9. Elara
Elara
Why is life like this?
Why can’t a girl go out and have a few drinks with a friend and not pay for it the entire next day?
Why can’t she have a couple of glasses of wine and a normal night’s sleep instead of — instead of whatever last night was.
Vivid. Detailed. Thorough, even. Yeah, thorough was definitely the word for… him. It. For it.
And I can still smell him. I’m not examining that. I close my eyes and I can feel his hands on me, and my body is fully convinced it happened, like it was there, like it kept receipts.
It did not happen. He is not real. I made him up out of a paperback and half a bottle of cheap wine.
Tell that to the rest of me. The rest of me is not taking notes.
Deadline.
There’s a deadline. There’s always a deadline.
So here I sit, on a Saturday — 11:57, technically still morning, I’m choosing to count it — writing eight hundred words about herbal teas that cure headaches.
Which is rich, because I currently have a headache that no tea on earth is touching, and the cure for it is a glass of water and lying very still in a dark room, neither of which is in the article.
Oolong has been shown to support—
Who cares. Genuinely. Who is reading this?
Who wakes up and thinks, today I will research the wellness properties of oolong on a content farm.
I don’t care, the imaginary reader doesn’t care, the oolong doesn’t care.
We are all united in not caring, and yet here I am, and there the cursor is, blinking at me like it’s disappointed.
I’m halfway into a sentence about antioxidants when I hear it.
Paper.
The slide of it across the floor.
I spin so fast I nearly take the chair down with me, and I catch it — the corner of something cream, moving under the gap of the door, coming to a stop on my floor like it has every right to be there.
I’m up before I decide to be. The chair shoots back and hits the shelf. Sorry. Not the priority.
I yank the door open and throw myself into the hallway.
Nothing.
Both directions, empty. Mrs. Kaiser’s welcome mat. A long stretch of carpet that needs vacuuming. No one. The elevator isn’t humming, isn’t moving, the little light over the doors sitting dark on my floor like it hasn’t been called in an hour.
Stairs.
I shove through the stairwell door hard enough to bang it off the wall.
Nothing. No footsteps going down. No breathing. No door clicking shut three floors below me. Just the hum of the building and my own pulse going stupid in my ears.
And I was fast. I know I was fast. I crossed a one-bedroom apartment and got the door open in — what, two seconds? Three? You do not slide a note under a door and evaporate in three seconds. You don’t make it to the stairs. You don’t make it to the elevator. There is nowhere to go in three seconds.
Nobody’s that fast.
Right?
The walk back to my apartment is slow.
It is not a walk of shame. I have nothing to be ashamed of. If anything it’s a walk of I’ll-get-you-next-time, fucker — except there’s no fucker. There’s no one to get. You can’t even storm properly when the person you’re storming at has evaporated.
I reach my doorway and then I just stand there. Like a moron. Like a woman who’s forgotten how doors work.
Because I can see it from here. And I don’t want to go in.
The note. Folded once. Sitting a couple of feet inside my apartment like it’s waiting for me to come back and deal with it.
I pick it up. Go in. Lock the door, which feels both essential and completely pointless given the last ten minutes.
I unfold it.
My heart is pounding. Why is that a thing right now. It’s paper.
You don’t have to earn every good thing.
Huh.
I read it again. Then I stand there holding it, being deeply weird about it, because the others were easy.
The others I could deal with. Your light reaches farther than you know — sure, okay, that’s tote-bag wisdom, that’s a candle with a saying on it, that could be slid under any door in America and land somewhere.
Always listen to your heart — great, thanks, that’s the inside of a gas-station fortune cookie.
Those were the wrong door. I told myself they were the wrong door and I moved on, and I did not, at any point, think about why I didn’t throw them away.
This one is different.
Which is insane, because who knows that about me.
It’s not Ashley. Ashley would never. Ashley would walk up and say it to my face and then make me talk about my mother.
Because — fine. Yes. The not-earning-good-things thing.
Taking what shows up and not making it weird.
That’s a me thing. That’s a thing I do. And I’ve never said it out loud, to anyone, ever, because it’s mine and it stays in my head where it can’t embarrass me.
I definitely didn’t write it on a card and slide it under my own door.
