Wow... what do I even say when I post the final chapter of the novel I've been working on for six years? Do I look back on all of my experiences writing it and the most important events that inspired parts of the story? I'd like to, but for tonight I need to give this to you and move on to the homework I neglected during this fit of passion. I had no idea I was going to overcome my writer's block today. I just suddenly had the urge to finish things once and for all.
Thank you to everyone reading this.
HE'S (@) THERE
Chapter 52 – She Called to Me and Said Free Me
“I am on the verge of losing you.
I know how this scene plays.
I've seen it before.
There's a thing called destiny.”
There was deceptively warm sunshine on the day we met up at the park. I got out of the car, and Mom waved me off before I went looking for Mariam and Jeffrey, who had promised to be somewhere obvious, but I couldn't find them right away. The other person I had invited was going to be a little late. I had to figure my friend and her dearest aspiring engineer had gone down the path and found solace somewhere quieter as I passed the front structures, barely hearing the children shouting on their way through the sprinklers, or their parents picnicking in the grass.
The heat was like a halo over my head, but a breeze was playing at my sleeves and brushing my hair away from my neck. I had been feeling something like this all week, and it hadn't gotten old. I'd been riding my bike all over the place, going down hills and pretending to fly, but gravity had its same awful strength when I wasn't riding: when I was home, when I was with the people who knew something about me, when I was in therapy... I couldn't even say I was happy, but I was hoping to steal some infectious energy. They had an abundance of it, Mariam and Jeffrey, more than I could handle sometimes.
Down the hill, there were more and more trees, and the voices were all fading. Mariam had been waiting behind a wide, drooping bush just to surprise me, to deliver me my first genuine smile that day, even if my lips never parted.
“Hey, you look cute today, Lily!”
“Thank you. So do you.” I nodded at Jeffrey, who did the same while patting his jean pocket a little confusedly.
“You guys be cute together while I find my phone,” he said before scavenging the area. Mariam was wearing a bright yellow tank-top with little beads on the straps, but I noticed part of it had gotten sprinkled. I asked what happened, and she just flapped her hand and took me to a blanket she'd laid out a ways from the path where a notebook, some candy wrappers, and two neon green water guns were sitting.
“Oh, we got here a little early and Jeffrey had his own ideas about it.” She picked up one of the guns and I instinctively ducked like she was going to use it on me. “This is actually really fair of him, because I know he has a super-soaker.” I lowered to the blanket and showed her my smuggest face.
“Oh, do you now? Did he show it to you?” I could hear it perfectly in my head, her saying something like “nothing you haven't seen before,” but she just slapped me in the arm and contented herself with looking around, wondering where that boy had gone. Around us were several low-hanging trees that looked like thick little red-leaved huts creating deep, hard shadows. It was hard not to preoccupy myself with staring ahead into those shadows, but I played with the straps on my sandals and didn't let myself question that this moment was good, or question that there would be nothing in the immediate or distant future that should make me paranoid. I had to remember and believe all the things I had heard from the outside world, no matter how many dreams I had that caused such an undercurrent.
* * *
“Lily, please don't do this. Just tell them the truth.”
“I can't. I'll be involved.”
“They already know you're involved. Everyone knows you're involved. If you tell the truth, Erik will-... He can't get away with this,” she couldn't tell me in more than a whisper. We held hands but I kept my gaze on the shadows of the tree branches over the dashboard.
“You told me he's not getting away,” I answered.
“Not with some of what he's done, Lily, but this is up to you-”
“If I press charges, I'll have to face him; I'll have a hand in it--”
“He kidnapped you!”
“But you told me he's already been taken...”
* * *
Three weeks had passed since I had been spirited away by Erik and returned by the girl sitting peacefully next to me, and she was the only one helping me try to understand something better, even if she often found herself just as lost.
Paulina wasn't here or anywhere nearby today, or tomorrow. She had done the Walk in the school's green robes and ventured off to a campus visit at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts. You could say we were still friends, but she didn't make a lot of sense to me anymore. She had never heard that Erik had kidnapped me, and never heard he'd broken into my house – she assumed I'd gotten on with things and that he had actually vanished, and I think once seeing me so unsure if I wanted her help had deterred her from ever going into detail about the bad times she'd had with him. She was so busy these days that if I even saw her, it was hard to bring up what she didn't know. There was some disconnect. The one time she'd really seen the unspoken desperation in me for answers, she only reassured me that there was less of a connection between her and Erik than it seemed, and that she'd never obliged so freely to be the Giry for him that she was for me. She said she was pressured, so I had to believe her, but I still suspected she must have known of him outside of his front and had it out to discover him for more than my sake.
Mariam would explain her repeated drives by the theater, her texts to her all the time about clues she thought she had, clues I thought she was only sharing with me. She would use Erik's texts to put together a pattern of when he may be there. She would discover Erik was parking his different cars behind the building. It was her dedication that gave Mariam (and by extension, me) a lifeline after the lights went out and I was gone. It was Paulina that discovered the significance of a man named Max Worden, even if he would prove to be difficult with her, and it was Paulina who had the sight of someone with a slender, looming build, helping him load his truck up front.
Mr. Worden had since been on my mind quite often.
Jeffrey returned from out of nowhere, at least to me, rolling down and reprimanding Mariam in a playful way for flipping through his notebook. “I can't help it – it's such beautiful art, you know? I say you had a love affair with this girl!”
“Of course, I did; that's a picture of you!”
I only slightly heard them continue with this banter.
Paulina had been writing to Mr. Worden through the theater's general email without knowing it, asking such questions as whether or not she could apply for a position there. She'd suspected quite a long time ago that Erik was in special relation to someone working there, which I had, too, but back when I cared to know the details of her research, she had nothing she could share. As I got spun up in a web, the research continued and it was Mariam instead who would hear about Paulina being brushed off and the theater choosing to answer only certain inquiries with disinterest.
She broke from this tack and had Mariam ask Mrs. Vardega the full name of the theater's owner. We knew a Mr. W-something hung around from time to time during our rehearsals, but he never acted like more than a disinterested coordinator of our events. I always thought Mrs. Vardega found him boring or standoffish, just there to keep us from breaking something, because I certainly did. Mariam was surprised that he was the owner, that this was Max Worden, but they didn't make the discoveries that they wanted to after finding his number and address. Just like Erik, he had no interest in others and no desire for strangers to know even the simplest of details; he was a fortress. They didn't know what to do with him.
“I think I should draw Lily next. She's already been posing behind you this entire time,” Jeffrey pointed out. Mariam had a very patient smile when she noticed too how still I had been.
