Chapter 76
Mireya
Play - Heartburn by Wafia
Same place
For the past few weeks I’ve been clean. No drugs, no alcohol, nothing.
I’ve been stone cold sober. My routine has settled down, training comes first, then everything else after.
Classes, moments with Hayzel and Blue. Ethan asking me to study with him before the final exams. The rhythm of my life here at St. Ellesta is familiar enough that I don’t question my place here anymore.
Only sometimes, in the pauses between movements, my mind slips for a fraction of a second and lands somewhere I never stay long enough to understand. It’s strange how the same mind that learned how to forget, still aches to remember.
Was it that terrible? Terrible enough for a part of me to decide I was safer without the memory?
Do I even want to know…
It’s easier not to name things out loud or in my thoughts. Naming them makes them real enough to lose control. And I’d be damned if I lost control now, especially when I’m so close to achieving everything that I’ve set out to do.
I like what’s happening with Damien. I do.
There are hours that feel borrowed now, as if I am only temporarily inside my own life. And they always feel peaceful when I’m with him. So I savor them slowly. They might end, they might be temporary but they’re real now and that’s all that matters to me.
By the time the weekend arrives, I am already in motion again, already doing what I always do, and pack to go back home.
My father is still somewhere out there at sea, moving from port to port for months. He’s coming back soon, but I’ve stopped measuring time around his return, and I don’t know what to do with the fact that things feel quieter when he’s gone.
Milo talks too much, laughs too easily, reaches for me, hugs me and makes life more bearable. Damien is there too. He drives, he waits. He is… present, in the same space, as if it has always made sense for him to be included in parts of my life that were never meant to overlap with anything else.
And it always ends up the same way, we end up at Heath’s coffee shop before going to classes again on Monday.
We talk and he always picks up a new CD from there to try.
We listen to it on the way back to St. Ellesta.
It just happens the way repeated things start to feel inevitable and comforting.
Same table, same distance, and same presence by your side.
The case exists somewhere behind it all. It’s held back, as if we both agreed without saying it that there are hours where certain things are not allowed to exist apart from us. And today, we came back earlier to sit on the cliff. Blue picked him as his personal heater now.
He’s still trying to understand what’s wrong with me and all I want to do is show him and let him decide if it's worth the pain. But instead, I draw and let him occupy my mind.
The flowers look more alive now, less petals are missing, and I’m not forcing it out of me.
We stayed there for hours, and then it was over. When he gets up to leave for his first class he gives me a small note shaped as a star. And it makes me smile.
“Don’t open it now, wait until I leave.”
I nod stupidly amused by this, “Okay.”
He disappears from my vision and I look down without thinking much of it at first, expecting nothing. Then I see it as I open the star.
Same place, same hour.
-D