can’t go back now.
What scares me about right now is the ‘never’s. The idea that now, a door is closing behind me. I couldn’t really go back before, but I could glance over my shoulder and see the safe areas that I was still allowed to revisit. I guess I’m ready to give those up, like the stuffed animals and safety blankets — and that if i’m not ready, I’ll have to be. But it was nice having them there, even if I could have survived without them all along. It was nice knowing that somewhere close to my present, I was okay.
link
the brightest green.
At first, I had no idea what had woken me up.
It was the dead of night; the number to the left of the blinking colon on the digital clock on my bedside table was a small, single-digit one. Yet the small electronic contraption, though on and vivid through the darkness of my bedroom, was silent. My window was open, letting the cool summer night diffuse freely through its screened space, but even outside there was little sign of life other than the low white noise that breathed through the atmosphere.
I sat up slowly, rolled my shoulders back, and listened, tensing the muscles around my ears until I felt like my hearing were scanning my surroundings for any trigger that might have pulled me from my vague dreams.
I was listening so hard that the violent buzz of the phone nearly made me jump. My head jerked around instinctively in the dark, ears searching for the source of the noise and eyes vainly trying to pinpoint a location in dimensionless darkness. Both blind hands patted the blankets around me in more vague attempts to find the phone.
Three buzzes drilled into my tired ears, with two-second pauses in between them.
Four.
Groaning and yelling at the thing to shut up, I flipped the covers off of my legs and stood, squinting at the carpet under my feet and finally dropping to hands and knees to check under the bed.
The phone buzzed a final time, screen illuminating the space beneath the slats of my bedframe in a flash of brilliant white, before falling silent and fading back to dormant darkness. Before it could disappear completely, I scrabbled a hand along the carpet, passing the roughly cut edge and sliding along exposed hardwood before my fingers could close around the cold, metallic plastic. I dragged it out, retracting my arm back toward me, and flipped it open.
The screen felt too bright on my sleep-blurred eyes, and as I stared down uncomprehendingly at the words it displayed, I considered for a moment simply shutting the damn thing off and crawling back into bed. I had to get up in too small a number of hours, anyway.
Still on my knees, I lifted my free fist to my eye and pushed, grinding at it until I felt like it could focus again.
Two missed calls from…
The name hit my brain with the force of a shot of espresso, and exhausted as I was, I was now solidly awake.
I couldn’t ignore that name.
I shifted my weight back and slouched against the side of my bedframe, back pressed into the hard edges of the wood, and shoved my thumb against the redial button as I lifted the cell phone and held it against the hair by my ear.
She answered after half of a ring. “Did I wake you?” Her voice was clear and high, but it sounded different. Breathier. Fuzzy, almost. She was asking the courteous question without a hint of tonal indication that she cared about the answer. Something had to be wrong.
“It’s fine,” I said dismissively, the words coming out mumbled and slow. “Where are you?”
She paused, and I listened to the background noises from her end. There were very few; just her breath, the crackle of our connection, and a slow rhythm that I guessed was her footsteps. A light whoosh of static put into my head the assumption that she was outside somewhere.
“I’m…” There was a broken note to her voice, and for a split second, the annoyance I had with her and the history we shared was swiped aside to make room for the concern that bled into my voice when I spoke again.
“What happened?” I asked. “You okay?”
She sighed into the phone; the whooshing and rhythmic stepping ceased. “I’m outside your apartment.”
I could visualize her, wavy brown hair and slim figure in clothes that fell around her like curtains. Soft leather shoes that complimented the way she bowed her legs together when she stood for too long. She sounded upset or something, and by the way she admitted her location I guessed she was pressing the phone to her ear as she bowed her head, tapered fingers pinching the bridge of her nose from behind the drapery of her loose strands.
I said nothing, waiting for the request to come.
“Buzz me in,” she murmured, pleading. Pathetic, but still a person.
I waited for her to yank the heavy door open, cross the lobby, and make her way up the steep checkered steps to my front door.
I swung it open to let her in, raking my fingers through my cropped curls and realizing all too late that I was clad in only boxers and a thin white t-shirt.
And there she was. Leaning unsteadily, eye makeup dark and slightly smudged, face otherwise pale. She looked at me and fumbled for a smile, slurring my name.
