One More Time
Summer
I wake up tired, curled to the right, always on the couch.
The missing buttons of the cushion are always the first thing I see, still opening my eyes, still facing the world.
It’s the weekend, so I can close my eyes again, uncurl to my back. Shift to my left. Shift to my stomach. Repeat the spin until something I can’t pinpoint gets me off the couch.
I always get off the couch, never knowing when or if the day will come when I don’t.
I sit a moment, several moments, for several breaths, reacclimating to another day, to the same day, smoothing my hair out of my face to be able to breathe the sad, stale air better.
I still straighten my curls. I still take the time to shower. I still take the time to make my face into something presentable. I still put food in my body.
I still move through the parts of my life that keep moving, never knowing when or if the day will come when I’m not.
Get up.
My own push is becoming harder to listen to, but once I’m standing and swiping up and into my phone, I see a text from the thing that would get me off the couch if I didn’t myself.
Get the squash. I’m on my way.
My best friend is a bigger foodie than I am. I think she only keeps me around for my cooking skills. Ha. Ha. Guess I can feed someone who appreciates the effort.
She’s not a Clara, but she is a Clarissa. And though Clara could be a nickname for her actual name, call her any nickname and get wrecked, as she warned me.
And either she’s better than I am at getting someone out of bed or I’m just too stubborn to keep anything covered but my dark circles.
I bruised the hell out of my tailbone two years ago, when I was play chasing Ferguson, our cat of just one year before he died, and slipped and went down hard. It hurt to walk or sit or bend in any kind of way, but no pain in my ass kept me still.
Why do I have to be so stubborn?
Or just not well with idle time. Puts me in my head and I’ve spent years trying to stay out of it.
I move through the morning, that’s actually the afternoon, doing the washing, the clothing, the brushing, the straightening, wishing I could wash out my brain.
My socks scuff through the vacant kitchen and I make my favorite coffee, a momentary joy, watching the brown liquid trickle quick and easy from the Keurig.
I swallow hot sips leaned into the mini island, relishing the burn as it passes through my chest, a momentary warmth over my heart.
I sip and stare at the reflection of the shadow version of myself staring back through the dulled shine in the marble.
In the silence.
I swallow it all, the last sip too cooled to feel.
The clock ticks, and our bedroom door stays closed.
His bedroom door. Just a lump in our bed the size of my dry swallow. His bed now. I’ve been run off to the couch.
The cup clangs onto the island as I let it drop from my hands, then rub both over my face and up through my hair, pull, then swipe up the cup and swing around to the sink. I shove up the toggle on the faucet and water sprays strong into the cup, the force sending some onto the counter.
Every part of me clenches as the cup clangs into the sink and the toggle slams down, the washcloth now squeezed in my hand swirling the tiny puddles into streaks.
I release a long exhale and pause, just breathing as I come back to my body.
I spin back to the island, my eyes landing on the couch, on where my head takes me in the dark. To the place and time I felt real light, when there was no end to possibility.
I’m twenty-three and I’m still haunted by my seventeenth summer. It’s been a recurring heckle.
How many times will my mind take me back there, to that town, where things went so right and so wrong, before I let my body follow?
The only thing I follow is an obstacle course of empty beer bottles when I breach the bedroom. I know the steps by heart, padding and hedging through, hoping to see a miracle.
But that would mean it’s a different day. And that’s too much to ask for.
What’s so wrong with this life? Everything.
Get the squash.
I feel a phantom smile at my lips as I fall against the glass door to the small balcony, the stretch of the corners as they stay flat. I love squash. I love squash even more from my own garden, knowing my mom would be proud of me for claiming my green thumb a few years ago. But it doesn’t fill my heart to look at them anymore. Just a twinge remains, a numbness to good and certainty beneath brain chemistry’s bullshit.
I close my eyes, hearing rustling branches and chirping crickets, feeling a steady phantom arm against mine.
And then I open my eyes before I can slip back into my imagination, back into a life I don’t have, back into the habits I phased out of my system at seventeen. Ignore the pull as the clear sign it is that I need a change. Ignore that pictures in my mind now won’t take me as far as they did then because I’m consumed by static, too inactive for an active imagination.
If this happens, I’ll leave; if that happens, I’ll leave. Random and foreseeable things.
Like if my forehead feels cool when I remove it from this glass, that I tell myself in the moment to get me moving in a different direction, to get a bag out the door.
But I can’t leave.
But I still tell myself those random and foreseeable things as he wastes away in this room, while I push through the infectious struggle to not waste away outside of it. It’s a disease, and it spreads to everyone around him. Aside from the friends he made here, during college, who fell off when he did, I’ve been the only one around him.
And unlike back then, when I helped Adam heal his broken heart, before he helped me heal mine, I can’t now.
I— we had another time of our lives our last year of high school and all through university. He gave me something more.
Then something more was just gone.
Something more was too much and not enough in the split second he lost everything he was working toward.
He wasn’t driving, so his head was spinning him lower.
He wasn’t dodging trains; he was dodging living.
He wasn’t feeling. He wasn’t being .
And I’ve tried to be his light in the dark, but in doing so, I’ve been dimmed too.
One more time.
It’s always one more time.
“Stop hovering,” he says, a grate in his voice that skims at my skin, pausing my opened mouth before I can start trying. He’s on his stomach, staring out toward the balcony. “I’m awake.”
I swallow, prepare my own voice. “Are you getting out of bed too?” It’s just a question.
“I get out of bed.” Defensive, anyway.
“Then get up.” My defense counters his.
“And do what?” he mutters out as he turns the other way, his shift running the sheet down. I’m more familiar with the lines of his back now than I am his face. His longer hair. His shrinking muscle mass. He needs to eat. I need to get the squash.
I inhale a cushioning breath. “Be with me?”
