Chapter 54 Sloan
Sloan
Time passes in these funny little chunks when you’re healing.
You go forward. You go backward. Sometimes, you stay still.
I sit with my discomfort. I mother it, the way my mother never really managed to mother me.
I start a new medication, and I don’t hate it.
I let myself be sensitive. It might be a superpower like Bohdan said, after all.
I let things be too loud and too big and too much. I pop in my earplugs when they are.
Months go by and the seasons bleed.
The leaves on campus sprout—bright and green and beautiful. They fade under the autumn sun and they fall off, golden, but floating back down to the earth. They get covered in giant, fluffy snowflakes that make the world go quiet.
My students wish me a good winter break, and one of them gives me a book I haven’t read on the earliest records of psychiatric practices across civilizations.
Jay flies up from Philadelphia to put up my Christmas tree with me before a road trip. His dads take me out for dinner when they come to see the Nutcracker on New Year’s Eve.
Bohdan’s grandparents send me a birthday card.
Tia watches reality TV with me over FaceTime. She gets more into it than me and we buy tickets too many live recap podcast shows.
Talon stays on my couch for what’s supposed to be a month but turns into two when he meets a professional golfer named Gavin and falls in love.
Talon Valdez in love is a really special thing to witness, and I don’t tell him because it would go to his head—but I think it helps form new pathways in my brain and one of the ribs in my chest belongs to him now.
I practice saying I love you. I try it out on Gavin first when he brings me coffee cake from a new bakery down the street because I’m grading and couldn’t meet him there.
I say it casually, tossing the words out there, not even in a full sentence—just “love” and “you.” He ruffles my hair and he smiles.
Nothing bad happens, so I practice more and more.
And one night while the snow melts and the world outside shifts to spring again, when missing him and loving him feels so much more like joy than it does pain, I send a text message.
Sloan: Hi.
Bohdan: Hey.