I could smell the hurt on her, the sadness and the lost. It was laced with dying perfume and alcohol, the remnants of her adventures from tonight.
She was a mess, and as she raised her eyes to me I realized this was more than usual.
There was a brightness to their shade of green on any given day, but tonight — in the dim hallway light that stayed on all the time, and set off by that dark gray she’d traced their outlines with — they were volatile. She stared at me, waiting or just watching, blank and yet so knowing. Those same eyes I’d seen a hundred thousand times before, the ones I’d looked into and wished would look away, the ones I’d read or missed, glowed somehow through the monotonous brown-black of their surroundings.
They were the brightest green I’d ever seen.
And yet they were extinguished, somehow. As exhausted as I felt.
I swung the door open wider, stepped back, raised my arm sideways so my palm tilted toward her and the ceiling at the same time.
“Come on in,” I said, shaking my head against my better judgement.
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no power.
My mother stood in the doorway, arm cocked up at the elbow to hold the expensive black handbag she’d bought herself on my birthday. Her hair was up in the tight, practiced bun I’d never seen her leave the house without, her face painted like she was ready for a date instead of preparing to heft my five sizable moving boxes up four flights of stairs to my new dorm. Looking her over, I noticed she was wearing her work heels — two solid inches of height that probably boosted her high enough over her coworkers that she could look down at them. They were nice shoes, but again, not exactly ideal footwear for trekking up and down stairs for an hour.
“Well,” she said, appraising the room with her usual sour expression, “it looks clean, at least.”
I could tell, from the way the lines moved into the skin on her face and the slight downward twist of her mouth, that she hated it. I could read the disgust on her like a bad mood. She scraped abrasive eyes over the walls and warped floor, stopping when she saw the industrial bed frame and sighing. The look that colored her features was one I’d seen a thousand times before, only this time the vague, unhappy and yet uncaring frown was directed at something other than myself.
I dismissed her disapproval, ignoring the guilty bite that reminded me that I cared what she thought, and turned to survey the place for myself.
The walls were an odd off-white, but they could be covered in photos and posters fairly easily. The slightly curved wooden floor would rarely really be an issue. The bed was big enough to sleep in or sit on, which was enough for me. And there, tucked into the corner, was my own desk. No begging for it from the parents who expected greatness but refused to spend on the quiet personal workspace, simply given to me by default. Behind it was a closet — smaller than the one I had at home, but then I had less to put in it now. There would be so much less that I’d have to hide.
It was small, it was empty, and it was unfamiliar.
Still. It could be home.
I turned back to my mother, who was still barely in the doorway. Her face had the kind of contained fear in it that betrayed her will to escape the situation; the weak, hysterical shade of crazy that lingered like dark clouds before a thunderstorm.
For a moment, I hated her for it. She was supposed to want to stay, to want to help. She was supposed to smile and make the best of this, to take charge and find someone to help out, to encourage and support. But as quickly as the anger burned inside of me, it blew itself out. I gave up for the hundredth time, felt the fight whoosh out of me like a match in the wind, sighed in a slight and self-deprecating way, and then shook my head.
“You don’t have to stay, Mom,” I said, putting a dull, nasal tint into my voice. “I’m fine. I’ll grab the boxes from the car and set up.” My heartbeat spiked with the lie, bringing the telltale flush to my cheeks.
By now, this giveaway was something my mother should have known. She should have seen it, and realized her mistake, and changed.
But she didn’t do any of that.
She let the smile of relief break onto her face, lifting her chin as though that could compensate for the fact that even this grin couldn’t reach her cold eyes. “Oh, are you sure?” she asked, as if it would make a difference.
I opened my mouth, feeling dark ideas furrow my brow for a second before I gave up again. “Yeah,” I said, nodding with a serious, Of-Course-I-Can expression carefully arranged on my face. “I’ll be fine.”
That much, I hoped, was true.
“Okay,” she said slowly, looking at me out of the corners of her eyes as though giving me a last chance to change my mind. About her, about here, about everything.
“Mm-hmm.” I turned around to look over the room again, then glanced back to convince her. “Go get coffee or something,” I suggested, but my words dropped onto the floor and lay there dead, unheard.
