It’s the way she has the covers tugged right up to her chin.
How her hair fans out across her pillow and it might as well be the silk they used to weave into tapestries to tell love stories in all those ancient worlds she finds so fascinating.
But each time my heart does what it’s supposed to do, beating to keep me alive and keep me here with her, I feel all those things, and I feel the pulse of blood that makes my scar throb and it reminds me I don’t deserve any of them anymore.
I stare at her, gilded by the moonlight shining through the windows, before I open my mouth and stomp on the already ruined wreckage of our lives.
I should talk to her—finally—tell her that I’m dizzy all the time, and at this point, I want to die just about every minute of every day because I’m living in a body I don’t think belongs to me.
I know what she’s going to hear and what kind of brutal web of lies her brain is going to weave—that she isn’t, wasn’t, won’t ever be enough.
But that’s not true. She’s gravity, the planet, the solar system, the universe, the whole galaxy.
I swallow, and I do it anyway.
“I love you.” She says it like it’s a “but,” a sort of qualifier that’s going to make me stay.
It won’t. It can’t.
“I’m leaving,” I tell her, running my thumb across her cheek one last time.
I think she says I love you again, but I can’t hear anything over the pounding of blood in my ears and the pulse of fucking pain lancing across my head that buckles my knees by our front door.
She doesn’t follow. She’s trapped, and I don’t think it’s her brain keeping her in our bed.
It’s mine. She’s stuck up here, in a cage I built for us. When I open the front door, I hope it sets her free.
I don’t remember doing it, but I leave.
I leave all the way to Brno to stay with my grandparents for three months.
I walk with my grandmother every day when she goes to Svobodák. It’s more time than I’ve spent outside in months. I tellher over Turek and sometimes Becherovka that I don’t think I’ll ever be the same, and that’s why I had to go.
That I hope one day Sloan understands, and even though it fucking kills me, I hope she thanks me for it.
The thought of her moving on hurts.
The sunlight hurts. My head hurts. My heart hurts.
I hurt, because there’s this piece of me missing.
Left behind with all these unsaid things.
That I love her.
That it wasn’t her.
That she was always enough.
That she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.
That I’d fall on the sword every day if it meant she had a chance at being happier without me.
And when I do go home, I leave them the same way—unsaid—and I move across the country so she’ll never have to see me again.
Sloan
It’s my favourite day on the cruise.