“Yeah, why not? Give it to Westin when he gets here,” she said. I smiled again and averted my eyes to my lap, still a little nervous about seeing him. Until recent, I had thought he didn't want to be around me anymore. Jeffrey peeled over to a fresh sheet.
“Lily, turn to your other side so I can get your clip,” he told me, so I listened. “This will be a speed sketch. You're lucky I'm not charging 'cause the prices get steep on these things.”
“Yes. Jeffrey's the one who painted the mantel-piece Colberts, didn't you know?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. They chuckled to themselves before Jeffrey got busy drawing, and Mariam got busy texting. I tried not to move, but I peered down on her. She proved ever since the beginning of our friendship to be the braver one, and it was hard not to focus on our differences lately.
* * *
She knew without a doubt who to call when things got very dangerous – when that landslide of threatening texts crashed her phone. It was during Shorts 7 that Mariam suspected Erik was watching me and found the car behind the building. Calmly and curiously, she told Mr. Worden during intermission that she'd seen it while “getting some air” and found it suspicious. His answer was that it was his own. Jeffrey agreed to stick around until quite late with her after I told her I was heading straight home, but, of course, she saw Erik and I walk into the woods, and she saw Mr. Worden drive away in the black truck parked up front.
“I knew he wouldn't have been covering for him if he wasn't someone close. And when I looked him in the eye, I just got that feeling: the same one as when Erik first talked to me.”
I am a student at the high school, and I'm worried about my friend. You know someone who parks behind the theater and wears a mask. He's tall and he has long, black hair. He tells my friend his name is Erik and takes advantage of her. I'm being threatened by him and we both need help.
Paulina agreed to give her his number, but all Mariam got was an answering machine, after three consecutive calls. She had to shorten what she'd rehearsed while her hands trembled. She never heard back from him. Not a single acknowledgment. She thought what had brought Erik to her house as she pulled into the garage was her prying into the black book that I'd left under the porch step. I was still coping with the fact that I was being kept in the dark by them, that Mariam was reading Erik's messages in my phone while I was distracted from it, trying to break into our realm for some idea of how he had control over me after all this time... I'd kept wondering what mistake I'd made that gave away we were talking again, but it was Mariam's the entire time. She knew I would pay for it when Erik had spite to throw at the both of them for prying, but Mr. Worden continued to act like he hadn't received the message. Paulina told Mariam she didn't trust him anymore; she thought the both of them were hiding something together, that the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
“Forget it. We have to stop her ourselves.”
The night he did everything short of calling me a horrible traitor was summed up in a crash of piano keys for me until I knew the drive behind Mr. Worden's abrupt entrance – he knew; he had gotten the message. Perhaps he hadn't seen me, but Erik must have sensed a new force that would soon swell and swipe the rug out from under us.
Eliminating Mariam. There was no actual way to do it, but after I ran away he could not physically stop himself from going to her, to do what he did best and pretend there was a way. Hatred like absolute fire: fire in his heart and in his hands. I don't want to relay Mariam's description – that night he was a fool of demonic proportions, not my Erik.
* * *
“I hate loving you like this,
Being chained to you like this.
Don't you hate loving me?
Knowing I'm inevitable?”
* * *
When Westin arrived, I thought he should know how grateful I was that he would choose to see us, but I didn't want to seem too excited to see him at the same time, lest he found himself overwhelmed, maybe teased by me somehow... I could say thank you and ask about his day thus far while Mariam seemed to be getting stir-crazy behind me, but it seemed like a better idea after that to stop making eye contact and show him Jeffrey's sketch of me, like my conscience was that simple. It was all anyone else was doing.
“It's very nice,” he said, but his conscience was as active as ever, and the walk through the woods down the hill would've been pretty quiet if not for the other two, giving us bizarre bird calls to laugh at and questions to answer. Jeffrey seemed young around Westin, too. Mariam admitted he could act quite boy-ish, but she felt free around him and couldn't stop herself from lying in bed, grinning like an idiot, every night. He was lured off the path by an abundance of tree roots which he jumped over like an obstacle course, but Westin went after him and they spent a while keeping near us by hopping from stone to stone until they were just beside a stream that we watched over from a little bridge. Mariam had found berries and was trying to toss them right onto Jeffrey's head when he wasn't looking and was having a little word with Westin. I covered my mouth and snorted when she succeeded. Maybe none of us was so different from the other.
We went to get something to eat and Westin talked about moving to start school, but not so far away, and that gave me hope that I interpreted as a chance to redeem myself somehow. He smiled at me and treated us all with pleasure in our curiosity and compliments, but, of course, ran out of words when he was driving me home. I didn't have the power that Mariam and Jeffrey did to change this awkward situation any longer.
It was the golden hour just before the sunset when he parked at the curb and kept the engine running, just as he had done once for a while in the theater's lot as the guests were still leaving and he wondered why my bag was still backstage, without me. He looked around like he knew he should get on with things, move on, just as he had then when I never answered his text. I glanced around, making sure Mom wasn't in the kitchen window, but when I dared to look at him, he had a slow smile in store, no words quite ready, but he had to think of something, no matter how generic: “It was nice to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I answered, reaching for the handle of the door, but more for it only to seem I was ready to go.
“Well, I hope I'm not too busy this summer. I wouldn't want to miss seeing you again before I move.”
No matter that he had a house up the hill where he would still return on holidays... I thought to myself that it was too soon for him to do this, but I kept that to myself. “That'd be nice.” He obviously caught me gripping the door, finding my body language impatient. Maybe I looked like I couldn't breathe. I softened my grip and finally said it: “I thought maybe you didn't want to anymore.”
A moment passed in which he decided to turn off the engine and quietly sigh. “No... I just felt a little— stupid, I guess.” I tried to shake my head. “I-I feel a little confused around you, and so I just avoided that until things were a little less crazy.”
“I understand. It's okay. You had a good time, though, right? ...At your party?”
“I did. But...” He thought for a second before turning to face me more and sort of fidgeting. “I should be honest with you: I was kind of mad,” he told me. I didn't move, I only listened. “It wouldn't have killed me to know you had a boyfriend, but... then I thought there is something else about it that you just don't want to share and I don't have a right to demand it of you. Actually, I thought you were hoping I'd back away. You don't have to be friends with me if you don't want to.”
“I do,” I said immediately. I could see something of the boy I knew, the one before word got around that I'd ran off obliviously, fighting to know me as the girl dancing in the wings before my cue, but it hurt to have such fantasies of us. Some day in the future? Doing it all again? What likelihood was there of that? “I like being around you. A lot. I just have to warn you that I haven't figured myself out yet.”
“And everyone else has?” He tried to smile, but I knew, and I knew that he knew, that my explanation was inadequate.
“I'm not seeing him anymore,” I said.
