Blue

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

TWENTY-ONE YEARS OLD

NOW

· · ·

I’m twenty-one years old and I don’t know how to stop loving him.

That’s where I started.

Now you know why.

Now you know the whole shape of it.

The windows and the sirens and the roof and the bathroom.

The kisses that meant everything.

The mornings he was gone.

The blue daisies.

The pill bottles.

The quad.

Now you know.

So let me tell you what happened after.

Cassian drove twelve hours through the night after my last message.

After I woke up to hospital lights and my dad's hand and the particular quiet of a room where something almost didn't happen — where Mara had found me on the floor and the bottle was empty and somewhere between the ambulance and the IV drip, I had apparently told a nurse I just wanted to sleep, which is the truest and the most terrible thing I've ever said.

I waited for Cassian.

Some stupid, unkillable part of me waited.

Watched the door.

The way I’ve watched doors my entire life.

He didn’t come through it. My dad told me everything. He said he was coming.

My dad was there though.

He held my hand and talked about the garden and the cooking class and the neighbor and all the tether things.

All the things that mean you are still here, you are still here, please stay here.

He didn’t mention Cassian again.

Not once.

But on the second day he stepped outside for ten minutes and when he came back his eyes were red.

I knew without asking.

Cassian stopped somewhere before the door here.

He was here. Drove through the night when the worst happened. And still could not go through the door.

· · ·

I come home for summer.

I don’t tell him.

My dad picks me up from the airport. Keeps his hand on my arm at red lights. Like he needs to confirm I’m solid.

Like I might disappear if he stops checking.

I understand. I feel the same way about myself lately.

The house looks the same. Of course it does. Houses don’t know what happened. They just hold memories.

Her cardigan is gone from the hook by the door. I don’t ask where. I think my dad moved it somewhere he can still find it when he needs to.

The garden is full. Her daisies. All of them. Every color.

Still going. Still hers. Completely indifferent to the fact that she’s not here to tend them.

I stand at the back window and look at them for a long time.

And wish that I could somehow fill this emptiness.

At least for my dad, I have to try.

· · ·

Then I go downstairs.

I stand in the middle of my room.

The window.

I have looked at this window my entire life.

Waiting. Hoping. Coming back to it the way you come back to a habit you know isn’t good for you but can’t stop.

Thirteen years of this window.

I walk over to it slowly.

I put my hand on the latch.

I stand there for a long moment.

Not deciding — I’ve already decided. That’s the thing.

The decision was made somewhere between the hospital and the drive home and walking into this room and seeing the window exactly where it’s always been, exactly where I’ve always left it for him.

I think about being eight years old and the first time I left it open.

I think about being eleven and the tap tap in the dark.

I think about every night I stayed awake a little longer than I needed to, listening.

I think about the morning I woke up and he was gone.

And the morning I woke up and he was still there. And how different those two things felt.

I think about the hospital. My dad’s eyes. Mara’s voice.

The white lights. And Cassian on a phone call with my father somewhere not here.

I turn the latch.

Click.

Locked.

The sound is so small. Such a small sound for what it means.

Such a small sound compared to the large sound of my heart finally breaking.

But even then, I still feel nothing. I don’t know if I can anymore.

I stand there with my hand still on it.

Then I go to bed.

· · ·

I sleep for eleven hours. Dreamless. The specific kind of heavy sleep that comes when you’ve been carrying something for a long time and you’ve finally, finally put it down.

Three days pass.

Dr. Reyes. The correct medication. Breakfast with my dad. The garden in the evenings. Normal things. Tether things.

I don’t look at his window. I don’t not look at it either.

His car is there sometimes. Gone others. I don’t track it.

I’m angry.

I am so angry it lives in me like a second heartbeat.

Steady and constant and there when I wake up and there when I lie down and there in the specific silence of a house where his absence takes up more space than most people’s presence.

And underneath the angry — God help me — I love him so completely that the anger almost makes me laugh.

Almost.

· · ·

The third night I wake at three in the morning for no reason. Body just decides.

I lie in the dark.

And then —

Tap .

My chest does the thing it’s done since I was eight years old. Before my brain catches up. Before I decide. My body just — responds. Like it always has. Like it never stopped.

Tap tap .

I don’t move.

I don’t breathe.