She’d already left me.
link
so contagious.
Don’t look up.
I could feel the tension in my jaw building up to a headache, but I kept my teeth together, focusing on the clenched discomfort and trying to let it overwhelm the other thoughts burning in my head. I let my back hunch over into a terrible, uncomfortable posture; my eyes stayed trained on the blank piece of drawing paper where it lay on the scarred surface of the wooden table in front of me. My fingers were stiff around the nub of a pencil, waiting for it to produce the light, feathery lines that darkened into artwork like it usually did.
Footsteps shuffled through the doorway behind me, sending a nervous line of goosebumps up my arms. They stopped for a moment, then there was a zipper-punctuated thump as a backpack hit the linoleum beside my chair and a small creak as a body transferred its weight onto the stool next to mine.
The shiver dissolved into the realization that it wasn’t her.
“Hey, man,” Luke greeted me as he bent at the waist, unzipped his backpack, and produced a sandwich from somewhere inside of it. It must have been somewhere deep inside of the bag, because even out of the corner of my eye I could tell that the meal was smashed into a vague L-shape as though it’d been bent around the unforgiving corner of a textbook or binder. “What’s good.”
I blinked, but my shoulders were too tense to shrug, so I slowly swiveled my eyes over to meet his, raising my head along the way. “Not much,” I said briefly. “Just drawing.”
Luke popped open the re-sealable edge of the plastic bag that housed his sandwich, crinkled it down to expose a corner, and bit off a chunk of his lunch. I watched as his eyes flickered down to where the blank piece of paper sat on the table, then back up to my face.
“Looks like,” he said, the usual Luke tone punctuating the joke.
There were voices in the hallway before I could spit a response back, and I felt each muscle in my body slowly harden to lock me into place, frozen in my awkward, twisted position.
Luke unwrapped one hand from his sandwich bag and hovered it in front of my face, snapping his fingers an inch from my nose.
I jumped, shook my head to clear it, and let the flash of a good-humored smile cross my face before I made myself turn back to the blank page.
But not before the girls rounded the corner and walked through the door.
The color rose unbidden to face, heat rising from my cheeks to my ears. I cursed myself for the millionth time, hating that I’d turned in the first place, hating that I’d ever even —
“She’s not here.” Luke’s words broke through my spiral, a splash of cold on the burning blush that stained my face.
I forced my shoulders down and back, pretending to relax them; I clenched the stubby pencil in my fist instead of my fingers now and concentrated on breathing.
“I mean,” he said idly, “if that’s what you’re stressing about.” He took another large bite of his sandwich and swiveled so he could lean both elbows on the table as he ate, letting me slide with only one jab today.
That was unusual.
I must have looked bad.
I closed my eyes and wiped my free, unclenched hand over my face. My palm was surprisingly cool where it touched my cheeks and forehead, and for some reason this — and this alone — calmed me down.
Leaving my hand over my mouth, I dared a glance back to where the girls had clustered their chairs, in their back corner of the art room where they could talk to each other and no one else.
I didn’t let myself wonder at the reasoning behind it, but simply, for once, felt the strange absence of disappointment linger confusedly in my chest as my eyes found her empty seat.
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in the belly of the whale.
Despite everything, his hands were the same. Almost double the size of mine, as we’d discovered the moment they’d intentionally touched for the first time, they were wide and strong and somehow graceful. There was a capability to the fingers, though they were rough at the tips and now spattered strokes of red. The straight cuts sliced his skin’s normally-perfect surface like the trails of the thinnest paintbrushes, minor incisions that were the least of his injuries.
I slipped my own hands, so small and naïvely smooth compared to his, around the one he rested by his side on the soft white sheets. The lightly haired skin of his wrist betrayed his pulse, feebly but surely, pounding through his veins in a weakly determined way. I closed my fingers around his.
“Ooh,” he fluttered, shuddering as he started the car and jabbed at buttons on the dashboard until warm air began to pour from the vents around us. “It is cold.”
I laughed, comfortable in my winter jacket while he shivered in his comparatively thin flannel shirt. “You okay?” I asked, shyly peeking up at him.
