Page 115 of Haunt Me

Isaiah: Oh crap, sorry, were you about to go to bed?

Eden: No.

Isaiah: Jet lag won’t let you sleep?

Eden: It’s not that.

Eden: I was waiting.

Isaiah: Waiting for what?

Eden: …

Isaiah: Waiting for what?

Isaiah: Eden?

Isaiah: Eden, are you there? Waiting for what?

Isaiah: Making me lose my mind over here.

Eden: Waiting for you to text me.

Eden: *user is offline*

twenty-eight

I wake up at noon with my throat raw, as if I’ve been screaming in my sleep. The minute I open my eyes, reality crashes down on me again.

Eden.

She’s ok. I checked on her before I fell unconscious.

But then I remember. She is not ok. I am not ok. None of this is ok.

The truth hits me all over again, like a punch to the stomach. I try to breathe, to process things. I can’t. I end up in the bathroom, dry-heaving, but my stomach is empty. All over the hotel, people are running around busy: we are packing up the tour and moving it to Belgium for next Friday. Talk about a ‘moveable feast’.

But I am stuck. There is nothing for me to do.

I am not helping or practicing or resting or working out.

Instead, I can’t stop thinking about the coal of truth burning me. How nothing can stay the same now: everything will be made pure or turned to ash. There is no third option.

‘The coal has touched your lips.’

That phrase is chasing me, tormenting me. Haunting me. Like the truth. Where is this from? I look it up.

It is, as I thought, from a biblical text. It is a quote by the prophet Isaiah—my name, of course. I knew Isaiah’s book was one of my dad’s favorites, but I may have repressed the memory.

I open the book of Isaiah on my phone and scroll to chapter 6. My eyes immediately sting with tears. The familiar words I learned as a little kid, now long forgotten, spring back into my memory as if I have never really lost them:

‘I am ruined.

I am a man of unclean lips,

I live among a people of unclean lips,

and my eyes have seenthe King.

---