Here’s how to die with a gravestone bestowed on by kisses for eternity:
You have a name too long for one breath, born in Dublin. Latin dripping off the tongue. Mother writes rebellions into her poems and father dissects. Words and blades. So you take both- wit, sharp as a blade, and wield it in salons where words are currency. You wear velvet jackets like armor and words like shields. Every sentence you craft is a jeweled epigram, glittering with irony and edge. The world begins to laugh with you, at you, in awe of you. But you know, oh, you know, how the tides of adoration shift like sand.
It begins with words, of course. It always does. Essays about beauty, plays that turn societal hypocrisy into comedy, a novel about a portrait that rots while its subject remains untouched. The Picture of Dorian Gray. It shocks them, delights them, and scandalizes them. You sit back, amused, watching the strings of his marionette world tighten and snap.
Step into the brilliance of success. Let it envelop you. The houses fill, the crowds roar. Your name is declared. They talk of it constantly. Your genius, your decadence, your defiance. But even you, with all your wit, cannot stop their laughter from becoming brittle. The thing about a gaslit age is that they will always try to snuff the flames out. You. Snuff you out.
Their blows don’t touch you and your sunlit boy yet. You write your adoration in letters too fragile to survive in the harsh world you reside in. He replies with the same love. Bosie, darling, dear. Sun-soaked love. Kisses hidden in dark rooms and candlelit glances across the room. It begins as quickly as it ends. Just as consumingly. Just as impactful. Bosie makes your heart hurt with love, and with dread, with pain, and everything in between.
Now comes the trial. Not of your work. Of your daring, defiant love. The love that should be whispered in darkened corners, and rips apart your carefully constructed world. “The love that dare not speak its name,” they call it, but it spoke plenty in your letters, your poems, your reckless choices.
There is a cell now, where once there were stages. Cold walls and hard beds replace the velvet and applause. Hard labor gnaws at your spirit, but it is the silence that breaks you, who once spoke of liberty, spends two years in chains. It is not the confinement that breaks you. It is the humiliation. The snickers of the crowd, the headlines screaming “sodomite,” the betrayal of those who once kissed your cheek.
You write again, but this time with less flamboyance, more sorrow. De Profundis becomes your prayer and your curse. Words soak the empty pages just as much as your skin soaks in your tears.
When freedom comes, it is a fractured thing. You are a specter of who you were, wandering Europe with a name no longer yours. Sebastian Melmoth. A man born of sin and disguise. And yet, you still write. Still hope.
Paris takes you in, but not kindly. The city of light casts you into shadow, where you drink absinthe and stumble down cobbled streets, your brilliance dimmed though never extinguished.
The end comes quietly, in a cheap Parisian hotel where the wallpaper offends your sensibilities more than death itself. "Either it goes, or I do," you say. And unfortunately, you do.
Lovers press their lips against the stone that you lay dead under, leaving red marks like prayers in lipstick. They kiss you not because you were perfect, but because you were flawed in ways that were as beautiful as a young-fellow named Grey.
So here’s how to die with a gravestone bestowed by kisses for eternity: You live boldly, you write extravagantly, you love defiantly. You shatter the rules, and then let rules rebuild themselves around your broken pieces. You leave behind works that crackle with wit and prose that aches with beauty. You love in a way that gets you condemned and later crowned. They call you a wit, a libertine, a martyr, a scandal. They write your name into the pages of history, underlined and italicized, kissed by strangers who see their own audacity in yours and thank you for your service. Thank you.