He shook his shoulders again and rubbed his palms against each other, arms hunched in toward his core as if they could retain more heat that way. After pressing his thumbs against his lips and squeezing his eyes shut, he turned to me. “I’m just chilly,” he said, giving me a smile with a brightness that whispered affection.
My answering smile could only have matched his. “Yeah?”
He nodded ardently, extending one arm in my direction. “See, my fingers are freezing.”
I paused, turned my torso to face him, and cupped my hands around his cold fingertips. “Here,” I said quietly, pressing my warmth into his body between clasped palms. “Better?”
He simply watched me for a moment, then leaned against the back of the driver’s chair and let his face soften. The shivering left his body and there was a comfortable happiness in his eyes, a happiness that a small sigh told me I’d put there.
“Better,” he told me, and confirmed it with a gentle nod. “Thank you.”
Sunlight dove through the slits in the blinds of the single window in the room, falling to the white linoleum floor in evenly spaced blocks. Everything in this room seemed to be standardized like that; the magazines stacked neatly on the chair on the opposite side of the bed, which was lined up perfectly with the one in which I sat now. Even the beeps from the monitors with feelers worming under his skin were regular, like the monotonous noise emitted from a reversing truck.
Part of me felt that the sun was wrong. It was a beautiful day outside, sunny and warm and flawless. The clouds in the bits of sky I could glimpse through the blinds were appropriate, not too busy but fluffy enough to be enticing. It was the kind of day you went to the beach on, in rolled-up jeans and a t-shirt, carrying your shoes as you walked on damp sand and dreamed of summer while remembering the bite of past frost. The kind of day you take a bike ride around town, sunscreen fooling your brain into loving the fleeting heat of the mid-year months even though your bones know it’ll be gone before you’re ready. The kind of day you lie outside on your stomach in fresh grass, a book open opposite your sunglasses-screened face.
Not the kind of day you spend with a broken body in a hospital bed, hating the color white and wishing the hand you hold would, please, please squeeze back.
His breath came in the abrupt gusts it always had, quick inhales and exhales from that safe place in his chest.
“Are you okay?” I asked, concern playing into my face as I sat up and searched his features for any sign of distress. A hand on his shoulder, on the thin fabric of the t-shirt that separated our skin but bled his body heat through to my nerves, propped me up as I tilted my head toward his. I rested my chin on his collar bone, watching his eyes as he looked back at me.
The confusion passed over his face like a raincloud. “What?” He glanced down. “Yeah, why?”
“You’re breathing fast,” I whispered, feeling his accelerated pulse in the hand that covered mine now and pulled it from his shoulder to his waist.
He smiled a tiny bit, just the corner of his mouth twitching upward. “I think I’m just excited,” he offered, shrugging though he was lying down.
I felt the small laugh move my own chest as more confusion came to my brow. “About…?”
He closed his eyes and leaned in, his nose against mine, foreheads meeting. “No reason,” he whispered, and then his arms shifted to my waist, hugging me closer to him.
I felt the tears rise to my eyes, well up in burning suspense, and then drip to my cheeks, left side before right. “Wake up,” I sighed, leaning forward in the hospital chair and resting my chin on the bed a few inches from where I’d laced our hands together.
He didn’t stir.
The beeps charged on, steady and sterile and meaningless.
I squeezed my eyes closed like he had that day in the car, feeling my own pulse skyrocket now as the desperation broke through my careful poker face from earlier, when I’d first gotten here.
One of my hands reluctantly untangled itself from our fingers and moved to swipe the tears away, though they’d already started to soak into the fabric wrapped around his immobile body.
“If you can hear me,” I began, but my voice came out in a shattered whisper.
He kept breathing, the machine kept beeping, but nothing changed, really.
“Wake up,” I begged in my broken voice.
I pulled his hand to my mouth and pressed the back of it against my lips.
“Wake up,” I murmured, “and I’ll be better. Wake up and I’ll try harder and do more. I’ll be there, I won’t leave you. Wake up and…wake up…”
I matched one of my breaths to his, then let a shaky sigh fill my lungs and rush out.
“Wake up,” I repeated.
The sun shone like the day was perfect.
“Wake up.”
His breath whooshed like he was simply asleep.
