Bash #2
She takes it, and I help her up, even though she didn’t need it. I think we both just needed the contact. Something safe. Something that was nothing but doesn’t feel like nothing. We fall into step beside each other, walking on the sidewalk that leads to the middle of campus.
“I’m proud of you,” I tell her after the silence lasts a little too long. “That was a lot back there. You didn’t have to share any of it, but you did.”
She gives me a look I can’t read fully. “Is that why you ran off? Because of what I said?”
I bite down on the truth. “No,” I say. “And…yes. But not because—” I rake a hand over my hair and exhale. “Not because it was too much, or because you were too much. It just…hit me, and hurt a little.”
“Why?” she asks, curiously.
Because I care about you in a way that has rules wrapped around it. Because I hate that the world did this to you. Because I know what some of those rooms look like, and I would bulldoze you a better one if I could.
But I swallow all of that.
“Because I care when any person’s story sounds like that.” The second I say it, I hear how safe it sounds and hate it. “I wish I could take those kinds of things out of the world. People don’t deserve it.”
“Oh,” she says. The corner of her mouth kicks up like she wants to smile and doesn’t. “Just…any person? Any stranger?”
I know what she’s asking…and screw it. I can’t say the thing outright, but I can tell the truth around it.
“It’s not quite the same as any stranger,” I say, smirking. “But I can’t technically say that…so I said it how I had to.”
She lets that sit.
“Hm, yeah…that’s how I felt hearing about your sister. I hated that pain for you…I mean, the only experience I have with suicide is a traumatic one and then my own…but I still understand in a lot of ways. I understand your pain, and I understand hers…”
I hate the thought of where my sister got in her mind to get to the point of wanting to end it…and I hate it just as much thinking about how Lydia was there too.
I swallow the emotions, trying to keep the conversation lighter. “Yeah…she was my best friend. We were so close in age, and we did everything together, told each other everything…it was really hard losing her.”
“Camilla was mine,” she tells me, offering the hand that says she understands too well what that feels like.
“She was my best friend, too. Well, more like a mother figure, honestly. She was five years older than me. She’d been raising me practically my whole life, even before our parents died…
and especially after when we were in and out of foster homes together.
” She gets quieter, almost whispering the next part.
“She was seventeen. She was about to turn eighteen. She was about to get out of the system, and promised me she would get a place and get custody of me…get us both out. But then she…left me.”
“What was she like?” I ask.
That stops her. She looks at me like nobody’s ever asked her that before.
“Funny,” she says, and when she says it, something in her unclenches, softens up a little bit.
I think I even see a slight smile as she thinks about her.
“Bossy. Super protective, but like super cool, too. I looked up to her a lot. I don’t have many childhood memories…
but all the ones I do remember have her in them. ”
“She sounds like an amazing big sister.”
“What was Isabel like?” she asks back.
“She was loud and fun…and always singing,” I say immediately.
“Always the wrong lyrics too, and no shame. She made every road trip a concert, and none of us knew the songs by the time we got there because she made up her own.” I smile into it, and it hurts in a good way.
“She borrowed all of my hoodies and never gave them back…and she was always the quietest but brightest in the room.”
“We probably would have been friends then,” she says, and now we’re both smiling.
Her smile drops a little. “I’m sorry about your sister. I hate that I understand what it’s like. That feeling of finding someone you love…not here anymore.”
“I’m sorry, too. It’s one of the worst things to go through, losing someone you love.” I pause, looking off. “Feels like we actually do understand each other on some deeper level, might not have been all in my head after all.”
She looks over at me, confused, and I realize I said those words out loud.
“What do you mean by that?”
I shake my head, trying to play it off. “I don’t know. I mean, it’s just that every time I’ve seen you…since even the first time…I’ve felt connected to you, like I knew you even though we were complete strangers.”
She looks at me, and I could melt from that look on her face.
“I don’t feel like we’re strangers anymore,” she says.
Danger. The good kind with bad rules attached. The kind I want to lean into without my ethics throwing a shoe at my head.
I want to be more than strangers…even if it’s just as friends, even if it’s just being a part of her story in some small, unimportant way…but not even that’s allowed.
I want to say screw the ethics, screw the group…but whatever this is with her…is delicate. It’s not something I want to risk becoming another thing that brings her pain in any way. I feel this need to protect her, even if it’s from me.
“Um, I should probably get back,” I say, and I hate myself for it even though I know I need to do it. “And we should…keep group stuff in the group. Safe on purpose, you know?”
Her mouth does a little downturn that she tries to fix before I can see it, but I do. “Right,” she says. “Boundaries.”
“Boundaries,” I echo, as if it’ll stick in my head if we both say it out loud.
She nods, and I can see the disappointment in it. “Goodnight, Bash.”
“Goodnight, Lydia.”
She turns and walks towards the dorms. Everything in me wants to pull her back, keep her here longer, say something reckless, throw out all the rules just to get ten more minutes in her world…but I don’t. I just watch as she walks away.
I pass the chapel near my dorm and sit on the cold stone steps because it feels like the kind of night where you need to take a second longer alone with the thoughts.
I’m not going to lie to myself and say I don’t like her.
I do; I just don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know what I want to do with that, or what I can do with that.
So I do what I do with anything I don’t know what to do with…
and throw it up to God, hoping he catches it and gives me the ‘in your face’ kind of sign to help…
that he almost always conveniently never chooses to use with me.