Page 258 of Breathe Like Hell

He contributed so much.

Why is he the one dead and not me?

If I’d stayed in the truck…

If I’d waited thirty more seconds…

If I’d let him respond to me…

What sort of predator would sacrifice himself for his own idiotic prey?

The cries came back, even when I tried to suppress them, as if my lungs would never be rid of the need to scream forever. Everything hurt all the time, and I wasn’t strong enough to keep up with it.

Had he still been angry?

Had he thought I’d hated him?

Had he died believing that?

I wanted to take my last words to him back.

I wanted to take my anger back.

I wanted one more ordinary argument.

I’d walked away because I thought there would be another chance to return. I’d stupidly believed there would be another tomorrow. That I could fuck up and he could fuck up and we’d always get time to fix it, even if fixing it eventually meant the end of our relationship. I never thought it would be the end of his life.

I could barely even remember what we’d been fighting about anymore.

Only that it had somehow been important enough to leave.

And I’d spend the rest of my life trying to outrun a decision that had lasted less than a minute.

I kept replaying the fight as if there was a version where I didn’t walk away.

I could still hear my own footsteps, in my memory. Boots on asphalt. Pulse pounding in my ears.

It was almost like a countdown.

Tires skidding off the road, my breath caught in my chest, headlights bearing down on me…

I flipped over to a different page in my journal, furiously wiping the tears from my hot cheeks, sniffling, choking back my sobs. This page was covered in ideas, most of them crossed out now. When I came to this tree for the first time, I started to think maybe I could bring Micah back in some way. There had to be a reason it shone for me.

I’d tried bringing different objects here, things I thought would’ve been important to him. His degrees, his dissertation, one of his shirts I slept in. I laid them on the ground one by one and waited. I prayed. I cried. I hugged the tree. I begged to a God I knew didn’t exist for Micah to come back. I even begged the God I did know existed; four archangels watching unsympathetically.

Nothing ever worked.

Mason went to the Syndesmos once, just to confirm again that this was irreversible.

It was.

It didn’t matter that Micah was the one who gave his life for me; I couldn’t bring him back because of that. I had no special connection to him, other than the fact that I’d been transformed by him. Parts of him still lived inside of me. The first drops of ichor in my blood had blossomed from the neon he breathed into my lungs. But nothing else beyond that tied me to him.

Mason told me the only person I could possibly have a connection to was the angel that’d turned me into one of the Angelakia in the first place, but that wasn’t what mattered to me. I only cared about the person who’d transformed me into an angel.

I shut my journal without adding any new ideas to my pointless list of ways to bring Micah back to life, then laid down on my side, resting my head on my arm. Maybe there were more objects I could try in the future. There had to be.

My eyes blinked a few times as I tried to clear my vision of tears.