Haunting #2
I read slowly. His handwriting was careful, deliberate, the writing of someone who had thought about every word.
Zane always noticed when something was wrong.
But how could he notice the things I couldn’t even see in myself?
So did Gavin and Osiris. They tried to pull me in and keep me close.
Do you remember cliffs? The lake we found, hidden from the world, the sun casting gold across the water like it was painting something just for us?
I stood there laughing, telling you, I told you it’d be worth it.
And it was. But I was already too far gone.
I wish I could’ve told you then. I wish I had the words.
You were everything I wasn’t, Zane. You were the love for life that I lost.
My stomach hurt as I tried to take it all in. Not because it was my ghost, not because it haunted me. But because it felt like I was finally coming face to face with the ghost that haunted everyone I loved.
I keep thinking about Blair. That one summer when we were inseparable.
We were golden then, weren’t we? The days we spent running through the streets, hand in hand, like the world was ours to take.
But time did what it does. It moved us apart.
You saw the version of me that should have lived. But fate had other plans.
And then:
And Seren.
The air lost oxygen. I looked back up at Zane, who had not moved from the way he was watching me read, waiting for this moment.
His mouth turned into a hard line, waiting for my explanation.
I did not have one to give him. We stared at each other for a second, my mind wasting time. I looked back down.
And Seren. I can still see the way you looked at me in that graveyard, your eyes red from the alcohol and the tears you couldn’t hold back.
You saw me in a way no one else ever did.
Because you were drowning too. You told me, “Love is beauty,” and maybe for you, it still is.
I could see it in your eyes, that hint of hope.
You held on to something I never could. You had this beautiful belief that love could still save you, that it was enough to keep you from falling all the way down.
I envied that. I really did. You still have hope.
Don’t let it die. You told me once that if you had people who loved you, you’d stay.
I hope you find them, Seren. I hope they see you the way you’re meant to be seen.
In a way, you saved me. I know that doesn’t make sense.
You were morphine before the cancer won.
You were my mercy. You won’t fall, Seren. I’ll make sure of it.
My hands had gone very still. My heart had, too. I went back to the beginning, and read it again, trying to understand something that could not ever be understood.
You saw me in a way no one else ever did. Because you were drowning too.
The night assembled itself. Cold grass. An angel at my back. A boy who sat close enough that our shoulders almost touched, not quite. A boy who said his name was Alex, easy, the way you offer something when you have nothing left to protect. Three nights in a row and then gone.
He was never going to show up on the fourth night. He already knew that when he said goodbye.
You were morphine before the cancer won. You were my mercy.
The pages were shaking. My hands. I understood distantly that my hands were shaking and that I could not stop them. You were my mercy.
Like I have told you so many times before, I knew grief. I had lived inside grief the way you live inside a house, known its rooms, its drafts, its settling sounds in the dark. I had buried two parents and stood between their graves in the dirt and screamed until Zane carried me out.
This was different. This was the airless understanding that a boy had sat beside me in the dark for three nights and been kind to me and seen me and asked nothing from me and was already dying when he did it.
That the last good thing he did before he let go was sit in the cold grass beside a girl who was also drowning, and hold still, and not ask her to turn the light on.
That he died.
That he had been dead for years.
That every time I had reached for that memory, the safe one, the clean one, the one that did not cost me anything, I had been reaching for Zane’s past. Zane’s pain.
And the most painful thing of all was the realization that Alex…
or Henry… had never left me. He had never left me because he was Zane’s ghost, and Zane carried him around in a suitcase everywhere we went, and somehow, he was also my ghost, and he had haunted both of us together without either one of us ever realizing it.
You won’t fall, Seren. I’ll make sure of it.
Suddenly I was back in the graveyard, but the memory was not clear. It felt hazy and difficult to hold onto. But there was Alex, preparing to walk away. “You know I won’t always be here, Seren. I’m just passing through.”
I looked back at the note, reading the end.
Remember me. That’s what I want. Not in the way I’m leaving, but in the way I tried.
In the way I loved. After I’m gone, I want you to notice me in the way you search for beauty.
I want you to see me, now. See me in all the moments you missed because I kept them hidden.
Trust me when I say I held onto for it as long as I could.
There is beauty everywhere. Remember to see it.
And maybe, when you do, you’ll keep me inside of it.
Then, I was back in the kitchen. The pages settled in my lap.
I did not know when I sat down. The floor of the kitchen again, I thought, vaguely.
I was always sitting on the floor of the kitchen.
If my grief had a place to call home, it was here.
It was always here, sitting on the kitchen floor, watching the green numbers of the microwave’s ledger of time.
“Seren.” Zane’s voice from somewhere close. He was crouching in front of me. When had he crouched in front of me? “Seren, look at me.”
I looked at him. But I did not know how to explain what my mind was desperately trying to understand, it was spinning, looping, and connecting years of memory. Only three nights of my own, but years of hearing Zane’s pain.
“Alex is Henry,” I found myself muttering as if I was testing this theory. “Alex is Henry. Henry is Alex.”
“What?” Zane asked me; his voice was sharp and had not dropped the underlying accusation.
“Alex,” I said. The word came out like a stone dropped in still water. “He told me his name was Alex.”
I watched Zane’s face reassemble itself around something unbearable.
The confusion did not leave. It just made room for the grief that had always been underneath it, the grief he’d been carrying in a suitcase for years, and now the suitcase had burst open on the floor between us, and everything inside it was mine too.
“Who the hell is Alex?” Zane asked me because just like Lucy, Zane knew everyone I knew, and he had never heard me say the name Alex.
“He never told me his real name,” I said. I heard my own voice from far away, flat, and precise, the inventory voice running itself without my permission. “He said he was Alex. I never asked anything more. I didn’t think to ask. I went back on the fourth night, and he was gone and I thought—”
I stopped. I thought he finished whatever he came to finish and moved on. He had.
“Seren.” Zane’s voice had shifted again, and the shift was not toward softness. “What does that mean? I don’t know what you’re talking about. What does ‘went back on the fourth night’ mean? How many nights were there?”
“Three,” I said.