Page 51 of Keep Me

We talked for a while more. She did not ask about the details, and I did not offer them. She asked about Zane and I said he was close, ten minutes, and she said that sounded right. She asked whether I was eating, I told her about the rice, and she wrote something down.

“Let’s talk again soon?” she asked at the end.

“Okay,” I said.

I went out to the porch. The feeder was nearly empty. I had been watching it go down all week the same way I had watched the clock at 3:47 AM, inventory without intervention. But I stood at the railing now and looked at it and thought about the past, again. The before. About coming here, looking at the birds, and feeling bad for them, the evasive beautiful things that kept their distance because they knew what we were capable of. About Zane calling me his little hummingbird and me trying not to think about the irony.

We mythologize them. I said it before. We make them precious by the very act of wanting them so badly. The rarity is the trap. The distance is what creates the longing. I had spent most of my life being a thing that kept its distance, and I had believed the distance was necessary, that letting anyone close enough to really look was the beginning of being damaged. And Zane changed my perspective. He loved me in a way that rewired my understanding of safety.

But there was a boy once who sat beside me in the dark and never once asked me to turn the light on.

He had not needed the light. He had not needed me to be visible or legible or performing anything. He had just sat there in the same dark I was in, and it had been enough, and I had been enough, and neither of us had needed to be a spectacle to exist meaningfully in the same space.

I leaned against the railing and let myself remember. The grass, cold even in summer, the kind of cold that came from the ground rather than the air. The angel at my back, the same one I had leaned against just nights ago with my father’s vodka.

Alex. Sitting close enough that our shoulders were almost touching, not quite, the geography of two people choosing to be near without making it permanent.

I had told him about my mom. I never tell people about my mom. He had nodded like it was enough. Like I did not have to add anything. Like my mom dying when I was three was a complete sentence that did not need elaboration before he would agree to keep sitting there.

He told me he had people who loved him. Austin’s words from earlier looped inside my head and for a second, I existed in a weird deja-vu of memories. I had said the same words to Alex, once. I had forgotten them. Time took them but now, she brought them back.

It had been the first night we met, the first time I saw him in the graveyard. He told me he had people who would miss him, and I had been jealous of that, in a cruel, twisted way.

If you have people who love you, you can’t leave them, I told him. And I had not really said it to be helpful, but to tell him he had what I ached for. I wouldn’t leave if I had people who loved me.

He gave me something I had never been able to name. I still can’t. I do not know what I gave him back. I hope something. I hope I sat in the dark beside him the same way he sat in it beside me, without asking for the light. I hope I was enough company for whatever he came to that graveyard for. He said he was looking for beauty, but I know, I never gave him that. My beauty, the physical beauty that’s been so twisted into my very existence, did not fill his brief. He was there for three nights, and then he wasn’t. Gone like everyone else.

The feeder swayed very slightly on its hook. Empty, or nearly. A few inches of red syrup left, barely enough for the bully with the crooked tail feather to bother with. I looked at it for a long time.

Then I went inside, found the sugar and the measuring cup under the sink where I somehow already knew they’d be, and I did the math on the recipe from memory, the way you know things your hands learned before your brain caught up. Four parts water, one part sugar. Bring to a boil. Let it cool red.

I filled the feeder. It was different from his keeping. It was not the same as twenty-one years of daily maintenance, waking up every morning and choosing the small act. It was not a fulfilled promise to my dead mother, or even to Tom. But it was the first morning I took over the duty. And he had to have had a first morning once, too.

I thought about her. The girl in the photograph, five years old. She was still inside me somewhere, that version, the way the past is still inside anyone who ever had a past that holds something they do not have any more. A black hole that never fully closes. I used to think that was a bad thing, that she was the evidence of everything I had lost, the haunting I had been trying to outpace since I first understood what had been taken from me. I guess she wasn’t really a stranger. I see her sometimes, me, the girl before the pain, looking back at me in the mirror.

She wished the bad things hadn’t happened to me.

I never told her the truth. The bad things happened to her, too. That it had always been coming for both of us, that the five-year-old in the yellow dress with her shoes on the wrong feet was the same girl who would one day sit in a graveyard with her father’s vodka and her mother’s headstone, and a grief so old she couldn’t find the bottom of it, remembering the violation of her own body, remembering all of the painful fucking moments time had thrown at her. She did not know yet. She couldn’t.

She was not the Dead Sea. Looking at her, I knew that. She was not poisonous to everyone who existed inside her. I did not know what to do with that understanding. I did not know how to see the proof of my own innocence and reconcile that somewhere… somehow, the innocence turned to salt so heavy it drowns everything around it.

She did not know yet. She did not know what was coming, who she would become, the things that would try to drown her, too. She couldn’t.

And maybe that was the only mercy in the whole story: that she got to not know. That for a little while, she got to be just that happy, in a yellow dress, laughing at nothing, while a man stood somewhere behind the frame and thought keep her.

I kept her too. I am keeping her, too.

Haunting

I was going to call Zane.

The feeder was full. The bully with the crooked tail feather had come twice since yesterday, and I had watched it both times from the bench in my father’s plaid blanket without feeling bad for the bird at all. Just watching. Just existing in the same air as something beautiful without needing to hold it or name it or keep it at a distance. I was watching it without punishing myself. That was new.

Zane had been ten minutes away for five days. I was going to call him and tell him to come home. Not to the colonial house. Home, to the blue apartment, where the paint was pale and the radiator still made its train sound despite the wrench and the kitchen smelled like us instead of ghosts and absence. I was going to tell him I was ready to stop being alone. That the alone had done what it needed to do, and what it needed to do was apparently leave me standing on my dead father’s porch at dusk filling a hummingbird feeder for the second day in a row, understanding something about choosing to stay that I hadn’t been able to learn any other way. But alone had done its purpose.

I thought about hummingbirds.

I thought about what I had written in my head a thousand times, since the first time I sat on this porch, watched them, and felt bad for them, the beautiful evasive things. The fact that they keep their distance and we cannot stop reaching anyway. I had spent twenty-one years being that. Being the thing that kept its distance and was loved more fiercely for it, watched more hungrily, wanted more desperately because it was so hard to get close. I have always been watched like a hummingbird. It was the only form of being seen that I had ever known.