Page 97 of Ghosted

THE CHOICE

It’s been three days, and I still haven’t gone back to the darkroom.

I tell myself it’s because I’m busy. Because I have readings to finish, a paper due, laundry turning into a small fabric landslide in the corner of my room. Because the project can wait. Because nothing in those trays needs me badly enough to drag myself back under red lights and chemical stink.

All lies.

The truth is simpler and worse.

Johnny ruined it.

He took the one place I could hide behind a lens and made me feel watched from both sides of the camera. He made distance feel fake. Made my hands feel wrong holding something that used to make sense. Every time I think about going back, my stomach folds in on itself, and I find something else to do.

Dishes. Sweeping. Reorganizing my bookshelf by whatever system my brain invents at two in the morning.

Anything except touching my camera bag.

So now my apartment is the only place left that still feels like mine.

The radiator hisses under the window. Rain taps against the glass in uneven little bursts, and the whole building creaks around me every time someone takes the stairs too hard. It’s a shitty second-floor walk-up with thin walls, bad lighting, and a lock

The lock I’d turned on him the other night.

The same one that clicked into place right before I heard Jagger breathe like it hurt.

I hate that I know exactly how he looked at it.

I hate that I keep thinking about him sitting outside my door all night, bloody and furious and too stubborn to leave.

That some part of me felt safer knowing he was there.

A tiny scrape comes from the tank near my desk.

I turn my head. “Please tell me at least one of you has your life together.”

Ernie is sitting in the water dish, fully committed to doing nothing.

Bernie is beside the food bowl, dragging a piece of dried fruit across the sand for no reason I can understand.

He drops it.

Picks it back up.

Drops it again.

“Okay,” I say. “So no.”

Ernie shifts in the water dish and immediately goes back to ignoring me.

Bernie abandons the fruit completely and walks straight through the food bowl, knocking half of it into the sand.

I stare at him.

“Cool. Love the leadership in this apartment.”

My phone buzzes on the bed.

I almost ignore it.