“Wake up.”
The beeping marched on impossibly.
“Wake up.”
Beep. Beep. Beep.
“Please…”
…
Beep.
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coming home.
There was a pause.
“What?” came the crackly voice on the other end of the line, unmistakably my sister’s yet somehow tinted and distorted from miles away. She sounded confused in a disappointed way, as though she’d expected more, better, from me.
“I’ll be there in a couple of days,” I repeated, slowly and carefully. I kept my tone even, knowing that my words would be ill-received no matter how I phrased them.
I didn’t expect her to understand, not really. Maybe some part of me, a latent sliver that still stubbornly maintained that there was unearned goodness in the world, had hoped that she would simply accept that I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t stay away from that too-small, too-significant town on the east coast. It had been vain hope, small enough to ignore but substantial enough to place in my gut the sensation of a letdown.
If I were being honest with myself, I would have admitted it. Gabby was always right, after all, and especially when it came to things like this. Her uncertainty as she soaked up the news that I was coming home should have been an omen. She’d watched me grow up beside her, heard every complaint and adolescent dream I’d cared about enough to articulate, and probably knew me better than anyone else did.
Anyone other than That Girl, at least. That Girl whose name I couldn’t say, the elephant in the metaphorical room stretched to span the thousands of miles separating me from my current position and my sister’s in the destination I might always call home. That Girl, the one who found me when I was happy with myself and ruined it.
That Girl had taken a confident, self-fulfilled kid of sixteen, gotten to know him to the point that everything was better when she was around, and made him so much better. She’d fixed what hadn’t been broken and improved the best in him, made his normal inadequate, and then ruined it.
She’d left.
I sighed into the receiver, letting the air blowing in through the open side of the phone booth cleanse my lungs. “I’m coming home,” I said, finally admitting it to Gabby as well as myself. The words felt strange on my tongue, even after all this time. Home was supposed to be the place you were most comfortable, and here I was giving that title to a place I’d been avoiding for miles.
“She’s not here, Dallas.” Gabby’s voice was tight, holding something back.
I didn’t dance around the truth for once. “And?” I challenged, demanding the withheld information. If she didn’t think I could read her voice after all these years, she was kidding herself.
“She left with him,” she said, tone suddenly hard and cold. “They’re together now. Dallas, if you’re coming back for her, you’re too late. She’s not going to hurt him again, not for you.”
I listened to the static on the line for a second, then dropped the black plastic telephone from my face, letting it hang at my side in a loosely formed fist.
When I lifted it back to my ear, she was still listening, waiting for me.
“I’m coming home,” I said again, obstinate and final.
“Dallas…”
“I’m coming home.”
I dunked the head of the phone into its cradle and headed back to my now-well-used Oldsmobile, dragging my boot heels in the dust behind me.
link
amelia.
She was standing, thin and tall, dark-denim clad legs disappearing into brown leather boots that were planted firmly yet lightly on the cement in front of the bench. A slight shove on her shoulders would have sent her backward and down, safely but abruptly onto the cold, warped seat behind her. Now, though, without the force, her back stayed upright and slightly curved within the quilts of her gray coat.
He loved that coat by now—or rather, he knew it, and loved that he knew it. This was the coat that sleeved the arm he got to loop into his own on good days, the one that kept her warm enough that she would agree to walk with him even when the sun’s heat faltered before it could reach them. It was the same coat he’d found himself wrapping his arms around when she’d let the sadness leak from the soft hazel eyes that seemed to see him the way he wanted to be seen; he’d felt its material against his chin when she’d stepped into the close space he usually saved for himself. It was the coat with the pockets from which she once pulled a mitten-blanketed hand to offer to him as they moved together along the same path, placing one foot ahead of the other in the common, steady dance he now performed alone as he walked toward her.
He was fifty feet away, each movement of his heavily-shoed feet bringing him another step closer. One brought him up off of the pavement and onto the curb, the next sent the gentler thump of grass against his rubber soles.
Twenty feet away, he almost paused.
