Your Heart, Online. Act II: Scary Stories

“Once upon a time there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together.”
– Red, Us (2019)

“If I pay $40 for a haunted house I better die”
– twitter user @hodgesboi15

1. Right Behind You

A cool damp spot on the back of my neck wrenched me from a dream. Where was I? Limbs still glued to the bed, the iron taste of fear spread across my tongue as I felt another breath rattle against me, against this strange darkness. I was not alone. I tried to rise with my panic, but your arm tightened around my waist. Your bed. You. Oh, god.

“Your hair tickles,” you whispered with a small smile, eyes closed.

I don’t know what to say about the way we woke up together that hasn’t already been claimed by the poets. We curled into each other like the colors of dawn. No, like the way two naked things in the wild survive the frost. Nose to nose, I received the breath you surrendered. I wanted to scoop from the spring between us with a ladle. There are some places language can’t touch.

[These are the stakes, then: my borrowed air. Our genesis.]

2. Sacrifice

When the apartment property manager unlocked my door for the first time, gauzy sunlight brightened 400 square feet of vinyl laminate and concrete walls. An erratic thud upstairs punctuated the muffled conversations from the neighbors on either side of my unit.

A small pile of sawdust was left on the floor outside my bathroom like an offering to a lesser god. The property manager mumbled something about “maintenance” mixing up my move-in date — maintenance being the catch-all term people in the building used for the services of a pallid 19-year-old kid named Mitchell, according to the red patch sewed to the breast of his jumpsuit. My bathroom door was installed without a handle, so maintenance/Mitchell carved a hole the size of a tangerine into the slab of wood to grant me entrance or escape. He kept the soft pyramid of shavings on the floor of the bare apartment. A problem for a different day, a sacrifice for his present moment.

The property manager left me alone with the small mess. I didn’t mind; I liked the reminder that nobody around me was rocked by the tides of my life, not the maintenance man nor the property manager nor the upstairs neighbor nor the dog pissing on the sickly birch outside my window. To-do lists grew, coworkers argued, and I was not set apart from any of it, not in my virtue and not in my wreckage. I was the god of this space and nothing beyond it.

[My idolatry — is this what awakened the horrors?]

I propped my phone on crooked piles of paperbacks to talk to you for hours while assembling couches and bookcases that warned Do Not Attempt to Move Alone. You told me about your rehearsals, your family visits, your days at work. In this way, we each filled my new home with you.

[If this was an instructional guide, it would be: How to Build A Haunted House.]

3. Something in the Walls

Alone, I imagined your eyes hovering low and close over me while I fought my Sisyphean fight against my apartment’s will towards atrophy. What would you think about the decay that overtook my bouquets? Or the pink scum encircling my sink drain? If you were here, would you eat the breakfast I made–or would you scorn my broken yolks?

I filled each room with art and poetry and the colors of ripe fruit, slowly at first, then in an expensive rush. You were coming to my town for once, your body finally catching up to the lingering specter of your judgment that flitted across my walls. When you first offered to take the hour-long bus ride to my place, the inconvenience felt like proof of something substantial.

[I tend to measure love by the discomfort one is willing to endure, which makes me bad at romance and great at road trips.]

I wanted to curate a museum from my home with bleached, needless me at its center. I dusted baseboards at the back of my closet and hid air fresheners behind decorative vases. The same meticulous attention went into my own grooming: I plucked and rubbed and tenderized my own skin like I was preparing a Christmas ham.

Later, you’d say, “You did all this just for me, huh?”

You enjoyed obliterating my illusions of effortlessness.

4. Body Horror

When my friends asked about me, it felt like they were asking about you.

I didn’t trust myself to say anything more than, “We’re just having fun! The way jumping out of a plane is fun.”

There is a colloquial term for what you and I were to each other, but I spit it out, hating the taste. You were not a situation.

[What to call us, then? A whisper, echo, hurricane. You once called it a bone bruise. Fine. If we’re using the language of injury, I’ll consider this the triage.]

