CHAPTER THIRTY
TWENTY YEARS OLD
· · ·
Sophomore year starts the way junior year of high school ended.
With me doing math I don’t want to do.
I know this pattern.
I’ve lived inside this pattern.
I have the scar tissue to prove it.
The difference is this time I’m twenty years old and eight hundred miles away and I feel so alone.
No driveway to sit on in the dark.
No way to just show up and make him remember I exist.
So I call.
Sometimes he answers.
Sometimes he doesn’t.
When he answers he’s sweet.
That’s what makes it so hard.
When he’s there he’s really there — his voice low and easy, making me laugh at something stupid, asking about Mara and Jonah, remembering things I told him weeks ago.
· · ·
Like nothing is wrong.
Like I’m imagining the gaps.
Maybe I’m imagining the gaps.
I’m not imagining the gaps.
· · ·
October.
He calls me out of nowhere on a Tuesday afternoon.
No warning.
Just — my phone ringing and his name on the screen.
I answer so fast I fumble it.
“Hey,” he says.
Loving again.
Easy.
Like the last two weeks of shorter calls didn’t happen.
“Hey,” I say back.
Trying not to sound like what I am, which is a person who has been waiting for this call like oxygen.
We talk for two hours.
Two hours.
He tells me about a car that came into the shop —fill it in here because I don’t know cars— and the owner who cried actual tears when they finished restoring it.
He tells me his professor gave him a B on a paper he worked on for three weeks and he’s been quietly furious about it ever since.
“Write a better paper,” I say.
“I wrote a great paper.”
“You always think you wrote a great paper.”
“Because I always write a great paper.”
“Cassian you got a C minus on your history final junior year.”
“That was a different time. I’ve grown.”
I laugh.
He laughs.
And I think — see.
See. This is real. This is us. The rest of it is just life getting in the way and we’re okay and —
He says he has to go.
Just like that.
Close to me the whole time and then — I have to go, talk soon, goodnight.
· · ·
Gone.
I sit with my phone in my hand.
Talk soon.
He doesn’t call for nine days.
Nine days.
I count them.
Of course I count them.
I have been counting days since I was sixteen years old.
I don’t reach out first.
Not this time.
I’m trying something new.
I’m trying to not be the only one reaching.
· · ·
It lasts four more days.
Then I text.
Hey. Miss you.
He reads it immediately.
Responds six hours later.
Miss you too. Crazy week. Talk soon.
I read it standing in the dining hall line.
I’m not hungry anymore.
I get food anyway because Mara is watching me from the table with the specific expression that means she’s about to say something I don’t want to hear.
I sit down.
She doesn’t say anything.
Just hands me a fork.
I eat.
· · ·
November.
He posts something on Instagram.
I see it at midnight when I can’t sleep.
The way you always see things at midnight when you can’t sleep because your brain has decided that’s exactly when you should see them.
When it’s dark and you’re alone and barely hanging on.
He’s at some party.
Someone’s house.
People I don’t know.
He looks fine.
More than fine.
He looks like a person who is out on a Friday night being young and alive and not thinking about anyone eight hundred miles away staring at their ceiling.
He looks good.
I hate that he looks good.
I love that he looks good.
These two things coexist and neither of them help me.
· · ·
I take two pills.
Put my phone face down.
Stare at the ceiling.
At 2am I pick the phone back up.
Open Instagram.
Look at the photo again.
Put the phone down.
Pick it up.
I’m not going to text him.
I’m not going to be that person.
I’m not going to text him.
I text him.
Saw your photo. Looks fun. Miss you.
He reads it.
Doesn’t respond.
I take another pill.
Eventually the ceiling stops being so loud.
· · ·
He calls the next afternoon like nothing happened. His voice filling the room the way it always does.
And I answer.
Of course I answer.
He sounds like himself and I let it carry me and we talk for an hour and when we hang up I feel okay.
Better than okay.
I feel like I made it bigger than it was.
I feel like an idiot for the texts.
For the photo.
For the ceiling at 2am.
I’m fine.
We’re fine.
· · ·
December.
I go home.
And he’s there.
He’s so there.
Like the last three months didn’t happen.
Like he pulled himself all the way back just to show me — see, I’m here, I’m always here, stop worrying —
And I believe it.
