Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
LENNON
The headaches come back something fierce.
Brutal and unrelenting, I spend the first half of the week back at Jake’s locked away in the guest room with the shades drawn and a sleep mask covering my eyes because it’s still too bright.
All I can do is lay in bed, miserable, and listen to audiobooks because my eyes are too pained to be able to even read.
Right back where I began.
My only solace is that things are starting to get fixed for August.
Hopefully he’s getting right back to where he was before I landed like a tornado in his life. We can forget we ever met each other and it can be… just like it never happened.
Sometimes, in the long dark of the day, or the even longer dark of night, it does feel like a dream.
A wonderful dream I came up with all in my head, as an escape from this bleak nightmare.
Especially since Jake is… kind again.
He cooks me meals. Set up a big water tank beside my bed and always reminds me how important it is to hydrate. Brings me coffee in the morning.
It’s hard to remember that I hate him when he’s my lifeline to survival.
If that’s what this is.
I’m not sure anymore.
I only drag myself out of bed on Thursday at noon for work. And even then, it’s more like I drag the work into bed with me. As in, I pull about four pillows into a perfect configuration behind me so I don’t have to hold any part of my body up, and then pull my laptop desk onto my lap.
And feel immediately tired from the exertion and like going back to sleep.
I breathe out and let my eyes shut.
Ugh, God. The headache pain has me nauseous and brain fogged as all get out today. My body is clearly not happy with me that I’ve come back here.
I listened to The Body Keeps the Score yesterday and it all suddenly clicked about why I have these bouts of my body absolutely rebelling like this.
Trauma has to have somewhere to go, and it will eat you alive from the inside out if it has to.
My body is screaming at me that we don’t want to be here.
Sorry, body. For the moment, we just gotta work through the pain.
I fire up my laptop and blink through my small open eye-slits, allowing in all the light I can.
I remember the first time I got sick. Just a few years after we’d gotten married and I was already so unhappy and restless. It was a heartbreaking time all around. I’d gotten pregnant but wasn’t sure how I felt about it. I was trying so hard to be happy.
When the migraines hit, I thought it was just pregnancy hormones.
I lost the pregnancy not much later. It was barely into the second trimester. Jake didn’t know why I cried so much, but he was still attentive when I was so ill. We got closer for a little while afterwards. Shared grief, you know. I felt horribly guilty. Like it was my fault.
Especially when the migraines returned on and off, usually when I was stressed. One more pregnancy lost, further along.
How was it not my fault, if I was the one allowing the stress to get to my body like that?
Sometimes, in my darkest moments, I thought I deserved the pain. I had done that to what might have become my babies.
Even now, the old grief comes back.
I almost close the lid, curl up and pull my covers back over my head.
But then a notification pops up.
From Minecraft. Minecraft Realms: Eighth Month has Invited you to join “Sixty-Two Degrees”
I laugh in disbelief and through the pounding haze in my brain, joy spikes.
Of course. Oh my God. Oh my God.
I’ve been so much more out of it than I thought.
It’s not like I forgot him. Just—
My external mouse flies off the side of the lap desk in my haste to click the little icon.
“Shit!” I hiss, grabbing it even as my fingers shake when I click accept and open Minecraft. Which immediately starts running an update because I haven’t opened the game in so long. I’m shocked it’s still even installed.
After Sunday and the pain and brain fog that came crashing in immediately after that horrible service, I’ve been so, so out of it, it was easier to let August go than hold out any real hope.
The install takes forever.
Beyond forever.
It takes infinity long.
If I could crawl out of this bed, I’d get up and pace.
And then it opens!
The world loads one precious block at a time. Grass. Sky. Water. Then glass blocks glowing blue and purple beneath my feet.
I’ve spawned on the edge of a blocky little pool, and right in front of me is a sign with a little chest on the ground beside it that reads:
You are not crazy.
I remember too.
A sob erupts from my entire body, shaking me as I open the little wooden chest. Inside it is a written book.
I click to read it, and tears roll down my cheek.
[You are real.
The last month was real.
You laughed in the hot tub.
You jumped in the sixty-two-degree pool.
You called it approximately swimming.
He does not get to erase that.]
Tears are pouring down my cheeks and I have to lean over to where my tissue box is on the nightstand to blow my nose. I click around the map and discover a lovingly built, ridiculous, blocky recreation of our first night: the hot tub, the pool, the cabin, and a sign that says:
I WON’T COME CLOSER UNLESS YOU ASK.
BUT I’M HERE.
I cry and cry and cry and for the first time in days, feel like myself again.