The wind blew, a rough gust too cold for his clothes to fend off but only enough to whisk her hair along with its invisible current. The almost-curly waves, tinted a light shade of milk chocolate in the afternoon sun, were swept up from where they tumbled down her back and swirled about her head. As he watched, putting his foot forward for another step that launched a nervous presence in his ribcage, she raised a hand and brushed the wisps from where they danced in her face. He couldn’t see if she was smiling or not, but he guessed that she was. Safe in her coat, she could marvel at the loveliness of the whisper of cold air, watch as it slid its force along the water of the pond before her and ruffled momentary whitecaps into existence. She could smile at the beauty of this place the way so many of its visitors simply forgot to, spotting the grace of each reeling tree while others pounded sneakers past, ears plugged with angry music, oblivious to all but the goal of returning to where they’d started.
Three more steps; he could have called out to her, pitching his voice through the air and tugging her attention away from whatever distant place it had found while he had been gone.
Another five and then he slowed.
Instead of a brisk near-jog, his steps dawdled into a stroll. He raised his chin and sent his shoulders back into a posture he could sing in, scuffing his heels on the mostly-dirt path he took toward her.
She felt his approach the way friends can after the kind of time they’d shared, the way a star moves in relation to its orbiting planets. He knew she felt it, perceived him, from the slowness with which she turned to greet him. Her chin started the revolution, then her shoulders and finally her eyes as she pulled them from the watery landscape she’d been thinking at. There was a comfortableness to the gesture, a familiarity that lit her face with a smile hinting at relief while the smoothness of her movement reminded that they’d met here, like this, so many times before.
He let his face unfold into a smile as well, deflecting his eyes down to his clumsy footfalls as he crossed the last of the dividing space between them, took her outstretched arm, and fell into place beside her.
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can’t help falling.
He finishes his sentence, the words slower and heavier with each step they take into the stillness between us. They are weighted with meaning, bleeding importance, and broken with a depth that both opens and fills a place somewhere in my chest. When they stop, he pauses, eyes forward and arm against mine, letting the moment soak in before he shifts back in his seat.
His eyes flicker from where they had rested on his knees, focusing on something vaguely below my face but watching me in their periphery.
I can hear his breath, rushing out of his lungs in small, calm shifts. His posture is relaxed, leaned toward me and against me without the tension of obligation. He swivels his head so he is profiled against the everything around him, an everything that barely matters now.
He looks at me, lips closed and thoughtful, brow expectant, jaw shut against the rawness that chafes life into his speech.
For a moment, I feel it. I feel the lurch of comfort and closeness, the warmth of apprehension and vulnerability. I nearly close my eyes into it, the overwhelmingness of an unexpected confession swelling and pulling on the self I barely knew. The sinking is familiar, yet somehow new here.
I look back at him, watch as he moves in a slight, human way.
“You’re kind of incredible, you know,” I breathe. The words feel simple, but they fall into place the way I mean and want them to. I’m in awe, and I don’t fear that it shows as I stare.
He blinks, straightens. His face responds toward me instinctively, the taken-aback twitch twisted into his confusion. “What?”
I lift my chin with bravery that my pulse beats against in protest. “I think you heard me.” My voice stays steady but soft.
It’s true. I had never planned on any of this, only dreamed of letting it happen or pushing it into existence. Here, though, I cannot even bring myself to question it. The burning safeness of the present, however fleeting it is—however unintended, unanticipated, and under-appreciated it may be—is natural, created without intent and enduring because it was meant to.
He leans away from me, but it’s so that he faces me as he replies. “I think you are, too,” he says, a gentleness there that I’d guessed at but never felt. “You’re…different.”
I wince on principle, but the reaction feels mechanical. There’s something kind about the wonted evaluation when it pours from this source.
“No,” he corrects, holding up a palm as if he can hold back the thoughts in my head, “it’s a good thing.”
He is sheepish for a split second, looking up at me with hope for my comprehension in his smile.
I open my mouth to speak again, but for once, the words fail me. The protests I’ve practiced have no place here; this is no limp compliment or theatrical hyperbole.
He means it.
Every ounce of earnestness from his memories and opinions charges this phrase as well.
I give up, let myself smile in a small way and hug the distinction around me.
Leaning back in my seat, I shake my head and let a little laugh move my shoulders.
Incredible.
I believe him.
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prelude.