“Well, I hope that's a good thing...” I should've just shut up, I realized. I reached for the door again and told him to take care, realizing as soon as I heard his side open just when mine did that he would be dashing around the car. A quick hug: that's all we would appear to have time for.
“See you later, Lily.”
I smiled as he drove off, but took my time. The newborn flowers I'd added by the deck were getting their last rays of sunlight. On a hot day such as this, I watered all the thirstier plants twice a day, once in the late morning, and once at this golden hour, so I had an excuse to spend some time outside. I didn't like to go in there so much these days, anyway. I was tired of feeling like an exploded bottle of all teenage typicality. Exhausted from repeatedly adding to a story composed of reality and fiction about someone I had to follow on the third night of my performances. Sick of hearing my Mom behind the door whimpering that she doesn't feel she protects me, but blasting Michael Crawford the next day, acting like our agreement for me to see a counselor was totally fine. “Let her speak when she's ready” was a mantra I had to appreciate my parents had adopted, but, still, our times here were as double-edged as any with Erik.
* * *
There was a canon of him that I became so attached to, I never interpreted the other sides that came to face us as “real”. The side that questioned my devotion to him, that spoke hurtful things under is breath... he'd had a bad day. The side that hurt those I didn't know... he was pushed to his limits. His angry, possessive side... that was a dream. The only real Erik that I saw in my mind in the middle of the night was the one whose pulse climbed when we touched, who curled up around me in bed and tried to stay there. He had nothing to say but never interrupted me when I held him from behind. He was tired of making up stories just as I did, and tired of being pushed off the edge on these bad days and in these dreams. He didn't want them to be his; he still wanted to gut out life as he knew it, but vices such as these had unreachable roots.
Sometimes I was so mad this version wasn't always there. I was angry he couldn't be mine anymore. I was sick of lying in bed without that Erik, of never being kissed by that Erik, of never hearing from him anymore. His head had been washed over inside this other person who I didn't know, couldn't trust, couldn't negotiate with... He was the Angel I remembered, held captive somewhere where he couldn't see once the air of the real world started to sting. Nothing so brilliant could survive here, I guess.
Mariam always went quiet when I started talking about this, but she would say so softly when I noticed and became offended by her silence that she still wanted to hear it. Everyone was studying me, designing this atmosphere of safety that they believed would make me “well” again, but I only pretended that my conscience was clearing. When Mom played those old tapes when I came home from the last day of school, smiling and humming, putting away the dishes.... Close your eyes, for your eyes will only tell the truth... I was a mirror to her while climbing the stairs, but I went straight to my room. I could hear it through the floor and covered my ears.
* * *
I turned around with the hose in my hands, wondering if it meant anything that Westin lived just on the hills, maybe ten minutes away, or was he miles and miles from my heart for just a second? I wanted to try to follow him into this next chapter in my life, fast approaching, if he brought up that Oregon State had a good theatre department after all, but... I was picturing My Erik trying to save himself, sending me a different letter than the one that had reached me, one that told me exactly who he was, what had happened to him, how he knew he was wrong, how he was under his father's wing now... Before I'd have to make those choices about growing up, summer would be dying, a chill would return, and he'd be waiting somewhere where we'd have privacy. We'd go to the dock and he'd be tired like the night I told him I couldn't love him anymore, but this time I'd say I did, and I'd feel his ecstasy. I shook myself out of it and stood in front of the door, not surprised to find that it was only in my mind that the scent of Mr. Worden lingered.
I came through the threshold but nobody was there. I figured Dad was in the computer room, and Mom was sitting on the back porch bench doing Sudoku. I didn't want to draw attention to myself by looking for them, so I just went up the stairs.
I have come to my room by the day's end just the same way for the past few weeks, and I can't foresee it changing soon. I close the door against my back, wanting to slide down, but I come to the bed and curl into myself. I turn the pillow the other way, rest my head, and spread my arm across it. I hear all of these words spoken, words that we could only write before because to say them was unbearably painful. Hearing them and imagining how they sound hurts too, but it's that purposeful pain that Erik and I could always agree was wonderful to know was real.
“I'll lose you soon,
But when you can no longer stand anymore,
No longer breathe anymore,
I'm the only one who will be there,
The way that you really need it.”
I ask myself where my Erik is, and why I feel like he's operating separately from the one who has claimed him.
I've dreamed of him surely every night. I found that he was in trouble and I had no power to help him. He was chained to the ground in some dark purgatory, with an attitude of indifference to his destruction, but I couldn't free him by myself. There was no one else there but he and I because that was the way we created our world... Except, sometimes, Mr. Worden was there, too.
* * *
When he stood at the door a few nights ago, the porch light held him under a glow. The lines in his face were not so engraved and his shadow not so stretching, as if a spell had come off of him. It was unclear who he wanted to speak to in that first moment, and my parents wouldn't stop hovering beside me, but I got the impression he realized the meaning of my silence around them and was trying to give me the right opportunity to speak. His eyes darted from place to place, and he faced us only somewhat, as if his desire to even be there was fleeting, but while explaining who he was he kept making eye contact with me. I bravely asked for a moment with him alone, and he bowed his head a ways, asking silently for their compliance. My mom and dad left the doorway, but their eyes hung on me from the living room, starved for truth, and Mom wouldn't even sit down.
I closed the front door behind me but couldn't quite look up to his face, so my focus settled on the worn front of his leather coat, then down to the floor, where his boots consumed the entry mat beside my bare feet.
It seemed like it would be an almost impossible confrontation after all the things that hadn't been said or done between us at the most crucial of times. He must have seen I was still afraid of him deep inside, even if I urged my gaze to at least meet his eyes once. Honestly, I couldn't think of any way to greet him, so I never said a word, and unfortunately Mr. Worden was afflicted with the same introversion. But then I began to suspect, and I hope now that it was not in my imagination, that we could still communicate with each other. I had already been thinking about everything he must have known had happened by now, even if Mariam was the only one who disclosed a story; a story full of holes, perhaps, but something that broke through to him. He knew Erik had taken me; without him there would have been no chase, no arrest, no checkmate. It would seem I should thank him, but those words couldn't come out either.
And yet, despite that he knew enough to feel something, as all I could hope for him to do at this point, I could not detect that he did. I thought he might have come to apologize for his son, but there was something like stone behind his eyes when I finally looked up, as if even I wasn't granted a short sight into his soul. It disappointed me, because now that I knew what a position of power he had over my fallen idol's fate, I... I somehow wanted a connection with him, but I knew Erik attributed enough of his misery to this person. I knew to be loyal to him even while he terrified me meant this man couldn't be trusted.
