nineteen
It’s like the dam has burst open. After that desperate, earth-shattering kiss, that’s all we do. We kiss.
Spring break comes and goes. We kiss all throughout it.
I sit next to her, I study. I kiss her. My grades soar; I am living on a cloud.
The weather gets warmer, and she exchanges her thick oversized sweaters for a cardigan. I rip it off her and kiss the corner of her bare shoulder. She smiles and blushes so furiously that I don’t do more than that. But I want to. I want to .
I want to take her to Boston and introduce her to my mom and grandpa, but she keeps changing the subject. I don’t press her. She has stopped reading so much, and I know that means that she no longer needs to escape.
She just sits next to me, gazing at the clouds, her eyes clear, her forehead unmarred by a frown. I am looking at her.
“I think I want…” she starts, then stops.
“What, baby?”
“No, I don’t want, I need to pray,” she says, and I shift uncomfortably. The woods are lovely and green, heavy with late spring. Wait, this is from a poem, right? No, concentrate. First Eden, then poetry. “Do you…? Can you teach me?” she asks.
“I no longer believe in God,” I shrug. “I used to, but I can’t believe in a God who would do that to my dad. To my mom. To my family.”
“I do believe,” she says. “I have to. But I don’t… I can’t pray to Him like people who love Him do. Loving Him and believing are two very different things.”
I choke on pure air. She is right.
But I don’t love Him either. In fact, if I still believed, loving Him would be the last thing I would be doing.
“I don’t know what it means to ‘have to’ believe, baby,” I tell her. “You either do, or you don’t. I don’t. I mean, how can I? My life is a joke. No one has ever cared about it; what is there to believe in?”
Still, she keeps looking at me with those huge eyes until I want to go down on my knees and beg her to tell me what I can do to make her stop hurting.
“Tons of horrible things happen to people every day,” she says finally, her eyes so sad my heart stutters. “But people still manage to stay good through them. To believe. To have faith and goodness in their hearts. I want... I want to be one of them. One of the strong ones.”
“Eden…” I murmur, my heart suddenly thrumming in my ears, an emotion so strong assaulting me, I don’t know what to do with it. “Eden, you are the strongest person I know. And the kindest. You…”
“Stop, please. I know what I am.”
“Oh? And what is that?”
“Someone who is scared. And I need to have something for when I get so scared. I need to know how to pray.”
It feel as if I’ve been knifed in the stomach.
“What are you scared of?” Tell me what’s happened to you .
She shrugs, as usual. “Just life in general. It’s scary.” She is lying.
“Listen, you tell me who scared you and I’ll annihilate them, ok?” I stand up, shaking from head to toe, meaning every single word.
And she… She looks at me for a minute. And then, of all things, she starts laughing.
“You,” she says, “are the sweetest person in the whole world.” I smile. “Ok. Can you teach me how to pray?”
I lean in and kiss her for a full minute.
“That there, was the best, most honest, most revered… the holiest prayer I’d ever sent up to the heavens in my entire life,” I whisper against her lips.
And that’s something, coming from someone who has been parroting prayers since he was old enough to talk.
…
Years later, when I go through all the documentaries about Eden’s case, I will find out that she was diagnosed with something called ‘skin hunger’, because she had been deprived of human touch and human contact since infancy. However, her therapist did not think it was as severe as it should have been for a child who grew up like she did.
I will read the comments underneath the articles, about how people pity Eden or marvel at this new weird medical thing, trying to make armchair diagnoses about who else has it. But I’ll only be thinking of all the times I pulled her in my arms and kept her there for hours. Of all the little kisses I dropped on her fingers randomly, without reason. Of how I used to play with the strands of her hair.
I touched her. A lot. And she let me.
I didn’t know she was starving for it—how could I? She didn’t know it herself. I only knew that I was. And in the end, it was my hunger that kept us both sane.
…
“What’s going on?” she asks me one day in May.
She’s sitting on my lap permanently now, my hand glued to her shoulder, but my mind is elsewhere. I shake myself out of my thoughts, but it’s pointless. She already saw it. She already saw me .
“You’re slipping away from me,” she says. “Where did you go?”
“You are literally sitting on my lap,” I murmur, trailing kisses behind her left ear. I run my fingers through the soft wisps of hair that have escaped her braid and the familiar shiver runs down my spine, just by touching her. “I’m not going anywhere baby.”
“You went inside your head,” Eden says, angling her head away from my lips to look into my eyes. Summer is beginning to bloom around us, its warmth making us reckless, drunk on sunlight. “You’re thinking.”
I lazily made a flower crown for her out of grass and daisies yesterday and she is still wearing it around her forehead. It makes her look like a dark-haired fairy that’s sent from a magical realm to steal my soul. Doesn’t need to steal it. She has it.
“Remind me to abstain from the activity in the future,” I smile, reaching for her fingers.
“Tell me,” she insists, and I sigh.
How can I hide from her when she can read me so well?
“School term ends soon,” I say and she stiffens. “It’s kind of messing with my head, you know? I’ll have to go back home to Boston, and even though I will definitely be driving back here every few days, I’m afraid that I might not…” I close my eyes. “I might not be able to see you every day.”
“Ok, so?”
I hug her more tightly. “So,” I say, “I won’t survive without you.”
“That is still weeks away,” she replies calmly. How can she be so calm? And then I notice her fingers trembling, and I know. She is not calm. She is just strong. “Let’s not waste any of our time together worrying about the summer.” She lifts her lips up to mine.
I lower my head until our mouths meet.
She is right , I think, losing myself in her lips. She is right.
But I turn out to be right as well. Just as abruptly as it had begun, the fairytale ends. Before we know it, summer break is upon us. And I’m not even remotely ready for it.
…
The day I am supposed to drive to Boston, we say our goodbyes and I promise to return the next day, or, worst case scenario, the day after. It already hurts, as if putting that much distance between us will split me in two .
I hold on to her and kiss her until we nearly both suffocate, gulping down our rising desperation.
“I’ll be back here tomorrow,” I tell her. “Or the day after. I’ll come back to you, baby.”
But I don’t.
It turns out that neither my mom or my brother, who is back from Juilliard, can stand to stay in our Boston house. The memories strangle us. That very first night, we can’t sleep a wink. We can barely breathe. So, a few hours after arriving at the house—it is no longer anyone’s home—we’re leaving it again. Before the sun is up, we’re on a plane to Europe.
And that’s how I lose my lifeline.
I lose Eden.