Page 75 of Haunt Me

But I don’t love Him either. In fact, if I still believed, loving Him would be the last thing I would be doing.

“I don’t know what it means to ‘have to’ believe, baby,” I tell her. “You either do, or you don’t. I don’t. I mean, how can I? My life is a joke. No one has ever cared about it; what is there to believe in?”

Still, she keeps looking at me with those huge eyes until I want to go down on my knees and beg her to tell me what I can do to make her stop hurting.

“Tons of horrible things happen to people every day,” she says finally, her eyes so sad my heart stutters. “But people still manage to stay good through them. To believe. To have faith and goodness in their hearts. I want... I want to be one of them. One of the strong ones.”

“Eden…” I murmur, my heart suddenly thrumming in my ears, an emotion so strong assaulting me, I don’t know what to do with it. “Eden, you are the strongest person I know. And the kindest. You…”

“Stop, please. I know what I am.”

“Oh? And what is that?”

“Someone who is scared. And I need to have something for when I get so scared. I need to know how to pray.”

It feel as if I’ve been knifed in the stomach.

“What are you scared of?”Tell me what’s happened to you.

She shrugs, as usual. “Just life in general. It’s scary.” She is lying.

“Listen, you tell me who scared you and I’ll annihilate them, ok?” I stand up, shaking from head to toe, meaning every single word.

And she… She looks at me for a minute. And then, of all things, she starts laughing.

“You,” she says, “are the sweetest person in the whole world.” I smile. “Ok. Can you teach me how to pray?”

I lean in and kiss her for a full minute.

“That there, was the best, most honest, most revered… the holiest prayer I’d ever sent up to the heavens in my entire life,” I whisper against her lips.

And that’s something, coming from someone who has been parroting prayers since he was old enough to talk.

…

Years later, when I go through all the documentaries about Eden’s case, I will find out that she was diagnosed with something called ‘skin hunger’, because she had been deprived of human touch and human contact since infancy. However, her therapist did not think it was as severe as it should have been for a child who grew up like she did.

I will read the comments underneath the articles, about how people pity Eden or marvel at this new weird medical thing, trying to make armchair diagnoses about who else has it. But I’ll only be thinking of all the times I pulled her in my arms and kept her there for hours. Of all the little kisses I dropped on her fingers randomly, without reason. Of how I used to play with the strands of her hair.

I touched her. A lot. And she let me.

I didn’t know she was starving for it—how could I? She didn’t know it herself. I only knew thatIwas. And in the end, it was my hunger that kept us both sane.

…

“What’s going on?” she asks me one day in May.

She’s sitting on my lap permanently now, my hand glued to her shoulder, but my mind is elsewhere. I shake myself out of my thoughts, but it’s pointless. She already saw it. She already saw me.

“You’re slipping away from me,” she says. “Where did you go?”

“You are literally sitting on my lap,” I murmur, trailing kisses behind her left ear. I run my fingers through the soft wisps of hair that have escaped her braid and the familiar shiver runs down my spine, just by touching her. “I’m not going anywhere baby.”

“You went inside your head,” Eden says, angling her head away from my lips to look into my eyes. Summer is beginning to bloom around us, its warmth making us reckless, drunk on sunlight. “You’re thinking.”

I lazily made a flower crown for her out of grass and daisies yesterday and she is still wearing it around her forehead. It makes her look like a dark-haired fairy that’s sent from a magical realm to steal my soul. Doesn’t need to steal it. She has it.

“Remind me to abstain from the activity in the future,” I smile, reaching for her fingers.

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