Page 14 of Haunt Me

I look at her carefully, fighting the same dizziness as yesterday.

If just hearing her voice once did this to me, then I’m a lost cause. This girl is trouble.

“Pet,” I say. “That’s cute.”

“Is it.”

There is a sharpness to her tone now, a harshness. Her eyes get hard for a second, as if filled with something poisonous, but quickly they soften again. They go back to sad.

Ok, she doesn’t like that. I won’t ever call her that, I decide.

“Eden,” I repeat.Like paradise.

It sounds like music.Like my own personal paradise.By some miracle, I keep that part to myself. I’m still too dizzy. I lower myself to the ground, trying to make it look intentional.

“We’ve established that,” she says. There is that harshness again. “Now you.”

“I’m Isaiah,” I reply. “Everyone calls me Zay, though. It’s a handful.”

“Isaiah,” she says, testing the syllables out in her mouth. More music. My name had always sounded weird on the lips of teachers, friends, adults, kids. But in her mouth, it is perfection.

Sheis the source of the music, I realize. Not her voice or her name.

“I seem to be having no trouble, Isaiah,” she says.

I think she’s laughing at me—even though she isn’t even smiling. I let her.

“Is your knee ok?” I ask her.

“Is your panic attack ok?”

I just stare at her. I can’t believe these words just came out of her mouth, and in that calm, deadpan tone. Her eyes are serious.

“You saw?” I ask, clearing my suddenly clogged throat.

She nods. “I saw, Isaiah.”

“Call me Zay,” I say impulsively. “It’s what all my—” I can’t continue.

I can’t utter the words ‘my family’. I can’t say the word. The air tightens in my chest and it starts again. Another panic attack. Life is nothing but an endless loop of panic attacks.

“Sorry,” I wince at her, rubbing my chest. “I can’t seem to go on. I can’t… I can’t.”

“It’s ok,” she says, and I’m so surprised at this answer that it snaps me straight out of my grief.

“What did you say?’

“I get it,” she says as if it’s no big deal.

And then. She waits. She gives me time. She gives me what I need.

Later, I will think that this is the time I gave her my heart.

But in the moment, I don’t know what is happening inside of me. I only know that I can breathe, finally.

So I breathe.

And she does too. The trees rustle overhead, and not a word is uttered between us. But both of us are alive and breathing. And, for the first time in weeks, that is good enough.

---