Page 50 of Light As A Feather
“It’s not like that, okay.”
“I’ll see what he says. But Hawthorne, if you let distance grow between you guys, it has a higher chance of festering. You two just need to talk. I know you’ll work it out.”
“He’s the one not responding to my texts or calls.” I sigh. “But yeah, you’re right. We’ll work it out.”
“Damn straight. Anyways, gotta go. Have fun tonight.” With a mischievous cackle, she ends the call, and the dark, synthy sounds and romantic lyrics of Mareux pour through my speakers once again.
Suddenly, the rest of the drive home doesn’t seem so long. I finally get to give in to my urge to fuck our problems away, and I fully intend to make it well worth the wait.
OCTOBER 31, 2008
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board.” The game begins, and despite my insistence that I be included, I’m immediately regretting it as a chill spreads across my skin and over my scalp. This was a bad idea. The prickle of intuition was a warning that came too late.
“Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather, stiff as a board,” they continue, drunk and oblivious to my panic as my lips become numb. I try to clench my muscles, but there’s no responding sensation. I’m just here, hanging in the balance, like a bated breath.
“She’s looking ill,” they chant in unison. And I feel it as I realize that I can no longer smell the alcohol wafting off their words.
“She’s looking worse,” they continue three times as I lift off the ground. Gone is any insecurity that I might be too heavy to play, dispelled in the worst possible way. I’m a prisoner in my own body, unable to stop whatever’s coming, even as my stomach flips in fear.
“She’s dying,” the group says over and over as they lift me higher, their voices growing more distorted with each repetition.
“She’s dead,” they say in unison, voices deep and slurring, as I rise above their heads.
Levitating above the circle of burning candles, I can feel myself being pulled toward something surreal, like magic, as I slip through the hard-pressing fingers of what I know as reality. I’m no stranger to feeling outside of my body—I can’t even count how many times I’ve quite literally wished to be floating consciousness—but this is different.
My body is a tether to everything I know, distant, but I can feel the tug of it at my periphery.
I focus on the flicker of orange candlelight creating undefined shapes against the wall, the erratic tempo of it likely similar to that of my heart, the beat of which I can’t seem to find.
As I slip away into the unknown, I have no choice but to wait for what’s coming to reveal itself. There’s a consciousness that lingers somewhere beyond me in the shadows that cling to the edge of the room.
There’s a dreamlike quality to everything around me, though. Hazy and inaccurate—the decor is different; furniture is moved around—but the Addams house is still recognizable.
I can’t move my head, but I watch myself stumble down the stairs. I’m older, my hair is green, but there’s no doubt it’s me. Behind her, I can only make out a pair of men’s shoes slowly coming around the bend in the staircase. With soft-landing feet,he’s not quite in pursuit, but there’s something sinister about the presence—a hunter waiting for its wounded prey to accept its fate and yield to death.
I want to call out to her, to warn her, to beg her to fight, but it’s as if my lips are stitched shut. They remain numb and unmoving. I’m reduced to an unwilling witness.
At the bottom of the steps, myolder self stumbles, swept into the arms of a much older Hawthorne. There’s a brief exchange of words I can’t hear over the roar of my heartbeat, shared looks of longing and sorrow, the reveal of a glass bottle that stirs panic in his eyes. He acts desperately as she fades, but there’s no stopping the inevitable. They both know it. I feel it in my chest the moment she takes her last breath, as real as anything I’ve ever experienced. It rattles there, a promise, a threat.
I’m so young, and everyone keeps telling me that I have my whole life ahead of me, but I'm certain that I’ve just seen my own death. I’ve had many precognitive dreams, but this is something else. It knocks the wind out of me, sends my mind reeling.
My heart is pounding in my chest; it could split me open. Feeling tingles in my toes, in my fingers, then the rest of my body. My surroundings are the version of Hawthorne’s house that I recognize. But instead of staring up at the ceiling, I meet a pair of cold blue eyes. Despite the glare of candlelight that cuts through the lens of his glasses, his gaze bores into me, and by the weight of that look alone, I know him. Ivan.
I still can’t move, so I don’t flinch or shift away as he comes closer. He smiles as his thumb traces over my lips.I see him in a distinct clarity that I never have before, standing over me. No longer swathed in darkness, I can make out his features—the lines that fan out from the corners of his eyes, the press of his lips—and his dirty blonde hair slicked back with a matchingshort beard. I was never quite able to create a picture of the entity in my head, but instead of reassuring me, being able to finally put a face to a name, it unsettles me in a way I can’t quite put my finger on.
The hunger in his gaze sinks its fangs into me, and it chills me to my core. All I know is that I don’t want to be here anymore, can’t handle another second of the unknown. Before I even register the decision, I reach for Hawthorne.
Ivan’s eyes snap to where my hand clasps around his wrist like he’s my lifeline. And right now, he is. But it’s not just that, Thorne is the one thing I can count on, my source of certainty, my safe place.
“Sol.” His voice comes from far away, but I latch onto it, using the sound to ground me as he calls to me again and again.
He’s the one thing that keeps me going day after day. He’s my only friend, the closest one I’ve ever had.If I’m honest, he’s so much more than that. And it dawns on me then, just after watching my own death like a horror movie in the dark of the theater, that I realize that I love him. That I would do anything with him, that I don’t want to do anything without him.
Ivansees it too, and he tastes it greedily. He doesn’t like the flavor.
“Sol, wake up.”
Waking is jarring, like a rubber band snapping against skin. The dream is familiar, one I’ve had dozens of times. That nighthaunts me as much as my attachment does. What’s different is the deep pit of dread that opens within me.