I catch the slightest shift in his shoulders, but he keeps his back to me and his eyes away in silence as he hugs to his pillow. Not to me.
How can I love someone and hate how they are? I’m doing that again now.
“You used to love looking out this glass with me.” I was pulling, always pulling, for him to turn back around, to see me and this life we’ve built, just to be snagged.
“It’s just a view.” Another mutter.
My silent laugh squeezes and burns as I give a glance to the glass, because I get it. He’s right. But this is wrong. I don’t want to get it.
“Adam, you need to talk to—”
“What’s anyone gonna do for me?” He’s whipped his stare to mine, tired but flared. “Unless this miracle worker can give me back my future…”
“You still have a future with me.” No warning, no threat that he could lose that too reaches my voice, but he almost gives me an argument before he thinks better of what I’m guessing he’s thinking— that’s not enough —and clenches his jaw shut.
Then he releases a breath like he’s been holding it, reminding me to release mine. “I can’t go in these circles.” His eyes flare again. “There’s no point.” He shakes his head at me, seeking his pillow again. “You weren’t there.”
“What about how I’d been there after? And now .” The understanding. The patience. Through his distance and his pain. The physical therapy. . .
He smacks at the bed as he pushes up, both of us coming alive at the burst, a second of revival. Yes. Care. “This same fucking—”
I cut in my agreement, wanting to smack my hands at something, but all I have is glass. “Yeah, the same—”
“—nagging.” He drops back against the wall, adjusting the sheet over his hips.
I actually haven’t nagged in a while. That takes energy I don’t always have.
“Look at me,” he says, and I do. I see a lost and grieving man, who still has so much going for him if he’d give himself another chance, get up and take a real look around. “Look at you,” he says next, a tone of being blinded to anyone but himself, a scale of who has it worse.
The only thing worse is his eyes. Those once bright hazels hold something darker, hazier. He’s less here than I am, but I’m the one who has to have a grip. I have to have and keep a job while he just lies here, because this apartment is expensive. And in Adam’s dad’s way of showing he cares for our troubles, he’s been helping me pay the other half of the rent. Which has honestly been an added anxiety waiting for that to go south. It’s more than my own father would do, but things with both our parents have a price.
I press my spine into the jamb of the door to feel some other pain that isn’t from him, from this. “If it weren’t for me, you really would lose everything . The world doesn’t stop just because you’ve stopped living in it.” I move closer to the bed as he stays still, a throb in my back and in my heart. “You expect me to just always be here for you when you’re not here for me. I can’t do this anymore.” His eyes sharpen on mine now, wide and vulnerable, as I stare back the same. “I can’t carry…our life on my own anymore.”
He drops his head back with a thud that echoes through me, his hold on the sheet, on himself, as tight as the one I have on myself too. “You act like you don’t have anything or anybody—”
“So do you,” I argue back at the same time he says, “You have Clarissa.”
“It’s our life,” I stress more, differently, as he slides back down to his pillow, burying himself in what might as well be his tomb. “Me and you.” My voice shakes with the words. “But thank God for our best friends, something you also still have.” My legs have hit the side of the bed, my hold slipping. “And you have me.” I give the assurance, the reminder, knowing it’s a fifty-fifty shot I get one back. “I’m supposed to have you too. You’re my boyfriend.” Another reminder, his still frame blurring around the edges. “You’re my future. This can’t be…I can’t be ignored , Adam.”
My eyes squeeze shut against seventeen-year-old Summer, squeezing at the sting, until another smack to the bed has my eyes jolting back open.
“Talk to me when your dream dies,” Adam says, sitting up again, his hold gone with mine, leaning toward me with anger and desperation and pleas. “Talk to me when a shit-faced idiot plows into you and destroys everything you’ve worked for. Talk to me when a job you loathe is what you have to look forward to now. Talk to me when your father is your future.”
He takes a big breath to my gasped one, then he falls back to the bed, his lungs heaving, as tears threaten to fall down my heated face.
I kick one of the beer bottles closest to me, the clattering sound bringing his focus back to me. “ Drinking was the cause of this.”
Adam was driving home from our graduation celebration when some guy, who had one too many and got behind the wheel, crashed into his car. I was on my way back with Clarissa. Both survived, no major injuries, except for his. He did get the worst of that. That accident took him from the game.
He had it. He was right there . Now no one will take him anymore. He’s a liability.
What a trash twist of fate life pulled.
I was angry with him. I was sad with him.
I was numb with him.
I went through it all with him and I’m still going through it all because of him.
“Maybe it can be the end of it,” he mumbles to the ceiling, then grimaces at himself.
I spin for the glass door, holding to life by the handle. “If you wanted to drink yourself to death, you would’ve done it before now.” And through a strained throat, I bite out, “Talk to me when you remember this isn’t just about you .” I yank open the door as “I love you too” scoffs from my mouth, and I disappear into and occupy myself with collecting this damn squash.
“I love you,” he says back, like an answer, small stresses as I’m walking back through.
I stop at the door and face him. Same position, with his head tilted at me, his arm stretched out toward me across the bed.
I hear the but and I clear my dry throat, swallow, and gesture to him. “You should shower.”
That flare returns to his eyes, but now with a warmed quality, as he hears my together . It’s not the first time I’ve tried to get him out of bed with a sexual advance. I can shower twice if that’s what works. But there’s always a fifty-fifty shot of it working here. To not completely lose what we’ve built all these years.
It’s been too much time to be for nothing. To not try for another momentary relief from our coils.
All while a little voice says, you’ve already lost .
Adam just stares.
Then he blinks toward the ceiling with a sigh, no movements and no words.
And I suck up my emotions and carry my squash to the kitchen, leaving him to himself with an empty click of the door.
Because I don’t have a choice.
Because I was trained for this life.