Mr. Worden had few things to say to me, but they were dense with authority, with conviction, with seasoned resilience to anything I could have possibly argued, like he'd spoken the words to me before, like they were written somewhere, like a prophecy that only he could pull from the page: “I'll make sure that he doesn't see you anymore.”
It wasn't the first thing he said: I just remember it because it had a seemingly endless reverberation throughout the rest of our time, the rest of the night, the rest of the week, and I feel it lying in bed, every time I long for remnants of the past.
“I need to know if you want to press charges,” he first said.
My gaze went back to the floor. “No.” To my discomfort, to maybe both our discomfort, he leaned into me.
“I need to know if you've been hurt,” was his way of putting it. I may have known what he meant, but “hurt” was such a confusing word by now. There were so may ways to be hurt, and a whole spectrum of ways to perceive it, I'd learned. I didn't want to share any of it, I didn't want someone else to judge for me what was good pain or bad pain anymore, and, most of all, I didn't trust that justice as Mr. Worden was thinking of it had a practical meaning for anything inside the shadow realm; Erik and I's realm. I told him “no”.
He wanted to know if I was eighteen yet. “No” continued to be my answer. He went silent and brushed long fingers through his receding hair, then dropped his heavy hands to his sides, glancing to things around us. I sensed he never wanted to say more than he had to when he decided to deliver those reverberating words.
“I'll make sure that he doesn't see you anymore, or write to you, because this is... this is the only other way I can think to protect him, from himself, and protect you.”
“Has he been arrested?”
I looked up with more of an instinct than bravery, only to catch a twitch in his expression; a line that may have been part of his smile, but smiles may not always mean happiness for Mr. Worden, I wonder now. He confirmed his arrest and dug his hands into his pockets. “I've already been asked to deliver you letters. I took them and read them, because I-I don't give my son any privacy anymore. But you need to tell me if he reaches you in any other way.”
I sunk into the door, I remember, because up until then I had ever been told so concretely that something was being taken away from me. Before then, I wasn't allowing myself to take seriously these silent wishes that a note would show up under the mat when I came to water the flowers, as innocently as that package on Christmas eve had appeared with my name written in red ink. I remembered standing just in that place, watching a world of snow play a type of music in my heart. I remembered being at the height of wonder, and suddenly I was mad at My Erik again for taking it away from me. It was Erik who revoked these things; Erik, who changed; Erik, who made it impossible to be loved.
All I thought I could share as I dared to look up again was that I had heard it all, accepted it, wasn't going to put up a fight or demand these letters, but then I saw that same sense of loss in Mr. Worden. This was no reflection of me that I saw, but someone of their own composition, someone I'd never know, suffering the loss of something important to them, or maybe to him the loss was happening all the time, and had been for years.
He had colossal stature and eyes like black stones, but I had a glimpse inside the fortress. He cleared his throat and managed one word, “I'm,” and I understood it. It was too hard to speak to him, so I just stepped forward, turned my cheek to the side, and pressed against him very lightly, hands closed and between us. He barely reacted. I felt his hand on my shoulder, but as I broke away, utterly consumed by awkwardness, I saw him eying the window, where I caught the curtain shuffling back in place.
I don't think he was expecting me to care. I think he was coming to my door to address a victim hoping for retribution, and nothing more. Maybe I startled him. He said he hoped I was okay and felt responsible for my safety from hereon. My confirmation and acceptance ended his mission and sent him back to his truck sitting in the driveway, and very soon after, he was gone.
I couldn't sleep and couldn't dream that night, but I was up at two in the morning taking the dress drenched in horrible memory from the back of the closet. I wanted to trigger my recollection of what happened, to let the stench of rotten wood bring back those surges of dread. Everybody had proven to me that I shouldn't miss him, but I had to prove it to myself.
* * *
I had another dream that I went to a prison and found Erik in the darkest corner of the building, and for some reason he claimed he couldn't see anything. He couldn't see beyond the bars or take notice that I had slipped through them like I had evaporated. I was at my knees, covering his hands over his lap with mine, and he was blind, but even so, he recognized it was me and started to cry.
* * *
I curse my observation, I curse my attachment, I curse his cleverness. I am lying to everyone when I show up at the park with my casual smile. I wonder if I would be more at peace if not for these things: if I could be as comforted as I should be by the people who have come to my door and offered a piece of themselves so I can try to be more whole.
The dress I should have thrown away had a note sewn inside, a kind that so immediately indicated Erik's trembling as it was written.
“Even when you are far away,
I feel your thoughts and your actions
And you feel mine.”
I see the curves of ink faltering like the keys of that piano, and I am taken in.
This has to be thrown away, I know. It all has to be thrown away to give all those other times their power.
“The cycle of things will align us again,
There's a thing called destiny
Why does it take so many rituals to expel him? I have to let him go, or I will never be myself again, never wake up all of the way, never love something true over something imaginary.
After everyone has acted like things are getting back to normal, after Mariam and I have ritualistically teased each other, after Westin has left a reassuring text that he likes having me around, it gets dark inside and out. In the dark, I feel like I'm falling through the lift again, surrounded in his sorrows, his trembling, his torment, and we all disappear. No one can hear us, but we hear nothing but each other, and I argue with fate. Erik and I are still two mirrors facing, even though we have shattered each other.
I need someone to talk to; I need a distraction, but there's a shadow in the room that, even with its unsettling shape, I never want the light to eradicate. It looms over my shoulder while I lie in bed with just enough space for two of us.
“I am on the verge of losing you.
I know how this scene plays.
I've seen it before.
There's a thing called destiny.
It's deja vu, the new way you look at me.
I'm shivering like there's nothing inside me anymore;
I'm filled with wind;
I'm still a storm, but no one will be catching me.
I'll lose you soon,
So the way you look at me,
It makes me miss you.”
Tomorrow I'll ride my bike again just as soon as I can wake.
“I know I don't have to miss you, though.
You are the wind.
I can't stand without you.
I don't breathe without you.
I only live because you do.
I hate loving you like this,
Being chained to you like this.
Don't you hate loving me?
Knowing I'm inevitable?
Only living because I do?
Feeling the weight of me inside, and nothing else?”
I'll go down the tallest hills until I'm weightless. I'll feel the wind whipping my hair, and I'll pretend I'm free.
“I know you are empty, too.
We animate each other.
When you can no longer stand anymore,
No longer breathe anymore,
I'm the only one who will be there,
The way that you really need it.
We are not an accident.
Winds have a pattern,
And even when you are far away,
I feel your thoughts and your actions
And you feel mine.
The cycle of things will align us again,
There's a thing called destiny.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow, I'll pretend I'm free.
“Destiny has chained you to me forever.”
As many times as it takes before I am.
