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The ship of Theseus. A classic philosophical question. The boards of Theseus’s ship are replaced one by one until no part of the original construction remains. Is it the same ship? If not, When does it become a different boat?
It must be strange to relate to a Philosophy 101 problem, but that was the only way that Freddie could describe his life as of late.
He’d been in his Ex’s living room when his last board was replaced. He awoke from some kind of trance. He joked, Nandor laughed.
Guillermo never came to look for him, he never even called him. His boyfriend abandoned him in new york with no way to get home. So, he stayed with Nandor. He stayed with him despite the feeling at the back of his head telling him to hate Nandor. Something telling him that Nandor had done something to him, despite having never met him before that first day.
Then his boyfriend came back. His real one. It was strange. He remembered two versions of how this came to be. In one, he had met Guillermo back home and after coming to visit he had met his roommate (employer?) and felt a strange sort of attraction to him. In the other, he feels the impression of a long relationship with Nandor, and then a sudden and intense affection for Guillermo.
Freddie remembered when his husband turned. Nandor had come to bid farewell to his favoured wife, before he was forced to leave.
He appeared at his wife’s doorstep, her father’s doorstep, in the dead of night. She awoke to his request to be invited inside. She didn’t verbally agree, instead joining him outside her home.
It was strange. Nandor was never mysterious, he never lended any sort of excitement. But something about this next interaction was exhilarating, almost romantic.It didn’t last. He glanced woefully at the soon-to-be-dawn sky, he kissed her once, and left. Until her death, it was Marwa’s fondest memory of her once-husband.
And then he awoke. Confused and crowded in the modern day. Freddie’s almost-closure was ruined and Nandor returned to a bumbling narcissist in his mind’s eye.
His boyfriends fought. Not quite over him, it seems that whatever issues they had would have bubbled over, if not from this, from something else. In the midst of their bickering, he met someone he could finally relate to, someone like himself.
He fell in love.
For once, not to make the best of his circumstances, not by default, not in mirror of another man’s love. This one was real.
Freddie was good for him. He was clever. He knew things, things that Freddie already knew, of course, but it felt good to rediscover them. It felt new. The stories of history and art and the stars. They pulled him in. He wanted to touch the edges of humanity’s findings.
Freddie knew that he was constructed out of something different. He felt a strange disconnect from the world as it was now. He felt the edge of a nagging horror, a fear of forgetting and starting all over again.
Freddie knew he wasn’t Freddie. He knew that he should not be aware of that fact, but was ultimately glad to know that he didn’t know his true self. A self that no longer exist in anything but the very recesses of Freddie’s mind. He knew he could never be happy as that self, it was too altered, too inauthentic to live the life he was now free to live.
In her reconstruction into Freddie, Marwa was set free.