Page 58 of Our Hearts Knew Better

In the silence.

I swallow it all, the last sip too cooled to feel.

The clock ticks, and our bedroom door stays closed.

Hisbedroom door. Just a lump in our bed the size of my dry swallow.Hisbed now. I’ve been run off to the couch.

The cup clangs onto the island as I let it drop from my hands, then rub both over my face and up through my hair, pull, then swipe up the cup and swing around to the sink. I shove up thetoggle on the faucet and water sprays strong into the cup, the force sending some onto the counter.

Every part of me clenches as the cup clangs into the sink and the toggle slams down, the washcloth now squeezed in my hand swirling the tiny puddles into streaks.

I release a long exhale and pause, just breathing as I come back to my body.

I spin back to the island, my eyes landing on the couch, on where my head takes me in the dark. To the place and time I felt real light, when there was no end to possibility.

I’m twenty-three and I’m still haunted by my seventeenth summer. It’s been a recurring heckle.

How many times will my mind take me back there, to that town, where things went so right and so wrong, before I let my body follow?

The only thing I follow is an obstacle course of empty beer bottles when I breach the bedroom. I know the steps by heart, padding and hedging through, hoping to see a miracle.

But that would mean it’s a different day. And that’s too much to ask for.

What’s so wrong with this life? Everything.

Get the squash.

I feel a phantom smile at my lips as I fall against the glass door to the small balcony, the stretch of the corners as they stay flat. I love squash. I love squash even more from my own garden, knowing my mom would be proud of me for claiming my green thumb a few years ago. But it doesn’t fill my heart to look at them anymore. Just a twinge remains, a numbness to good and certainty beneath brain chemistry’s bullshit.

I close my eyes, hearing rustling branches and chirping crickets, feeling a steady phantom arm against mine.

And then I open my eyes before I can slip back into my imagination, back into a life I don’t have, back into the habitsI phased out of my system at seventeen. Ignore the pull as the clear sign it is that I need a change. Ignore that pictures in my mind now won’t take me as far as they did then because I’m consumed by static, too inactive for an active imagination.

Ifthishappens, I’ll leave; ifthathappens, I’ll leave. Random and foreseeable things.

Like if my forehead feels cool when I remove it from this glass, that I tell myself in the moment to get me moving in a different direction, to get a bag out the door.

But I can’t leave.

But I still tell myself those random and foreseeable things as he wastes away in this room, while I push through the infectious struggle to not waste away outside of it. It’s a disease, and it spreads to everyone around him. Aside from the friends he made here, during college, who fell off when he did, I’ve been the only one around him.

And unlike back then, when I helped Adam heal his broken heart, before he helped me heal mine, I can’t now.

I—wehad another time of our lives our last year of high school and all through university. He gave me something more.

Then something more was just gone.

Something more was too much and not enough in the split second he lost everything he was working toward.

He wasn’t driving, so his head was spinning him lower.

He wasn’t dodging trains; he was dodging living.

He wasn’t feeling. He wasn’tbeing.

And I’ve tried to be his light in the dark, but in doing so, I’ve been dimmed too.

One more time.

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