The inspiration for this chapter, and the woman whose music has carried me wonderfully through the entire story.
Thank you, Shara.
Thank you to everyone reading this.
HE'S (@) THERE
Chapter 52 – She Called to Me and Said Free Me
“I am on the verge of losing you.
I know how this scene plays.
I've seen it before.
There's a thing called destiny.”
There was deceptively warm sunshine on the day we met up at the park. I got out of the car, and Mom waved me off before I went looking for Mariam and Jeffrey, who had promised to be somewhere obvious, but I couldn't find them right away. The other person I had invited was going to be a little late. I had to figure my friend and her dearest aspiring engineer had gone down the path and found solace somewhere quieter as I passed the front structures, barely hearing the children shouting on their way through the sprinklers, or their parents picnicking in the grass.
The heat was like a halo over my head, but a breeze was playing at my sleeves and brushing my hair away from my neck. I had been feeling something like this all week, and it hadn't gotten old. I'd been riding my bike all over the place, going down hills and pretending to fly, but gravity had its same awful strength when I wasn't riding: when I was home, when I was with the people who knew something about me, when I was in therapy... I couldn't even say I was happy, but I was hoping to steal some infectious energy. They had an abundance of it, Mariam and Jeffrey, more than I could handle sometimes.
Down the hill, there were more and more trees, and the voices were all fading. Mariam had been waiting behind a wide, drooping bush just to surprise me, to deliver me my first genuine smile that day, even if my lips never parted.
“Hey, you look cute today, Lily!”
“Thank you. So do you.” I nodded at Jeffrey, who did the same while patting his jean pocket a little confusedly.
“You guys be cute together while I find my phone,” he said before scavenging the area. Mariam was wearing a bright yellow tank-top with little beads on the straps, but I noticed part of it had gotten sprinkled. I asked what happened, and she just flapped her hand and took me to a blanket she'd laid out a ways from the path where a notebook, some candy wrappers, and two neon green water guns were sitting.
“Oh, we got here a little early and Jeffrey had his own ideas about it.” She picked up one of the guns and I instinctively ducked like she was going to use it on me. “This is actually really fair of him, because I know he has a super-soaker.” I lowered to the blanket and showed her my smuggest face.
“Oh, do you now? Did he show it to you?” I could hear it perfectly in my head, her saying something like “nothing you haven't seen before,” but she just slapped me in the arm and contented herself with looking around, wondering where that boy had gone. Around us were several low-hanging trees that looked like thick little red-leaved huts creating deep, hard shadows. It was hard not to preoccupy myself with staring ahead into those shadows, but I played with the straps on my sandals and didn't let myself question that this moment was good, or question that there would be nothing in the immediate or distant future that should make me paranoid. I had to remember and believe all the things I had heard from the outside world, no matter how many dreams I had that caused such an undercurrent.
* * *
“Lily, please don't do this. Just tell them the truth.”
“I can't. I'll be involved.”
“They already know you're involved. Everyone knows you're involved. If you tell the truth, Erik will-... He can't get away with this,” she couldn't tell me in more than a whisper. We held hands but I kept my gaze on the shadows of the tree branches over the dashboard.
“You told me he's not getting away,” I answered.
“Not with some of what he's done, Lily, but this is up to you-”
“If I press charges, I'll have to face him; I'll have a hand in it--”
“He kidnapped you!”
“But you told me he's already been taken...”
* * *
Three weeks had passed since I had been spirited away by Erik and returned by the girl sitting peacefully next to me, and she was the only one helping me try to understand something better, even if she often found herself just as lost.
Paulina wasn't here or anywhere nearby today, or tomorrow. She had done the Walk in the school's green robes and ventured off to a campus visit at the Pacific Northwest College of Arts. You could say we were still friends, but she didn't make a lot of sense to me anymore. She had never heard that Erik had kidnapped me, and never heard he'd broken into my house – she assumed I'd gotten on with things and that he had actually vanished, and I think once seeing me so unsure if I wanted her help had deterred her from ever going into detail about the bad times she'd had with him. She was so busy these days that if I even saw her, it was hard to bring up what she didn't know. There was some disconnect. The one time she'd really seen the unspoken desperation in me for answers, she only reassured me that there was less of a connection between her and Erik than it seemed, and that she'd never obliged so freely to be the Giry for him that she was for me. She said she was pressured, so I had to believe her, but I still suspected she must have known of him outside of his front and had it out to discover him for more than my sake.
Mariam would explain her repeated drives by the theater, her texts to her all the time about clues she thought she had, clues I thought she was only sharing with me. She would use Erik's texts to put together a pattern of when he may be there. She would discover Erik was parking his different cars behind the building. It was her dedication that gave Mariam (and by extension, me) a lifeline after the lights went out and I was gone. It was Paulina that discovered the significance of a man named Max Worden, even if he would prove to be difficult with her, and it was Paulina who had the sight of someone with a slender, looming build, helping him load his truck up front.
Mr. Worden had since been on my mind quite often.
Jeffrey returned from out of nowhere, at least to me, rolling down and reprimanding Mariam in a playful way for flipping through his notebook. “I can't help it – it's such beautiful art, you know? I say you had a love affair with this girl!”
“Of course, I did; that's a picture of you!”
I only slightly heard them continue with this banter.
Paulina had been writing to Mr. Worden through the theater's general email without knowing it, asking such questions as whether or not she could apply for a position there. She'd suspected quite a long time ago that Erik was in special relation to someone working there, which I had, too, but back when I cared to know the details of her research, she had nothing she could share. As I got spun up in a web, the research continued and it was Mariam instead who would hear about Paulina being brushed off and the theater choosing to answer only certain inquiries with disinterest.
She broke from this tack and had Mariam ask Mrs. Vardega the full name of the theater's owner. We knew a Mr. W-something hung around from time to time during our rehearsals, but he never acted like more than a disinterested coordinator of our events. I always thought Mrs. Vardega found him boring or standoffish, just there to keep us from breaking something, because I certainly did. Mariam was surprised that he was the owner, that this was Max Worden, but they didn't make the discoveries that they wanted to after finding his number and address. Just like Erik, he had no interest in others and no desire for strangers to know even the simplest of details; he was a fortress. They didn't know what to do with him.
“I think I should draw Lily next. She's already been posing behind you this entire time,” Jeffrey pointed out. Mariam had a very patient smile when she noticed too how still I had been.
“Yeah, why not? Give it to Westin when he gets here,” she said. I smiled again and averted my eyes to my lap, still a little nervous about seeing him. Until recent, I had thought he didn't want to be around me anymore. Jeffrey peeled over to a fresh sheet.