It was like watching an artist.
At first, the notes were timid, experimental, like a cautious first conversation. His fingers touched the keys, played them—yet it was somehow intimate, easing into the deeper sentiment of the stroke of a lover on the skin of his aching other half. One could not feel whole without the other, the man coaxing voice from the empty lungs of a sad and broken creature, lifting her with the gentleness required to raise a nymph from the loneliness of silent waters. In fleeting moments, each was blissfully united with the other; his hands fluttered and danced with the grace of a small bird, the instrument vibrated with living color. Like sweeps of a paintbrush freeing beauty from the blankness of a canvas, or the liquid swoop of a partnered dancer, the two twirled as one fluid idea.
Then the tone grew frantic, each realizing that the other was impermanent and separate.
For a moment, he leaned into the piano, shoulders lilting toward it as his face grew lost in their creation, and then with a release, it was gone.
The music faded, and as he straightened his spine, his fingertips trailed from the white pureness of the keyboard as though lingering on the soft hand of a leaving friend.
His arms fell to his lap and his foot lifted from the bulb of the pedal with a viscous reluctance.
When he breathed again, he was alone.
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and island now.
His back was to me.
I couldn’t see his face, then, but I could imagine it — perfect in ways I wished I didn’t think were perfect, brow furrowed as he focused on the string of words she spoke and eyes piercingly blue as they gazed unwaveringly on her face. The collar of his lightly-striped shirt was folded neatly for once, and its hem was completely tucked in. He was leaning backward ever so slightly, the base of his shoulder blade probably against the metal of the chair behind him and his forearms resting on the lip of the table.
As I stood there, cold air on my back and the brightness of the restaurant glaring in my unadjusted eyes, he lifted his right hand and brushed back his hair in a gesture I’d watched to familiarity.
For a moment, I missed him. I felt the whisper of the strands of his hair against my cheek as he stooped to anchor his arms around my waist, I breathed the sleepy cleanness of his skin, I brushed my fingers with the rougher ones that now dropped back to the edge of the table. I felt the ache of his absence, the yearning of a reminder that I was remembering, not experiencing.
The door swung shut behind me, cutting off the cold air with a sucking rush and clanging closed abruptly. I barely reacted, turning my head a fraction of an inch but letting my eyes linger where they wanted to. On him.
She looked up at the noise, her mouth freezing in the shape of the last syllable she’d put into the air and her eyes growing slightly. Her expression was not surprised, nor angry; she was not triumphant nor vengeful. She simply sat and stared, like I stood and stared from the doorway only ten or fifteen feet from where they sat together.
He turned, confused, and then stopped when his eyes met mine.
It didn’t matter that I was in sweatpants and a loose t-shirt, or that my hair was falling from its braid in stubbornly limp wisps. Nothing mattered, for a heartbeat.
He was looking at me, and the flickering of a recognitive smile dared to spark in his bold features.
But that didn’t matter, either.
I moved my eyes from his, something I’d never been able to do before. The coldness, an apathy I hadn’t been born with, mechanized my actions with a practiced, protective sureness.
I let it.
He raised a hand in a welcoming movement and put his voice into my name, I saw, and her expression changed.
I watched, felt the twinge in my stomach without admitting that he’d put it there, and lifted my chin. I moved my lips up to show I saw them, found her face and read the tension there, and looked away.
She was across from him now. It was she, not I, who watched him turn his shoulders back to her but keep his head rotated in my direction. It was she who saw his eyes follow me to the counter, she who opened her mouth again to speak as his silence counted out my change with the cashier, she who found no words in her breath as I wrapped numb fingers around the twine of the shopping bag and took my dinner with me.
She was the one who felt something, anything, for the boy across from her; she was the one who wondered at his thoughts as I pushed open the glass door again and stepped through it.
She felt the draft as I stepped into the cold night.
When I glanced back at the restaurant, she sat, staring at the door, with him and yet as alone as I was.
She missed the puff of air that hurt its way from my lungs.
Maybe, for her, I told myself, he was different.
As the cold worked its way inside of me, I started the short walk home in silence.
Maybe, now, he was different.
Alone, in the dark, I put one foot before the other and moved forward.
Maybe I was the different one.
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