CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CASSIAN
TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD
I want to tell you about Rowan Hayes.
Not what I did. Not the excuses or the reasons or all the ways I’ve been over it in my head.
Just him.
Because I think about him all the time and I don’t know what to do with that except to say it.
I have thought about him every day and every night since I was eight years old.
· · ·
I think about him at the shop when its slow and the radio is on and something comes through that sounds like a song he would’ve made fun of until he knew all the words.
I think about him in the dorm when its quiet in a way that feels intentional, like the quiet is specifically shaped like his absence.
I think about him at night which is always now, the sleeping-badly kind of night, the staring-at-the-ceiling kind and I run through it like I’m trying to find the place I could have done it differently.
There isn’t a place.
That’s what I keep coming back to.
There isn’t a place where a different version of me could have given him what he deserved, because the version of me that exists is the version made in that house, by those hands, in all that silence.
The empty version.
And that version of me is not safe. Not to love and be loved by. Not the way Ro loves which is completely, without reservation, with every part of himself handed over like it costs nothing.
It costs everything. And I didn’t want to take everything from him.
· · ·
I’ve watched what loving costs. I grew up inside what loving costs.
Ro is the most extraordinary person I have ever been near. Not because he’s perfect.
Because he is.
But he’s also anxious about everything and nothing and he overthinks and he loves too much and gives too much and holds on too long and makes himself smaller for people who don’t deserve the full size of him.
Especially me.
· · ·
But he wakes up every morning and tries. He has always woken up and tried. Through every panic attack and every dark day and every time the pills weren’t enough and every time I disappeared on him.
· · ·
He just keeps trying.
He is the most perfect person I have ever seen. And I have been slowly killing that for years. Not on purpose. Ever since I was a kid. But that has never made it better.
And I wake up every morning and give up.
I come from a dark house. That’s the only way I know how to say it. Dark house, dark hands, dark things that happened in dark rooms that I have never said out loud to anyone.
Not once. Not even to him. Especially not to him.
For so long I held it in. Because he would hold it. I know he would hold it. He would take every dark thing I have and press it against his chest and carry it without flinching and call it love.
And it would destroy him. The way it destroyed her.
My mother loved my father. She held everything he gave her all the dark, all the damage and she carried it until she couldn’t. I watched that. I grew up inside that.
I couldn’t watch it happen to Ro.
Perfect Ro. Who was all love and happiness.
I didn’t want to ruin him.
· · ·
And I am made of the same materials as him. I have his hands. His jaw. His same silence when something I wrong. I caught my own reflection once and had to leave the room.
I am not safe to love.
That’s what I know about myself. In my bones. In the place where other people keep their confidence.
I am not safe to love and Rowan Hayes is the safest person I have ever met and I have spent too long reaching for him anyway because I am selfish and he is the only light I have ever had and I cannot make myself stay in the dark. Even though I try.
· · ·
That’s the whole truth. I am weak. I know I’m weak. I know that every time I came back through that window I was choosing myself over him. Choosing the warmth of him over the safety of him. Choosing to be near the light even knowing what I do to light.
I dim things. I have always dimmed things.
Because the dark snuffs out the light.
I dimmed his mother's garden just by existing in it. She grew daisies and laughed and loved and she took me in like I was hers and I brought my dark house into her bright one and eventually she was gone and her garden needed someone else to tend it.
I know it's not healthy or logical for me to think that way.But its what I feel at 3am. When the drinking isn't working and the quiet is too loud and his texts are sitting on my phone and I can't bring myself to answer because I don't deserve him.
I thought maybe distance is the thing. Maybe if we're not right next to each other for a while, I can be better.
And I was better for a while.
Then my father called.
And I was eleven and small and scared and made of all of the wrong things again.
So I went quiet.
Because that's what I do.
What I've always done.
When the dark gets too heavy I close the door.
On everyone.
Even myself.
· · ·
I buy the bus ticket at 2am on a Tuesday.
I couldn't handle any more of the texts and the voice memos and seeing Ro get farther and farther away from himself.
Just Ro, eight hundred miles away, needing me to know he loves me before the day ended. Every day.
· · ·
Needing me to know because that’s what he does. He loves out loud. He has always loved out loud. And I have spent years receiving it in the dark where no one could see.
· · ·
I get on the bus.
I sit in the back and I don’t listen to anything and I watch the sky darkening outside the window and I think about all the nights I read his texts and put the phone face down. All the voice memos I listened to in the dark like prayers I couldn’t answer.
I miss you. I'm not okay. Please.
I knew. I always knew. I know you're not okay. That’s the thing I can’t outrun. I knew and I did nothing and I called it love and maybe it was but it was also cowardice and I have to live with the specific hurt of that forever.
Because I am the common denominator to all of Ro's problems. I am the reason he's never been fully okay.
I just want to see him.
I need proof that something good exists in the world.
· · ·
Georgetown is bigger than I imagined.
Of course it is. Everything about Ro’s life is bigger than what I come from. That’s the point. That’s always been the point.
I know his schedule. You memorize things about the people you love whether you want to or not. Wednesday afternoons. The bench by the fountain. He mentioned it enough in those first months the good months, when I still answered every call that I can close my eyes and picture it exactly.
· · ·
I find the fountain.
And I stop.
Because there he is.
Not at the bench standing near it, head thrown back, laughing.
Full body laughing. The kind he doesn’t do for everyone.
The kind that’s rare. I know how rare it is.
I’ve spent thirteen years trying to earn that laugh and here it is, free and easy and completely unguarded, aimed at someone who isn’t me.
· · ·
That's not jealousy. I want to be clear about that. I’m not jealous of the girl next to him. I’m jealous of a version of my life where I could be standing there. Where I could be the reason.
Where we could be normal.
But I can’t be the reason.
That’s what I’m here to confirm.
· · ·
He turns not toward me, just toward someone in the group and I see his face and I see it.
He’s okay.
Not performing okay. Not managing okay. Not the careful, medicated, holding-it-together okay I’ve watched him wear for years like armor.
Actually, genuinely, all the way okay.
And something in me breaks apart quietly. The way things break when they’ve been stressed for a long time and finally find the right pressure point. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there. And then not there.
I did this, I think.
Not meaning I built it. Meaning I didn’t destroy it.
· · ·
Somehow, despite all the ways I’ve been careless with him, despite every morning I wasn’t there and every text I read and put face down and every promise I made and broke somehow he’s still this.
Still the boy who can throw his head back and laugh in a fountain square eight hundred miles from everything that broke him.
I love him so much I can’t breathe.
I love him so much I turn around.
I walk back the way I came.
I don’t look back because if I look back I’ll see his face and I’ll go to him and I’ll take everything again and it will feel like love and it will cost him everything and I am so tired of being something that costs him.
· · ·
I get on the bus.
I read his texts the whole way home. All of them. From the beginning. The good mornings. The blue fish photos.
The voice memos.
I miss you. I'm not okay. Please.
I listen to that one three times.
And I think: he will be okay.
He will be okay because he was standing in that quad laughing. Because he has an amazing future ahead of him and people who really care about him.
He’s just everything that matters to me.
He will be okay because I am on a bus going home.
I tell myself that.
· · ·
I tell myself that until the lights blur and the bus smells like old coffee and my hands are shaking slightly around the phone and I cannot for the life of me explain how I’ll be okay without him.
That I love him more than I have ever loved anything and that going home is the right thing.
Because as long as he’s okay, I’ll be fine.
Eventually he will stop loving me.