“Lily, turn to your other side so I can get your clip,” he told me, so I listened. “This will be a speed sketch. You're lucky I'm not charging 'cause the prices get steep on these things.”
“Yes. Jeffrey's the one who painted the mantel-piece Colberts, didn't you know?”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said. They chuckled to themselves before Jeffrey got busy drawing, and Mariam got busy texting. I tried not to move, but I peered down on her. She proved ever since the beginning of our friendship to be the braver one, and it was hard not to focus on our differences lately.
* * *
She knew without a doubt who to call when things got very dangerous – when that landslide of threatening texts crashed her phone. It was during Shorts 7 that Mariam suspected Erik was watching me and found the car behind the building. Calmly and curiously, she told Mr. Worden during intermission that she'd seen it while “getting some air” and found it suspicious. His answer was that it was his own. Jeffrey agreed to stick around until quite late with her after I told her I was heading straight home, but, of course, she saw Erik and I walk into the woods, and she saw Mr. Worden drive away in the black truck parked up front.
“I knew he wouldn't have been covering for him if he wasn't someone close. And when I looked him in the eye, I just got that feeling: the same one as when Erik first talked to me.”
I am a student at the high school, and I'm worried about my friend. You know someone who parks behind the theater and wears a mask. He's tall and he has long, black hair. He tells my friend his name is Erik and takes advantage of her. I'm being threatened by him and we both need help.
Paulina agreed to give her his number, but all Mariam got was an answering machine, after three consecutive calls. She had to shorten what she'd rehearsed while her hands trembled. She never heard back from him. Not a single acknowledgment. She thought what had brought Erik to her house as she pulled into the garage was her prying into the black book that I'd left under the porch step. I was still coping with the fact that I was being kept in the dark by them, that Mariam was reading Erik's messages in my phone while I was distracted from it, trying to break into our realm for some idea of how he had control over me after all this time... I'd kept wondering what mistake I'd made that gave away we were talking again, but it was Mariam's the entire time. She knew I would pay for it when Erik had spite to throw at the both of them for prying, but Mr. Worden continued to act like he hadn't received the message. Paulina told Mariam she didn't trust him anymore; she thought the both of them were hiding something together, that the apple didn't fall far from the tree.
“Forget it. We have to stop her ourselves.”
The night he did everything short of calling me a horrible traitor was summed up in a crash of piano keys for me until I knew the drive behind Mr. Worden's abrupt entrance – he knew; he had gotten the message. Perhaps he hadn't seen me, but Erik must have sensed a new force that would soon swell and swipe the rug out from under us.
Eliminating Mariam. There was no actual way to do it, but after I ran away he could not physically stop himself from going to her, to do what he did best and pretend there was a way. Hatred like absolute fire: fire in his heart and in his hands. I don't want to relay Mariam's description – that night he was a fool of demonic proportions, not my Erik.
* * *
“I hate loving you like this,
Being chained to you like this.
Don't you hate loving me?
Knowing I'm inevitable?”
* * *
When Westin arrived, I thought he should know how grateful I was that he would choose to see us, but I didn't want to seem too excited to see him at the same time, lest he found himself overwhelmed, maybe teased by me somehow... I could say thank you and ask about his day thus far while Mariam seemed to be getting stir-crazy behind me, but it seemed like a better idea after that to stop making eye contact and show him Jeffrey's sketch of me, like my conscience was that simple. It was all anyone else was doing.
“It's very nice,” he said, but his conscience was as active as ever, and the walk through the woods down the hill would've been pretty quiet if not for the other two, giving us bizarre bird calls to laugh at and questions to answer. Jeffrey seemed young around Westin, too. Mariam admitted he could act quite boy-ish, but she felt free around him and couldn't stop herself from lying in bed, grinning like an idiot, every night. He was lured off the path by an abundance of tree roots which he jumped over like an obstacle course, but Westin went after him and they spent a while keeping near us by hopping from stone to stone until they were just beside a stream that we watched over from a little bridge. Mariam had found berries and was trying to toss them right onto Jeffrey's head when he wasn't looking and was having a little word with Westin. I covered my mouth and snorted when she succeeded. Maybe none of us was so different from the other.
We went to get something to eat and Westin talked about moving to start school, but not so far away, and that gave me hope that I interpreted as a chance to redeem myself somehow. He smiled at me and treated us all with pleasure in our curiosity and compliments, but, of course, ran out of words when he was driving me home. I didn't have the power that Mariam and Jeffrey did to change this awkward situation any longer.
It was the golden hour just before the sunset when he parked at the curb and kept the engine running, just as he had done once for a while in the theater's lot as the guests were still leaving and he wondered why my bag was still backstage, without me. He looked around like he knew he should get on with things, move on, just as he had then when I never answered his text. I glanced around, making sure Mom wasn't in the kitchen window, but when I dared to look at him, he had a slow smile in store, no words quite ready, but he had to think of something, no matter how generic: “It was nice to see you again.”
“Yeah,” I answered, reaching for the handle of the door, but more for it only to seem I was ready to go.
“Well, I hope I'm not too busy this summer. I wouldn't want to miss seeing you again before I move.”
No matter that he had a house up the hill where he would still return on holidays... I thought to myself that it was too soon for him to do this, but I kept that to myself. “That'd be nice.” He obviously caught me gripping the door, finding my body language impatient. Maybe I looked like I couldn't breathe. I softened my grip and finally said it: “I thought maybe you didn't want to anymore.”
A moment passed in which he decided to turn off the engine and quietly sigh. “No... I just felt a little— stupid, I guess.” I tried to shake my head. “I-I feel a little confused around you, and so I just avoided that until things were a little less crazy.”
“I understand. It's okay. You had a good time, though, right? ...At your party?”
“I did. But...” He thought for a second before turning to face me more and sort of fidgeting. “I should be honest with you: I was kind of mad,” he told me. I didn't move, I only listened. “It wouldn't have killed me to know you had a boyfriend, but... then I thought there is something else about it that you just don't want to share and I don't have a right to demand it of you. Actually, I thought you were hoping I'd back away. You don't have to be friends with me if you don't want to.”
“I do,” I said immediately. I could see something of the boy I knew, the one before word got around that I'd ran off obliviously, fighting to know me as the girl dancing in the wings before my cue, but it hurt to have such fantasies of us. Some day in the future? Doing it all again? What likelihood was there of that? “I like being around you. A lot. I just have to warn you that I haven't figured myself out yet.”
“And everyone else has?” He tried to smile, but I knew, and I knew that he knew, that my explanation was inadequate.
“I'm not seeing him anymore,” I said.
“Well, I hope that's a good thing...” I should've just shut up, I realized. I reached for the door again and told him to take care, realizing as soon as I heard his side open just when mine did that he would be dashing around the car. A quick hug: that's all we would appear to have time for.