5. The Phone is Ringing

You called me from the bus stop and crooned from my speaker, “I’M IN YOUR CITY!”

I felt a sharp jab of anxiety in my gut. Why didn’t you tell me you were on your way? I’d been checking my phone ten times an hour, even steeling myself for the cancellation text as your silence panned across my day. But there you were, filling my city with the brass of your one man parade. You waited for me to pick you up from the station. I rushed to put away the groceries I purchased to fulfill your cravings, in a race against your impatience and the slow, wet spread of weakening paper bags.

Parked in the lot around the corner from the bus station at last, I called you with sunshine and sparrow in my throat. Your voice: the sound of a bird hitting a window. You pitched your questions like hot rocks from the other end of the phone.

“Where are you. I don’t see you.”

“I’m around the corner! I just had to find a place to –”

The line cut out. I stared at my phone in my hand. I experienced it like a question: You hung up on me? My disbelief roiled into a foamy regret as I pictured you turning around to board the bus home.

6. Crash

When I was in the fifth grade, my brother, father, and I were involved in a nine-car accident on our way home from a baseball game. After my father brought the car to a screaming stop only a few inches from the bumper in front of us, we shared a silent moment, breath suspended. Before the shock could develop into full-bodied relief, a truck barreled into our car and sent us careening into the jaws of the wreckage. People ahead and behind us were carried away in stretchers. Loved ones wept on the side of the road where a local news crew interviewed me, hours later, amongst the debris.

[Years later, I cringe from the sidewalk as cars fly past, haunted by the collision of unyielding metal with my still and waiting body. For similar reasons, I shrink from angry men.]

7. Did You Hear That?

Regulating other people’s moods is a physical process more than anything. As an elementary school counselor, I stoop and bend and crawl and crouch and in some instances lay right down on the floor, right next to them — the young people crying or thrashing or frozen — where I can feel the enormity of the feelings sloshing around their insides.

I sometimes envy the corporality of their processing. Their bodies demand a reckoning. Wails scrape against the wet rocks of their mouths before tearing across the walls of our school. I think to myself, yes, the feelings are exactly that terrible, exactly that violent. The sound of their anguish raises the hair on my thighs. Only after I match their posture do I try to guide us through the moment with language.

“Put your hand on your heart — it keeps beating to give you the energy you need to keep fighting or find calm. You are trying to choke off your sobs but they need to come out. The air will find its way to you if you open your lungs. Breathe in like you’re smelling a flower. Breathe out like you’re blowing out a candle.”

When their hands are small enough to fit in my palm, I pretend the force of their exhalations can bowl me over. I tip backward theatrically to tempt their laughter, which springs as wet and natural as the noises of their grief. An interlude: snotty giggles, damp eyes.

I rarely write about the young people in my life. They are unspeakably good. I don’t trust myself to share them.

[I’m saying, by the time you found me, I was already well-practiced in knocking myself over to soothe the moods of others.]

8. The Slow Walker

I bought you lunch just minutes after you hung up on me. I filled your silences with coaxing hmms and soft inquiries. Your begrudging answers melted under my warmth until you took up more and more conversational space. We both loved the sound of your voice. Relief flooded my limbs as I watched you return to your softer self. Across the booth, you cupped your hand around the small of my calf, circling the bony protrusion of my ankle with your thumb. The insistent, tender movement ran up my legs and burrowed into the dark cave of my want. I could never hold your eye contact. The fear was too acute — that you’d see my need splayed across my face, naked and pulsing.

We walked in lazy eights around my favorite neighborhood park down the street. You tugged at my arm when my pace accelerated to its natural clip.

“You walk too damn fast,” you said with a smile I wanted to dip my fingers in.

The air was thick with spring, tree limbs dripped with pink petals, and it already seemed impossible that we might hurt one another. Two ducks tucked themselves into a shaded corner of the pond: every living thing seemed to collude in our rapture. When I loosened my sweaty fingers from your grip, you held fast. We kissed between laughs and in the middle of sentences, on the pedestrian bridge, by the basketball courts.