I hear him try the window.

The latch holds.

I close my eyes.

· · ·

On the other side of the glass: Cassian. I know it the way I’ve always known it. Before the sound. Before the tap. I know him the way you know weather coming — something in the air shifts and you just know.

He’s right there. Right on the other side of a piece of glass I just locked.

I lie in the dark and I breathe and I wait for him to leave.

And I don’t think about him.

I don’t think about what he feels or how he looks or how he sounds or if he feels like I feel because I’ll break.

It takes longer than I expect.

He stays. Just — stays. Standing at a locked window in the dark, not knocking again, not calling, not texting. Just there. The way he’s always just been there, even when I couldn’t reach him. Even when he was somewhere I couldn’t follow.

I wonder if he understands.

After a long time — long enough that I’ve stopped being sure he’s still there — the quiet settles in a different way.

He’s gone.

I lie there. My hand over my own chest, feeling my heartbeat.

Both of us are broken, I think.

The difference is that one of us broke first and one of us broke alone.

The blue daisy is on the sill in the morning.

I’m not even looking for it. I’m just opening the curtains, my mom’s habit, let the light in first thing — and there it is.

One blue daisy. From her garden.

I stand there for a very long time. I don’t pick it up right away. I just look at it.

This is his language. This has always been his language.

Not words. Never words. Not the explanations I’ve spent years asking for.

This. Showing up to a locked window with a flower from her garden because it’s the only way he knows how to say I’m still here.

I pick it up.

I sit on the floor. My floor. The one that knows me better than anyone. I hold the daisy in both hands.

· · ·

And I let myself think about all of it.

Not the leaving.

For the first time — not the leaving.

The coming back.

How he always came back.

And that thought pulls a thread.

And the thread pulls everything.

He was always there. That’s what falls apart in my chest. He was always there.

I spent so many years believing I was the only one holding on.

Me, reaching.

Me, waiting.

Me, keeping the window open while he decided whether I was worth coming back to.

But that’s not what really happened, is it.

He was eight years old and we met and something got decided that changed us forever.

He was nine and started coming through my window where he felt safe.

He was eleven and he showed up on the worst night of his life because my house was the only place that felt like somewhere.

He was twelve and sat on a kitchen floor with me without being called.

He was thirteen and he appeared in the dark.

He was fifteen and he stayed until I fell asleep.

He was sixteen and he came back after two weeks and kissed me.

He was eighteen and he came back through my window the night my mom died.

He drove in the middle of the night for twelve hours when my dad called.

He was always coming back.

Every single time. For me.

He just struggled with staying. With letting me in. And I know why.

I spent my whole life living in the leaving. Measuring it. Making it mean everything.

I never looked at it as a whole.

He left.

He came back.

And then—a blue daisy on the windowsill.

He pushed me away because he thought he had to. Not because he didn’t love me. Because he thought that’s what love looked like.

To him, love destroys things. That’s what love did in his house. Love ends in sirens and kids that grow up alone and broken.

And then he met me. And he loved me. And spent too many years terrified of what that meant.

Every time he left—he thought he was protecting me.

Sixten and he’d seen his father’s face when I knocked on the door.

The grey year. He thought if he stayed he’d drag me further into the hole.

Georgetown. He stood thirty feet away from me and turned around.

The hospital. He stopped right before coming in the door because coming through it meant I’d let him back in and hurt myself again.

He thought he was protecting me from the dark house and the broken things and everything he really believed he was made of.

And the devastating, unbearable, beautiful truth is that he was wrong.

He was so completely wrong.

Not because his darkness isn’t real.

It is.

It’s real and heavy and has cost both of us more than I can calculate.

But the darkness never hurt me. I can take every piece without flinching. I told him that in every way I know how.

It was the leaving that hurt me. What I cannot handle is the absence of him.

What my chest doesn’t know how to survive is the nothing. The space to be okay without him.

The locked window with no tap.

As if I have ever been able to be okay without him. As if okay has ever meant anything to me when he wasn’t in it.

I think about my mom.

She knew.

She always knew.

She saw the way he went still when he would hug her.

She understood something I'm only just starting to understand now.

Some people love so loudly on the inside that all you can see from the outside is the quiet.

I put the flower on my nightstand and wait.

Because he always comes back.