the youngest a bowling game the week before.
It was just his other brother cancelling the movie on him for the second time because he couldn't make it back in time from his friend's house.
It was just him cursing both of them out every single time they became even slightly annoying, with little to no regard for their feelings or the gravity of those foolish words of his.
It was just all of that.
Over and over and over again, they’ve done this before.
So frequently that he has lost count of how often he leaves a conversation with them feeling more upset than he did before it began.
He drags his thumb over the screen, opening Instagram, at the top is a photograph of his oldest triplet, surrounded by a colourful ring, nicolassturniolo written underneath it, a story update.
He taps on it and was met with a mirror selfie of his brother and his boyfriend. It was uploaded nine hours ago.
He can feel a tennis ball forming in his throat.
The coil in his stomach tightening and the hollow ache in his chest that his breath catches, in an instant, his eyes are stinging again.
Fuck.
For fuck’s sake!
He is not jealous, he is not angry, he is not upset.
He is so, so, so happy for him.
He remembers how giggly and teary-eyed the first triplet had been when he first told them about his then-crush, now-partner. He can remember the shine in his eyes, the nervousness and the excitement that made him talk faster than he already does. And he remembers just as vividly how happiness had fluttered through his own chest for the oldest.
But perhaps that was the last time he remembers feeling that uncomplicated for his triplets.
His grandmother once told him that change is good, change allows you to grow.
He had not understood her at the time, he was eleven, and had to settle for some random soda instead of his favourite one at a diner, which did not seem all that related to self-growth either.
But he had trusted her, and sure enough, grandma had been right for most part. Embracing
changes have made him into the person he is today.
When the oldest triplet proposed that they move into another house, he had been positive.Good change!, he had thought.
Melancholy is an emotion he does not particularly enjoy dealing with. Thinking about the past can be nice, but he has never understood the point of remaining there when there is still so much more future to create.
"Melancholy will be the death of me.", the author-soul of his older brother had let out once.
He had laughed when he heard it.
But now he thinks that he is not at all that different either.
In his case, he believes the present might be the death of him instead.
Because he cannot breathe thinking how much he fucking hates how he is feeling right now.
The move threw him completely off balance.
One day they're packing up and moving. Another day, the oldest relationship took a deeper dive. The next day they become increasingly occupied with other friends, other plans, other places to be.
And whenever they are together all they talk about is work, work, work and work.
Their goddamn fucking work.
He shifts on his side as there's that ugly feeling again.
Lodge in between his chest and stomach, deep within his sickened core.
He is running out of things to blame.
He can blame adulthood, he can blame their career, he can blame them for being in a relationship, he can blame them for wanting to spend more time alone or with their friends, he can blame the new house, he can fucking blame the goddamn breath that has been given to him.
But he knows.
He knows that if he's the only one feeling this way, then the blame cannot belong to anyone or anything else.
It is unfair to blame them when he is the one carrying this intense, humiliating desire to scoop his two brothers out of their lives and take them somewhere nobody knows them and nobody gives a damn.
The blame is on him.