[We needed witnesses to make us real. Is that what I’m doing here?]

We found an empty park bench at the top of the hill. We sat and watched the slope sway with long, fresh grass and daisies the size of my thumbnail. You pulled me to you, drumming the pads of your fingers against my shoulder. I felt that upon standing from this bench, surely we’d find ourselves permanently fused; a being with four legs, four lungs, two buzzing brains. The sun broke through the cloud cover. A tentative beam found us on the bench for a pulse before we stood to leave. We couldn’t stay too long in the light.

9. Somebody In The Mirror / Nobody In The Mirror

I have never seen a video of myself as a child. That record was destroyed, an old VHS tape recorded over, apparently. But was there only one tape for a whole childhood?

[If this was a confidential folder, it would be labeled: Questions I Don’t Ask My Mother.]

My therapist often asks me to conjure the younger Kayla who supposedly dwells inside me. Specifically, she wants the current me to commune with the version of myself still unfamiliar with terror. When was I a stranger to violence? Third grade, I think. Maybe younger.

She asks me, “What would you say to her?”

Silence swells between us in these moments, past the point of contemplation, then past the point of comfort.

I stammer, “I don’t — I can’t see it. I mean, her. I can’t see her.”

[I am trying to write myself back into the record. Assembling a self-portrait from eraser shavings.]

In these moments, I am not embarrassed, nor am I touched by revelation. I am furious.

10. Night Terrors

I hated sleeping without you. In my dreams, I spit out clumps of hard, round baby teeth suspended in the jelly of blood and saliva. Sometimes I tried to fit them back into my gums until they collected like pebbles in the back of my throat. I’d wake up choking.

Nights with you, the sound of your grinding teeth or the violent twitch of your arm would jolt me from sleep, although you’d deny it upon waking. We never shared our nightmares with each other.

11. It’s A Trap

You relished how my breath hitched as you stepped closer to me in the elevator up to my floor, my back to the metal wall, both of us caged by my adoration. We walked the length of my hallway with your arms snaked around my waist, the firmness of you pressed into my back, chin atop my head, or burrowed into my neck, hands clasped around my stomach, legs around and in between mine.

[I am confused by these proportions while I document them. I am trying to say: you were everywhere.]

12. Fight Back

In my early twenties, I dated a series of men all skinnier and shorter than me.

When I spoke about the realities of our bodies I’d say, “I like knowing that if they ever attacked me, I’d have a decent chance at survival.”

I laughed when I said this, pretending like it was incidental, not essential, to my attraction.

My college boyfriend would flout our size disparities by jumping on top of me and pinning my arms to the bed with his bony knees. He’d tickle me by raking his sweaty fingers across my ribs. Despite my screams for him to please stop please stop please please stop, he wouldn’t quit until he grew bored of my writhing. The last time he ever did this, I managed to wrench my arm free and hit him once, hard, with an open palm across his face.

“What the FUCK,” he shouted as he rolled off me.

He rubbed his slender jaw with accusation in his scowl. The room was silent, save for the sound of my panting. I waited until my breathing slowed.

“I told you,” I said, “to stop.”

[I’m squinting towards the sky, tracing the length of this chem trail with my finger until I find the vanishing point. I want to know where my fight went.]

13. Contagion

When the kettle hissed its climax, I placed one bag of peach tea and one of pomegranate into two chipped cups and filled both with water. You and I swapped mugs back and forth, trying to pick our favorite flavor despite the imperceptible differences. We abandoned the drinks to braid our limbs together, all mouth and hunger and hot tea on our lips. The textured muscle of your tongue tilled the soft pink of me. I called on the name of my long-abandoned god to have a spectator for my pleasure.

The next day, my positive COVID test was a Rorschach test for intimacy: I thought, first, of sharing fruit tea.

Each minute felt worse than the last. My bone-deep fatigue progressed with such rapidity, I thought it must have been a psychosomatic effect. How could the onset of symptoms wash my wellness away so rapidly? I felt a curved, scaly spine sharpening in my throat with every swallow. The coolness of my tears smarted against my boiling cheeks as my fever climbed. I thought, if I die here, I will die alone, with no one to witness.