So somebody guessed.
Which is…
No.
They couldn’t have.
Because they don’t know.
They don’t know that’s why Kyle and I—
That’s not—
Because at first it was fine, until it wasn’t. Until he was self-satisfied in his expectation that he didn’t need to try anymore while I had to try harder. It’s the kind of thing I don’t let myself think about. The kind of thing I don’t let anyone know.
I’ve never told another living person.
And someone wrote it down.
Hand-delivered it to my apartment with freakish accuracy, and then left at a speed no human being can physically achieve.
…I don’t love how that sounded.
Let me try it again with less of that.
I walk to my desk and open the box.
The little wooden one that’s been sitting here empty since my mom brought it back from some crystals-and-incense place in Scotland, the kind of shop that sells you a rock and a feeling.
It’s beautiful, I’ll give it that. A dragon carved into the lid, wings spread wide down the sides, worn smooth like somebody’s thumbed it for a hundred years.
It reminded me of your tattoo, sweetheart. That’s what Mom said when she gave it to me.
That silly little tattoo I got on my side the day I turned eighteen. Easy to hide. Easy to forget. I forget it’s there more often than not.
Sometimes it throbs.
Which is probably normal. Bodies do weird things. Old injuries ache when it rains. Knees predict weather. Maybe tattoos have moods. I don’t know.
That’s the explanation I’m choosing.
The wood is a color I’ve never been able to name — too warm to be brown, too dark to be red, and Mom swears up and down it’s a normal wood from a normal tree, even though I have stood in a great many forests in my life and never once seen one that shade.
She gave it to me “for pens.” I have never put a pen in it.
Pens felt wrong in it, somehow, the first time I tried, and I never tried again.
The other two notes are already inside.
I don’t remember putting them there. I don’t remember deciding to keep them at all. But there they are, folded, tucked into a dragon box made of a wood that supposedly exists, and I drop the third one in on top of them and close the lid.
There.
Done.
Handled.
I sit back down. I find my last sentence about oolong. I read it. It’s terrible. I delete it.
Then I open the box, take the note back out, read it one more time, put it back, and shut the lid harder than a lid needs to be shut, which accomplishes nothing except telling the lid I mean business.
Okay. No. Nope. I am not doing this. I am not a grown woman getting slowly taken apart, in a locked apartment, by a piece of paper the size of a gum wrapper.
“You know what? No,” I tell Gerald.
He doesn’t argue. He never does. Best roommate I’ve ever had.
I grab my coat. My purse. The laptop, because being haunted is not a recognized extension and the deadline does not care about my personal life.
And then — everybody look away, this is between me and Gerald and I’ll deal with the consequences from him — I open the box, take the note back out, and put it in my coat pocket.
Because I can’t sit in a room with it.
So I’m leaving the room.
I take it with me. Obviously. These two things go together perfectly and I will not be explaining how.
I might slam the door on the way out. Hard to say. It’s loud in here.
The coffee place around the corner is bright and loud and full of people who are not, as far as I can tell, leaving anyone notes.
Definitely not leaving me notes, and that’s the important part.
I order what I always order. The barista gives me a look.
Or she doesn’t. I’ve hit the part of the morning where I assume everyone’s looking at me.
She’s got the face of a woman whose Saturday is going exactly as planned.
She does not look hungover and her only deadline is the time she’s done with her shift. Must be nice.
I get my table. The good one, by the window, where on a normal day I’d watch strangers and invent whole lives for them instead of writing.
Not today. Today I’m focused. Today I am a professional with a document open and my hands on the keys, functioning, look at me go.
I type one sentence.
Then I take the note out and read that instead.
No.
I put it face down on the table, which holds for about four seconds before the back of it starts looking at me too.
Now I’m annoyed. At the note, at the speed-walking ghost, at the oolong, but mostly at myself, because I am the one who brought the haunted paper to coffee. I turn back to the screen. I find the sentence. I rewrite it, badly, and I’m already reaching for the note again when —
Someone stops at my table.
I don’t look up. People stop at tables. They want the chair, the outlet, the whole is anyone sitting here. Normal. Fine. Happens constantly.
“Hey there.”
Shit.