“See you later, Lily.”
I smiled as he drove off, but took my time. The newborn flowers I'd added by the deck were getting their last rays of sunlight. On a hot day such as this, I watered all the thirstier plants twice a day, once in the late morning, and once at this golden hour, so I had an excuse to spend some time outside. I didn't like to go in there so much these days, anyway. I was tired of feeling like an exploded bottle of all teenage typicality. Exhausted from repeatedly adding to a story composed of reality and fiction about someone I had to follow on the third night of my performances. Sick of hearing my Mom behind the door whimpering that she doesn't feel she protects me, but blasting Michael Crawford the next day, acting like our agreement for me to see a counselor was totally fine. “Let her speak when she's ready” was a mantra I had to appreciate my parents had adopted, but, still, our times here were as double-edged as any with Erik.
* * *
There was a canon of him that I became so attached to, I never interpreted the other sides that came to face us as “real”. The side that questioned my devotion to him, that spoke hurtful things under is breath... he'd had a bad day. The side that hurt those I didn't know... he was pushed to his limits. His angry, possessive side... that was a dream. The only real Erik that I saw in my mind in the middle of the night was the one whose pulse climbed when we touched, who curled up around me in bed and tried to stay there. He had nothing to say but never interrupted me when I held him from behind. He was tired of making up stories just as I did, and tired of being pushed off the edge on these bad days and in these dreams. He didn't want them to be his; he still wanted to gut out life as he knew it, but vices such as these had unreachable roots.
Sometimes I was so mad this version wasn't always there. I was angry he couldn't be mine anymore. I was sick of lying in bed without that Erik, of never being kissed by that Erik, of never hearing from him anymore. His head had been washed over inside this other person who I didn't know, couldn't trust, couldn't negotiate with... He was the Angel I remembered, held captive somewhere where he couldn't see once the air of the real world started to sting. Nothing so brilliant could survive here, I guess.
Mariam always went quiet when I started talking about this, but she would say so softly when I noticed and became offended by her silence that she still wanted to hear it. Everyone was studying me, designing this atmosphere of safety that they believed would make me “well” again, but I only pretended that my conscience was clearing. When Mom played those old tapes when I came home from the last day of school, smiling and humming, putting away the dishes.... Close your eyes, for your eyes will only tell the truth... I was a mirror to her while climbing the stairs, but I went straight to my room. I could hear it through the floor and covered my ears.
* * *
I turned around with the hose in my hands, wondering if it meant anything that Westin lived just on the hills, maybe ten minutes away, or was he miles and miles from my heart for just a second? I wanted to try to follow him into this next chapter in my life, fast approaching, if he brought up that Oregon State had a good theatre department after all, but... I was picturing My Erik trying to save himself, sending me a different letter than the one that had reached me, one that told me exactly who he was, what had happened to him, how he knew he was wrong, how he was under his father's wing now... Before I'd have to make those choices about growing up, summer would be dying, a chill would return, and he'd be waiting somewhere where we'd have privacy. We'd go to the dock and he'd be tired like the night I told him I couldn't love him anymore, but this time I'd say I did, and I'd feel his ecstasy. I shook myself out of it and stood in front of the door, not surprised to find that it was only in my mind that the scent of Mr. Worden lingered.
I came through the threshold but nobody was there. I figured Dad was in the computer room, and Mom was sitting on the back porch bench doing Sudoku. I didn't want to draw attention to myself by looking for them, so I just went up the stairs.
I have come to my room by the day's end just the same way for the past few weeks, and I can't foresee it changing soon. I close the door against my back, wanting to slide down, but I come to the bed and curl into myself. I turn the pillow the other way, rest my head, and spread my arm across it. I hear all of these words spoken, words that we could only write before because to say them was unbearably painful. Hearing them and imagining how they sound hurts too, but it's that purposeful pain that Erik and I could always agree was wonderful to know was real.
“I'll lose you soon,
But when you can no longer stand anymore,
No longer breathe anymore,
I'm the only one who will be there,
The way that you really need it.”
I ask myself where my Erik is, and why I feel like he's operating separately from the one who has claimed him.
I've dreamed of him surely every night. I found that he was in trouble and I had no power to help him. He was chained to the ground in some dark purgatory, with an attitude of indifference to his destruction, but I couldn't free him by myself. There was no one else there but he and I because that was the way we created our world... Except, sometimes, Mr. Worden was there, too.
* * *
When he stood at the door a few nights ago, the porch light held him under a glow. The lines in his face were not so engraved and his shadow not so stretching, as if a spell had come off of him. It was unclear who he wanted to speak to in that first moment, and my parents wouldn't stop hovering beside me, but I got the impression he realized the meaning of my silence around them and was trying to give me the right opportunity to speak. His eyes darted from place to place, and he faced us only somewhat, as if his desire to even be there was fleeting, but while explaining who he was he kept making eye contact with me. I bravely asked for a moment with him alone, and he bowed his head a ways, asking silently for their compliance. My mom and dad left the doorway, but their eyes hung on me from the living room, starved for truth, and Mom wouldn't even sit down.
I closed the front door behind me but couldn't quite look up to his face, so my focus settled on the worn front of his leather coat, then down to the floor, where his boots consumed the entry mat beside my bare feet.
It seemed like it would be an almost impossible confrontation after all the things that hadn't been said or done between us at the most crucial of times. He must have seen I was still afraid of him deep inside, even if I urged my gaze to at least meet his eyes once. Honestly, I couldn't think of any way to greet him, so I never said a word, and unfortunately Mr. Worden was afflicted with the same introversion. But then I began to suspect, and I hope now that it was not in my imagination, that we could still communicate with each other. I had already been thinking about everything he must have known had happened by now, even if Mariam was the only one who disclosed a story; a story full of holes, perhaps, but something that broke through to him. He knew Erik had taken me; without him there would have been no chase, no arrest, no checkmate. It would seem I should thank him, but those words couldn't come out either.
And yet, despite that he knew enough to feel something, as all I could hope for him to do at this point, I could not detect that he did. I thought he might have come to apologize for his son, but there was something like stone behind his eyes when I finally looked up, as if even I wasn't granted a short sight into his soul. It disappointed me, because now that I knew what a position of power he had over my fallen idol's fate, I... I somehow wanted a connection with him, but I knew Erik attributed enough of his misery to this person. I knew to be loyal to him even while he terrified me meant this man couldn't be trusted.
Mr. Worden had few things to say to me, but they were dense with authority, with conviction, with seasoned resilience to anything I could have possibly argued, like he'd spoken the words to me before, like they were written somewhere, like a prophecy that only he could pull from the page: “I'll make sure that he doesn't see you anymore.”