I responded to myself out loud, “Oh, don’t be so fucking stupid.”

When I texted you about my illness, I apologized repeatedly, already anticipating your irritation and hoping to escape it by spearheading my blame. You responded with a voice note. Alone on my couch, I pressed the speaker to my ear, an echo of a sweeter memory from months before.

“Well. I wish you hadn’t started my day with that news. Like, I just woke up.”

[If this was a book for dummies, it would be: 101 Ways to Destroy a Body.]

I played the message enough times to commit the disdain in your tone to memory.

14. Don’t Open The Door

There is a voice that screams at me all day long. It sounds like me now, but didn’t always — at least not in the beginning. Now, the voice is only in my head, but it used to come from the other side of a locked door. The locked door was not a metaphor. It was just a door. In flashes, your voice sounded just like it.

“You’re wasting my time / Don’t touch me / Do you even know what you’re doing?”

It wasn’t distance or ambivalence, but a more specific and participatory contempt.

[If this was a game, it would be: Connect The Dots.]

I submitted at any sign of dissatisfaction from you, “You’re right, I’m selfish and wrong.”

My supplication softened you.

You would chastise me, “It’s a matter of trust. You have to trust me.”

15. Premonition

I spent countless drives to your city convincing myself to put an end to our relational purgatory. I rehearsed the nonchalance with which I would lay bare our incompatibility. I’d primarily rely on the mounting evidence of your unhappiness: your flares in temper, the messages you ignored, the appraisals I continuously failed. My resolve liquified when I faced your warmth. You’d text me sporadically, I miss you. I wish I was sleeping next to you. I made you a playlist. This was just a fling. I was just being flung.

After one such drive, a ticket to your show waited for me at the call box. The theater lowered into the darkness like easing into a hot tub, and my shoulders relaxed when you — at last — appeared on stage. Us, stripped of our pretense: I could behold you as a fan you could take up all four corners of the stage. I didn’t need to make any room for myself beyond the square of my collapsible seat, which was a relief for us both.

Quiet in your audience, I knew I would hollow myself out to make more room for you, like a bowl waiting to be made purposeful by what it might hold. I called this love.

[I am tempted to revise this memory with all the hindsight and hurt I carry now. I mean surely, this couldn’t have been love — just my ensnarement in our pattern, which is how somebody might describe addiction.]

No matter what I called it, my powerlessness bore down on me from all sides.

We crowded around a corner booth with your friends after the show. Your roommate threw his head back in laughter at my joke and slid the flat expanse of his palm across mine. I fought the urge to request an updated performance review from you. Over piles of french fries and the raucous conversation of strangers and friends, we met each other’s gaze. You smiled and I smiled and I thanked all the gods for placing me at the soft center of this mutual knowing. Your hand rested easily on my knee under the table, and I felt the delicious, delirious weight of my foolishness.

16. A Woman Possessed

I swallowed your name in my mouth during most of my conversations until it beat, strong and feathered, against the thin skin of my neck. The night I faced the depth of my desperation in that dark theater, I vowed to stop talking about you to my friends. I broke this vow easily, thoughtlessly. Their faces all pinched with the same worry when they asked after me.
I answered rapidly, with a humor that didn’t touch my spirit, “We have so much in common: he’s not sure about me and I’m not sure about me either.”

I held my own heart loosely in my hands and jangled the decisions of my life like spare change.

You’d disappear after seeing me. The warmer our shared time, the longer the silence. The stretches of your absence punched a hole through me; from my head to a vast, dark pit in my stomach, I longed for you to come back. The vacancy screamed in all my cells.

I attempted and abandoned detoxes from you in an incessant cycle: I started locking my phone in my car most mornings before work, but by noon, I’d jog the length of the parking lot to retrieve it from the glove box. I deleted your number. I didn’t speak your name out loud. I muted our message thread. I looked up spells on the internet for ending relationships but never used them, afraid they might work. I did everything but leave.

