Even now, six months after everything, I’m not sure how it happened, or what happened first. In my mind, everything happens at once, simultaneously, a collage of memories colliding and crashing in my mind, on my eyelids.

It’s like, they’re there, in my memory, but they’re not at the same time. I can’t think of one of them without thinking of their funeral, or the trial, or the blood. I can’t separate them from their deaths, their deaths from them.

It happened so fast, all of it. We met. I moved in. We fell in love. And three months later, they were dead. Lance Bass, destiny is calling, your best friend and your boyfriend are going to die within the year, how do you feel?

Well, maybe the little things. The way Justin took his coffee- three sugar cubes, one creamer. Or the kind of alcohol Josh used to drink- kahlua with cream, piña coladas, strawberry daiquiris. The smell of the apartment, plaster and paint and leather and lemons. How Josh’s hair looked in the mornings, sticking out in every direction. That’s the sort of thing I remember, the sort of thing that’s not attached to their deaths.

When I met him, Josh was just getting over his old boyfriend, Joey. Joey, it turned out, wasn’t the commitment type, whereas Josh definitely was. It was like something out of a chick-flick, our meeting, except that we’re two guys, and usually it’s a guy and a girl. We slammed into each other at the library, then that same day he spilled coffee on my shirt at Starbucks.

He was wild and creative and insane, a genuine artiste. He had blue eyes like the ocean and the sky when the sun sets and everything is stained in the dying light. His brown hair was always tousled and the tips were bleached blond, and he was tall and skinny with a long elegant neck, like a giraffe, and smooth fingernails. He dressed in fur coats and sequined pants and platforms and painted his nails black, his glasses with rhinestones sparkling in the frames. His teeth were pearly white, and his nose was too big, but I loved it anyways.

We only lived a few blocks away from each other, and kept seeing each other on our way to work- me, an accountant, him, a songwriter- or in the Starbucks or in the park a few streets down. It was only a week before he came over to me and asked for my phone number- not my name, because Josh was like that. He would find out my name later, he said, and he would only need it if I had a roommate.

It was the perfect romance- Broadway shows, strolls in the park, philosophical conversations over coffee at one in the morning. The romance every teenager dreams of, I was living it. I walked down the streets with my head in cotton-candy colored clouds that smelled of Josh’s cologne.

Within a few weeks I had moved in. Each morning I would wake up with the sun shining fiercely on my face, for even at seven a.m. New York is boiling with heat, dripping with it, and we would be so close I couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended.

Josh introduced me to his roommate and best friend since childhood, Justin. Justin was exactly like and not like Josh at the same time, with soft blond curls and blue eyes, angel eyes, that reminded you of innocence and were like bottomless pools you could drown in. His voice was gentle and sweet like honey, or marinara sauce, and his lips were red and full and pouty. He was skinny but in a muscular sort of way and he wore leather and mesh and clothes that clung to his body like a second skin. He walked with a sort-of rhythm and grace, because he was a dancer, and talked in an elegant way, because he was a singer and a writer, and he saw beauty in the weirdest things, because he was a photographer.

Justin loved rock shows and computers and hair gel, Josh adored records and vintage clothing stores and walking through alleys looking for old furniture. Justin was smooth but sincere, practiced but naïve, chic with a certain sort of charm, while Josh was spontaneous but wise, funky but stylish, obnoxious without being irritating.

I, with my hatred of abstract art and conservative (if classy) clothing and black coffee and carefully filled-out day planner, fit in perfectly with them, odd as it may seem. I was the missing piece in the puzzle, the organized and cautious amid the impulsive and reckless. Of course, they burned my day planner, but I learned to live without it.

So when did the fairy-tale end? When did everything come to a screeching, rubber-burning halt? I’m not sure. When I left for work that day, it still seemed like the storybook life to me. Justin, a fabulous and understated cook, made Belgian waffles piled high with whipped cream and strawberries and chocolate syrup. Josh modeled his new outfits for us and gave Justin a pair of thigh-high vinyl boots, explaining that he thought Justin needed some variation in his wardrobe. He gave me a soft kiss and threw a flower out the window at me, which hit me in the head while I was trying to unlock the car door. They laughed and waved at me from the window, flowers Josh had picked illegally in the park yesterday in their hands, Justin’s arm wrapped casually around Josh’s waist.

That was the last time I saw them alive.

The silence, of course, was my first hint. The apartment was unusually quiet. Even when they were gone, Josh left the radio on, or the TV, or the water running. They hated silence.

When I called, there was no answer. When I told them the joke was over, there was no resounding laughter. When my voice broke with fear, there was no Josh leaping out of a cupboard and putting his arms around me and telling me it was just a joke. There was simply silence, a terrifying and unnatural silence.

Then the feathers. On the floor of the living room, spilling out from underneath the closed bedroom door. And the smell, the thick-salty-sweet smell that was heavy in the air and made me feel like my stomach was doing the rumba.

Justin was on the couch, shot twice in the chest, one bullet puncturing his lungs, the other flying straight through his heart and embedding itself in the couch beneath him. Josh was lying on the bed, his blue eyes closed, his mouth wide open, a gaping and terrible hole in the middle of his forehead, his eyelashes spiky and wet and his hair soaked with blood.

No, I didn’t notice that everything in the apartment of value was gone. I didn’t really care. I don’t care now.

Why was there blood on my clothes, my hands? Because I touched them, tried to shake them awake. Why were my fingerprints all over the apartment? Because I lived there, dammit.

Don’t you see? I didn’t kill them, I couldn’t have killed them. Of course I knew about them, I wasn’t blind. Of course I knew they slept together. God, of course I knew they were together! I thought I made it clear, they weren’t the subtlest people in the world!

But you have to see. You have to understand. I didn’t mind it, because it made them happy. I didn’t mind it because I was the one Josh fell asleep with, and woke up with.

I know you think I’m lying, that I’m making this all up. Why would I make it up? I’m already in jail. They’ve already passed my sentence, they’ve already said no bail, no appeal. A lifetime in prison. So why wouldn’t I tell the truth?

The truth is, I didn’t mind it because I loved them. I loved them more than anything in the world.

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