It wasn't the first thing he said: I just remember it because it had a seemingly endless reverberation throughout the rest of our time, the rest of the night, the rest of the week, and I feel it lying in bed, every time I long for remnants of the past.
“I need to know if you want to press charges,” he first said.
My gaze went back to the floor. “No.” To my discomfort, to maybe both our discomfort, he leaned into me.
“I need to know if you've been hurt,” was his way of putting it. I may have known what he meant, but “hurt” was such a confusing word by now. There were so may ways to be hurt, and a whole spectrum of ways to perceive it, I'd learned. I didn't want to share any of it, I didn't want someone else to judge for me what was good pain or bad pain anymore, and, most of all, I didn't trust that justice as Mr. Worden was thinking of it had a practical meaning for anything inside the shadow realm; Erik and I's realm. I told him “no”.
He wanted to know if I was eighteen yet. “No” continued to be my answer. He went silent and brushed long fingers through his receding hair, then dropped his heavy hands to his sides, glancing to things around us. I sensed he never wanted to say more than he had to when he decided to deliver those reverberating words.
“I'll make sure that he doesn't see you anymore, or write to you, because this is... this is the only other way I can think to protect him, from himself, and protect you.”
“Has he been arrested?”
I looked up with more of an instinct than bravery, only to catch a twitch in his expression; a line that may have been part of his smile, but smiles may not always mean happiness for Mr. Worden, I wonder now. He confirmed his arrest and dug his hands into his pockets. “I've already been asked to deliver you letters. I took them and read them, because I-I don't give my son any privacy anymore. But you need to tell me if he reaches you in any other way.”
I sunk into the door, I remember, because up until then I had ever been told so concretely that something was being taken away from me. Before then, I wasn't allowing myself to take seriously these silent wishes that a note would show up under the mat when I came to water the flowers, as innocently as that package on Christmas eve had appeared with my name written in red ink. I remembered standing just in that place, watching a world of snow play a type of music in my heart. I remembered being at the height of wonder, and suddenly I was mad at My Erik again for taking it away from me. It was Erik who revoked these things; Erik, who changed; Erik, who made it impossible to be loved.
All I thought I could share as I dared to look up again was that I had heard it all, accepted it, wasn't going to put up a fight or demand these letters, but then I saw that same sense of loss in Mr. Worden. This was no reflection of me that I saw, but someone of their own composition, someone I'd never know, suffering the loss of something important to them, or maybe to him the loss was happening all the time, and had been for years.
He had colossal stature and eyes like black stones, but I had a glimpse inside the fortress. He cleared his throat and managed one word, “I'm,” and I understood it. It was too hard to speak to him, so I just stepped forward, turned my cheek to the side, and pressed against him very lightly, hands closed and between us. He barely reacted. I felt his hand on my shoulder, but as I broke away, utterly consumed by awkwardness, I saw him eying the window, where I caught the curtain shuffling back in place.
I don't think he was expecting me to care. I think he was coming to my door to address a victim hoping for retribution, and nothing more. Maybe I startled him. He said he hoped I was okay and felt responsible for my safety from hereon. My confirmation and acceptance ended his mission and sent him back to his truck sitting in the driveway, and very soon after, he was gone.
I couldn't sleep and couldn't dream that night, but I was up at two in the morning taking the dress drenched in horrible memory from the back of the closet. I wanted to trigger my recollection of what happened, to let the stench of rotten wood bring back those surges of dread. Everybody had proven to me that I shouldn't miss him, but I had to prove it to myself.
* * *
I had another dream that I went to a prison and found Erik in the darkest corner of the building, and for some reason he claimed he couldn't see anything. He couldn't see beyond the bars or take notice that I had slipped through them like I had evaporated. I was at my knees, covering his hands over his lap with mine, and he was blind, but even so, he recognized it was me and started to cry.
* * *
I curse my observation, I curse my attachment, I curse his cleverness. I am lying to everyone when I show up at the park with my casual smile. I wonder if I would be more at peace if not for these things: if I could be as comforted as I should be by the people who have come to my door and offered a piece of themselves so I can try to be more whole.
The dress I should have thrown away had a note sewn inside, a kind that so immediately indicated Erik's trembling as it was written.
“Even when you are far away,
I feel your thoughts and your actions
And you feel mine.”
I see the curves of ink faltering like the keys of that piano, and I am taken in.
This has to be thrown away, I know. It all has to be thrown away to give all those other times their power.
“The cycle of things will align us again,
There's a thing called destiny
Why does it take so many rituals to expel him? I have to let him go, or I will never be myself again, never wake up all of the way, never love something true over something imaginary.
After everyone has acted like things are getting back to normal, after Mariam and I have ritualistically teased each other, after Westin has left a reassuring text that he likes having me around, it gets dark inside and out. In the dark, I feel like I'm falling through the lift again, surrounded in his sorrows, his trembling, his torment, and we all disappear. No one can hear us, but we hear nothing but each other, and I argue with fate. Erik and I are still two mirrors facing, even though we have shattered each other.
I need someone to talk to; I need a distraction, but there's a shadow in the room that, even with its unsettling shape, I never want the light to eradicate. It looms over my shoulder while I lie in bed with just enough space for two of us.
“I am on the verge of losing you.
I know how this scene plays.
I've seen it before.
There's a thing called destiny.
It's deja vu, the new way you look at me.
I'm shivering like there's nothing inside me anymore;
I'm filled with wind;
I'm still a storm, but no one will be catching me.
I'll lose you soon,
So the way you look at me,
It makes me miss you.”
Tomorrow I'll ride my bike again just as soon as I can wake.
“I know I don't have to miss you, though.
You are the wind.
I can't stand without you.
I don't breathe without you.
I only live because you do.
I hate loving you like this,
Being chained to you like this.
Don't you hate loving me?
Knowing I'm inevitable?
Only living because I do?
Feeling the weight of me inside, and nothing else?”
I'll go down the tallest hills until I'm weightless. I'll feel the wind whipping my hair, and I'll pretend I'm free.
“I know you are empty, too.
We animate each other.
When you can no longer stand anymore,
No longer breathe anymore,
I'm the only one who will be there,
The way that you really need it.
We are not an accident.
Winds have a pattern,
And even when you are far away,
I feel your thoughts and your actions
And you feel mine.
The cycle of things will align us again,
There's a thing called destiny.
Yesterday, today, tomorrow, I'll pretend I'm free.
“Destiny has chained you to me forever.”
As many times as it takes before I am.
The inspiration for this chapter, and the woman whose music has carried me wonderfully through the entire story.
Thank you, Shara.
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