God help me I believe it every single time.
We spend two weeks like we’re making up for something.
His hands and his voice and the window every night.
My dad laughing at the table.
The garden in winter.
The movie room.
All of it.
· · ·
One night I have my face pressed into his neck and his arms are around me and he smells exactly like he always smells and I think —
this is what’s real.
Everything else is just distance.
Distance is just geography.
Geography is just a problem with a solution.
We have a solution.
We’ll figure it out.
· · ·
January.
I go back.
This time without my own hoodie.
I left it on purpose.
Some stupid superstitious thing.
Like if I leave something here he has to still be mine.
Like it’s a placeholder.
He texts me a photo of it on my desk three days later.
You forgot this.
I left it.
Why.
So you’d have something of mine. So you’d remember I’m coming back.
A long pause.
Longer than it should be for what I said.
I know you’re coming back, Ro.
That’s it.
That’s the whole response.
I sit with it.
I don’t know why it lands the way it does.
It should be reassuring.
He said he knows.
But something about the way it’s worded.
Not I can’t wait or I’ll be here.
Just —
I know.
Like it’s information he already has.
Settled.
Decided.
Like it’s not something he’s looking forward to.
Just something he knows is going to happen.
I close my phone and try to breathe.
· · ·
February.
The texts stop coming from his side almost entirely.
I’m sending everything.
Good mornings and stupid memes and photos of things that remind me of him — a car I don’t know the name of but I know he likes, a dumb fish at the aquarium exhibit near campus Jonah dragged me to, a song that came on shuffle that I know he likes.
He reacts to them sometimes.
A like.
A thumbs up.
A thumbs up.
Are you kidding me?
· · ·
I send him a voice memo at two in the morning on a night when the pills aren’t enough and the quiet is too loud and I’ve been staring at the hoodie I stole from him because I caved like I always cave.
Hey. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty. I’m really not. I just — I miss you and I don't know what’s happening and I’m scared to ask because every time I ask it gets worse somehow. So I’m just saying it into your voicemail instead. I miss you. I love you. I’m not doing okay. Please call me.
He doesn’t call.
He texts the next morning.
· · ·
I heard your message. I’m sorry. I’ve just been really in my head lately. I’ll call tonight.
He doesn’t call that night.
Or the next.
I stop sending good mornings.
Not as punishment.
Just because I’ve run out of ways to reach across eight hundred miles to someone who has decided, quietly, without telling me, to be unreachable.
I know this.
I’ve always known this.
The wall.
That door.
The thing that’s been there since he was eleven years old and I’ve been climbing my whole life.
I thought we were past it.
I thought after everything — the truth, his father, the hospital, the goodbye, the daisies, the summer together —
I thought we had finally, actually gotten past it.
I was wrong.
Or maybe — and this is the thought that keeps me up at night more than anything else —
maybe the wall was never about me.
Maybe it never had anything to do with whether he loved me.
Maybe it’s just what he does when things get heavy.
When the dark gets too dark.
When the stuff he’s never dealt with, never actually dealt with, comes back around.
Maybe he’s drowning over there.
And I can’t reach him.
And he won’t let me.
I could deal with it if he would just let me in.
· · ·
March.
I send one more text.
Cassian. I’m not okay. I need you to answer me. Please.
He reads it at 11am.
At 9pm he responds.
I know. I m sorry. I’m trying.
I stare at those two words.
I’m trying.
Something about that.
Not I’m fine or I’ll call or I’ve got you.
I’m trying.
Like it’s costing him something.
Like there’s something in the way.
Like he’s fighting something I can’t see from here.
Or maybe I’m too much and he just can’t deal with me right now.
· · ·
I want to ask.
I want to call and say — what are you trying, what is it, let me in, please let me in, I have been standing at your door my entire life because I love you.
I don’t.
Because I know him.
I know that when he says I’m trying he means it.
And I know that pushing right now will make the door close faster.
So I wait.
I take two pills and get in bed and pull the hoodie over my face and breathe him in.
He’s still there in the fabric.
Faintly.
Getting fainter.
I close my eyes.
I’m so tired of waiting.
I’m so tired of being the only one who refuses to let go.
But I don’t know how to be anything else.
I’ve never known how to be anything else.
Not when it comes to him.
Not ever.