As the stretches of silence lengthened, I wondered, is this how we’ll finally end? A long pull the fibers of us couldn’t bear. A release without relief. I compulsively checked your social accounts during our time apart. In the void of your silences, I grasped for proof of your imprint on my life, on the world we both occupied.

[This seems like a generous interpretation of my behavior. I think, mainly, I was afraid.]

17. The Omniscient Child

At work, I became distracted and irritable. Every day felt like an audition I failed. In a long hallway of gray carpet, a young person with sunlight in her stride stepped in front of me with a furrowed brow.

“What’s wrong?” she demanded, hands on her sharp hips.

Her concern was almost cartoonish, the type of disinhibited expression of care that still stuns me.

She continued, “Your eyes are sad today.”

I forgot that knowing went both ways. I could not bring myself to lie to her, to any of them. I refused to be the adult who undermined their intuition.

I said, carefully, “Adults have bad days too.”

She was not satisfied with the mere acknowledgment. She wanted relief for me and for her.

I tried again, “I can have hard days and still love you so much. You are safe even when I am sad. You can see how others are feeling because of your kind heart.”

Her frown tightened and cracked, like clay left too long in the kiln. She bowed her head to my hip and cried.

She wept, “I want you to be happy, can you please just be happy?”

I wondered then, as I had a thousand times before, if I’d said the wrong thing, if I sourced this pain, or if this was always the collateral for loving so fully. Should I have just lied? I knelt down to her height and she collapsed over my shoulder.

I fought back my own tears and whispered into her braids, “We’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay.”

[As I write this, I cannot keep myself from imagining you as my audience. You are my second person because it is the only honest way. I picture you scrolling past these sentences, the ones that aren’t about you. Bored of me, still.]

18. Unheeded Warning

As my deterioration kept pace with that of our relationship, Mary sipped her cider across from me in our favorite booth.
She said gently, “I don’t even think this is about him.”

This, being the purple under my eyes. This, being the plummet.

I shook my head in protest and raised my volume to be heard over the pool balls clattering behind us, “Nobody else has ever found this fault line. It’s got to be something about him, something special.”

She looked at me patiently. I didn’t know what she was trying to say. Not yet.

19. Prophecy

When young parents lament the throes of childhood tantrums, my mother theatrically widens her eyes and nods with a big sigh, “Oh trust me, I know.”

Although I trust my mother’s account, I cannot remember being in my body when the tantrums happened. From my childhood body, I mainly remember muted panic. Snowfall over shards of glass.

My mother recently told me she stopped bringing me to the storytime events at the public library. I was a disaster in the crowd of children, according to her, as I would gasp and exclaim and fall over laughing at the story to the point of distraction. She eventually yanked me from the audience with a tight grip on the meat of my upper arm.

“We never went back,” she said with a short sigh.

[I color in the shades of my mother’s shame, embarrassment, fear, anxiety, or apprehension in my adulthood. As a child, I only recognized two moods: irritated or appeased. I preferred either of these moods to the shadow of my father’s rage.]

She thought I was seeking attention, but I recognize my own motivations across the expanse of decades. It’s what makes me an excellent attendee for public lectures and poetry readings, how strangers corner me on the subway, why I collect street pamphlets for causes I care nothing for: I am an attentive audience member because I cannot stand the thought of conspiring in somebody else’s loneliness. It is important to me that one should tell their story and feel that somebody cares to hear it.

20. Writing on the Walls

Some mornings, you and I fought before my feet touched the floor for the first time. My anger dissipated by the time I finished my commute to work, replaced instead by an anxious fawning. I apologized for the venom you sucked from my most honeyed sentences.

“I don’t mean to upset you, and it’s the only thing I seem to do,” I’d plead.

You replied, “Well. Intent versus impact.”

[Am I cataloging my own humiliations? I think of the refrain on the internet: You couldn’t torture this information out of me. Am I submitting to my impulse towards masochism, first by loving you, then by writing about it?]

