Falcon's Outlaw Forever

Five Years Ago

Cara

You stop counting days somewhere around the second month.

Not because you've given up. Because counting requires believing there's an end to count toward, and belief is the first thing they take.

They take it the way they take everything else, quietly, patiently, a little more each week, until you look up one day and realize you can't remember the last time you expected tomorrow to be different from today.

The room doesn't have a window. It has a light that comes on and goes off on somebody else's schedule, and I learned early not to ask whose. Asking earns you nothing but the sound of a door, and the sound of a door is never good.

I used to be someone who talked too much.

Falcon used to tell me that, it was always half a complaint and half the thing he loved most about me, that I couldn't sit in a silence without filling it.

I don't remember when I stopped. I just know that somewhere in here, the girl who filled silences became a woman who survives inside them instead, and I don't know how to find my way back to being the first one.

They tell us things to keep us quiet. That the men who took us were owed a debt.

That someone let this happen to us, that somewhere out there a man made a choice and we're the ones paying for it.

I don't know if it's true. I don't know if believing it is better or worse than not believing it, whether it's easier to survive hating a stranger's decision or easier to survive believing there's no reason at all, that the universe is simply this cruel and always was.

Some nights I choose to hate him. Falcon. Because hating him is a door in a room that has no doors, because it gives the unbearable something I can point to, and pointing to something is better than drowning in nothing.

He knew where I was and he let this happen.

I know it isn't true even while I'm thinking it.

I know, somewhere underneath the place where the truth still lives, that he doesn't know where I am, that he probably believes I left him, that whatever note they made me trace in my own shaking handwriting was built exactly for that purpose, to give him a story easier to live with than the real one.

I know all of this and I hate him anyway, because some nights hating him is the only thing keeping me upright, and I've learned by now that survival doesn't care whether the thing holding you up is true.

There's a woman two doors down I've never seen but I've heard cry, and some nights I press my hand flat against the wall like the contact might travel, it might tell her I'm here too, you're not the only one, though I have no way of knowing if she can feel it, or if there even is a wall between us and not just distance dressed up as one.

I think about small things to keep from thinking about large ones.

The exact color of the kitchen curtains in the apartment Falcon and I shared.

The way his laugh used to embarrass him, quick and startled, like it caught him off guard every time.

The smell of his leather jacket after he'd been riding, cold air and engine oil that was just him.

I build the apartment room by room in my head until I can walk through it with my eyes closed, and some nights that's the only door I get to walk through that isn't guarded.

I don't know how long I've been gone. I know it's long enough that counting stopped mattering, long enough that my body has learned to flinch at sounds before my mind catches up, long enough that the girl who used to fall asleep with her head on Falcon's chest, listening to his heartbeat like it was the safest sound in the world, feels like someone I read about once instead of someone I was.

But there's a smaller, stubborner thing underneath the hatred and the grief and the counting I gave up on. It doesn't have a voice most days. Most days it's just a pulse, steady under everything else, the same rhythm as a heartbeat I used to fall asleep to.

Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.

I don't know what I'm waiting for. I've stopped believing in rescue the way I've stopped believing in a lot of things. But some part of me keeps waiting anyway, quiet and relentless, the way a body keeps breathing long after a person's stopped asking it to.

I press my hand to the wall again. Somewhere past the men and the doors and the years I've lost count of; there's a version of me who still knows how to hope.

I just don't know yet if she's going to make it out with the rest of me.