Page 197 of These Tears

Whatever else happened between us, I chose that. I chose him last night.

The memory leaves a kind of pressure behind as my eyes climb back over his stomach and the ink travelling towards his beard, until my eyes zero in on the script on the inside of his upper arm.

The one I’d glimpsed a fraction of in prison and tried not to stare at too long. The one I’ve been aching to decipher ever since, as though the words might explain the man.

I lean over him, squinting in the low light, heart hammering softly. My hair slips over my shoulder, brushing his chest, but he doesn’t wake.

At first, the lines are just fragments in the dark. I blink and bend closer, following one word into the next—

—and it hits.

My lungs forget what they’re meant to do.

The line attributed to Rumi – the one I’d scribbled on the back of the first photo I ever sent him. It sits there in stark black cursive. Etched into his skin.

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’

I can’t move. I can’t even think.

He didn’t just keep the photo. He took something from it into his skin.

Something from me.

In that instant, as my eyes sweep over his beard and find the false peace of his sleeping face, the monster blurs. The kidnapper fades. My mind rushes to fill the space with meaning.

That I’m his weakness. The one thing he clung to when there was nothing else to grab onto. The one thing he let in. The one thing he wants to burn away, but still keep.

I mattered before I knew I mattered. Enough to mark himself with my words. Enough that some treacherous part of me wants to believe I was the light—

No.

My hand covers my vision. I let the coolness of my fingers banish the spiral I always fall through.

I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep turning scars into shrines just because I want them to mean something beautiful.

For all I know, he took the quote because it belonged to Rumi, not me. Because it spoke to him long before I ever did.

My hand drags down my face, wiping away the anger and the ache to make myself important in his life. Make myself the crack. The light. The exception.

God, Leandra. Stop.

Stop making a prison out of poetry because it feels warmer than reality.

With my camera safely around my neck, I slip from the room before my thoughts start building temples anew.

The battery icon flashes red when I turn it on. Almost dead. I thumb it off again to save what little charge is left and let it fall back against my chest as I enter the dark of the hallway.

The house is still caught in that blue October hush. The sitting room glows faintly around me as I click on the kitchen light, starting the coffee machine. Reindeer hides are folded over the backs of chairs, woven Sámi bands edge cushions in red, yellow and deep blue. Duodji knives – as Inga had called them – and carved cups are arranged on a shelf with a silent pride of things made by hands that knew winter.

Before the battery on my camera dies, I move through the space carefully, stealing the imprint of peace with my shutter, past the wool blankets and the low table still cluttered with empty glasses from last night. And finally, I circle back into the kitchen, where the smell of coffee grounds, cinnamon and sugar is baked into the walls.

The little green light of the coffee machine blinks at me.

One thing at a time, Leandra, I tell myself in my father’s voice. Mug. Coffee. Spoon.

With my camera settled atop the counter, I pry open the first tin. Last night comes back in a single flash. Then another. My palm presses flat to the counter until they pass.

Two scoops of coffee into the filter.