Other mornings, I woke before you in bed to trace messages on your arms with my finger. Benedictions for your day in big, loopy cursive: Rest. Beautiful boy. My star. I cut corners, hoping your skin would absorb what I couldn’t say to your face.

21. Ghosts

You called me during my hurried midday caffeine run to ask if I’d been dating other people. Except you did not use the word dating. Your question was a corporeal inquiry: Who had I shared my body with?

[I revise this memory on paper to preserve a dignity you rarely afforded me otherwise.]

While I listened to you stumble through this question, a car in the drive-thru lane reversed into me with a plastic crunch. I stopped asking for signs after that.

I did try to date other people: a dad with a podcast, a bald doctor, a kind public radio host. Mainly, I was thankful to do something other than stare at my phone and wait for you to call. When those others reached for me, they swiped at vapor, hands ghost-chilled and drenched in desperation. One of them texted me, I know they call this ghosting but I need you to spell it out for me. This is what I find myself angriest about: You made me love the way you loved, flashy and afraid.

[This, of course, is a lie. The way I loved is my burden.]

22. Massacre

We lived through two mass shootings ten days apart. The photos of the slain looked like the people who reigned over our hearts. Blood marked the calendar of our silence. We tended to our wounds separately, still hiding our nightmares.

The morning of the elementary school shooting, I walked into my own elementary school initially oblivious to the specific carnage but aware, always, of the threat. The news pierced me in pieces throughout the workday. Push notifications came in while I tied shoes, opened milk cartons, put stickers on star charts. I used a gentle tone all day, knowing no distant terror could halt the immediate needs of the young people around me. A coworker saw my gray face as I exited the building at the end of the day.

She held her phone away from her mouth — her husband, or daughter, or doggy daycare on the other end–and whispered, “Go home and take care of yourself.”

On the drive home, you and I continued a fight (we were always fighting by that point) and I listened to you describe for the hundredth time how I loved you wrong, loved you both too close and too far away. I felt the inevitability of my apology but I couldn’t keep track of what for anymore. I practiced in my head: I am sorry I chafe you, I’m sorry you do not like me.

I didn’t recognize the deadened voice coming from my mouth. I made another attempt, overcorrecting to something bright and plastic. I tried again. Finally, my voice splintered.

“I can’t do this today,” I wept on the road, “I don’t have anything left. I am so tired and sad,” and lonely, I wanted to scream, I am so unbearably lonely I want to swallow the sky and drown in its fluorescent clutter.

[I want to scream at everyone: I am tired of taking care of myself. I want somebody else to do it.]

Before I fell asleep, you said, “I know I’m not the only one who had a hard day. I just wanted to let you know someone is thinking of you tonight. Hoping for a softer tomorrow for us. Sleep well.”

I dreamt of you appearing at my door to wrap me up close to your beating heart, alive and together, celebrating the miracle and briefness of each condition. But your face wouldn’t stay in place. It moved wetly, like a hand smearing ink across a page. We never fully committed to either dream or nightmare, we danced between them with honey and blood in our mouths.

[I am circling something here. Trying to bear down on an artistic and undeniable truth about human nature and love and why I fell to pieces over someone — and something — so brief and formless. The circles I walk are getting tighter and smaller, but I don’t feel closer to a breakthrough. I just feel dizzy.]

23. Dead End

I tried. For the record.

After months of faux nonchalance and muddy boundaries, I said, “I just wonder if maybe I’m overplaying my part.”

You responded swiftly, “Yeah. I’m not doing this with you today. Talk to you later.”

When I tried to write about it, all my poems ended in locked doors. I remembered how the first door felt, the cool grain pressed against my forehead. I was small and bad and when I stopped crying, I could come out. My breath a whimper against the wood. There were so many rooms I walked in full and left emptier, so I stopped knocking. I preferred the tight, snug fit of a key in a lock that wouldn’t turn.

[The people who used to hurt me love me so good now. I keep waiting to convince everybody else.]

24. Exorcism

Food sat gluey and starched in my mouth. Jordyn searched her cabinets for gentle foods and brought me a bowl of popcorn with a cup of pretzels. Her husband shuffled anxiously around the kitchen looking for ways to help. They spoke to me with so much tenderness I had to turn away, struggling to look into the face of what I was so desperately missing elsewhere. I gulped my red wine, gripping the glass with two hands like a communion cup. I fell asleep on their couch for the longest stretch of uninterrupted sleep I’d had in weeks.

I woke up with a pop of terror at 4 AM. I had two missed calls and three texts from you.

WYD
I might slide
Lol ok.

One minute after my last missed call from you, you wrote online, The fact that people can’t meet my lowered expectations is nuts.

The next morning, I knelt before my toilet, confessional in my posture. The heaves wracked my torso as I filled the bowl with the red pulp of my insides.

25. Something In The Water

The last time we slept together, you sat at the foot of my bed with your back turned against me. I could see you by the slant of light from the streetlight outside my bedroom window, standing lonely and witness.

“You made me overthink things,” you snapped at me.

You were angry at me for motioning to my pleasure. I cleared my throat.

“When you –” I started.

I had researched this: Healthy communication in conflict. “I” statements. Steady voice.

“I feel like I’m being blamed when I hear sentences like that.”

I protected you with the passive voice as if the snappish words floated down from my ceiling instead of the hot poker of your tongue.

“I am blaming you,” you clarified, “There’s only you, and me, and it’s definitely not my fault. So it’s yours.”

Your arithmetic was clean and cruel. As your words landed, I wondered— Could we build a way of being together? Not a good way, not loving, but at least clear in its roles: you the blameless, me the blamed.

Moments later, you cradled my head to your chest. Greasy mascara and snot-soaked my sheets. I had long been kicking to the surface, my muscles wasted in the attempt to fill my lungs only to find I’d been swimming in the wrong direction. So much ocean above me. There in the dark, at the silty bottom, you looked into my face, soft and long, before opening into me. Under the covers, I shuddered against you. When I gasped for air, I got the slick of your neck instead. I was a woman drowned. Inside me, you reached for the immovable. I fell asleep to you pulling me closer, your thick fingers finding purchase at the hollows of my ribs.

“Come here,” you begged.

The next morning, you took the earliest bus home. I felt something snapping, a brittleness at the end of me.

26. Final Girl

In that last week, I woke up every night at 2:30 AM taking clipped inhales. We called this our summoning — when I somehow anticipated the moment you’d reach out to me. More likely, my body memorized the times the bars in your city closed. I rolled over before knowing where or who I was, or before I extricated my brain from the swamp of my dreams. I only knew my phone was ringing and you were on the other end.

“Hi,” I hummed into the screen hot against my cheek.

You groaned but I could hear your smile when you said, “You always answer. Why do you always have to answer?”

I was relieved to be getting this version of you, cheeky and playful.

“I’ll always answer for you,” I murmured.

[Sometimes, I wonder if this is still true. That says more about me than it does about you.]

You were uncharacteristically slow with your words. In your pause, I knew what would come next. I did not sit up, or open my eyes. I sat still in the dark and waited.

“I love you. And I really was not trying to fall in love with somebody right now,” you laughed.

I turned on my back to keep my pillow dry. Tears collected in the curves of my ear and pooled at the creases of my neck. Smileless, I stared at my ceiling before throwing my forearm across my eyes.

“You’re so easy to love, Kayla.”

A hollow ringing snaked through the pipes of my body. On the other side of easy was a nothingness; a yawning, screaming empty. Impossibly blank and wrong. We were suspended for a moment in this silence.

Since I couldn’t see you, I said something honest: “I have loved you.”

Before I knew you, before you found me, I loved what ran. Loved a locked door. Loved what required my obliteration.

Alone in my apartment, I hung up the phone. There in the dark, I folded my hands over my belly. A noise came from the basement floor of myself. I put my ear to the wall and held my breath. There was a knock coming from somewhere deep, and dark, and yet unseen. A tremble grabbed ahold of me at the soft meat of my thighs and ran both ways.

Without light, nor plan, nor bravery, I descended.