27
DOVE
I’ve never felt “normal”since the night everything died.
Lark. My old life. My memories. My very identity.
I had to relearn everything about who I was. What I liked or didn’t. How other people viewed me.
Some of those lessons were harder than they should have been, like wanting to eat raspberries so badly and then realizing the second I popped one in my mouth that I actuallycouldn’tbecause I had a mild sensitivity to them that made my lips blow up.
I cried so hard that day you’d have thought I’d just lost a loved one.
Conversely, there were things that should have been heartbreaking that were just…easy.
Like Scott.
He’d been my boyfriend for almost two years. I’d lost myvirginityto him, for fuck's sake. I’m assuming at some point or another, I’d told him I loved him.
But when he came to visit me in the hospital, roses and teddy bear in hand, I feltnothingfor him. Like he was a stranger. Not a stranger I wanted to remember, like Chiara. A stranger I was happy to keep walking past on the street.
I broke up with him officially a week later, when I went home. And I didn’t shed a single tear.
Nothing about any of that is “normal”.
But now, things feel even worse.
My life is spiraling out of control, and I can't do squat about it.
Notallof it is awful, of course.
There’s Bane, and no matter how this thing with us started, he’s quickly become my tether to reality. The one who grounds me. The rock I cling to when the craziness inside me wants to break me into a hundred psycho little pieces.
Everything else around me keeps changing. He stays exactly the same.
But even with Bane being this hard rock I can hold onto—punvery muchintended—everything else feels like it’s slipping through my fingers like sand.
I feel like I’m getting worse: mentally, emotionally.
Psychologically.
I’m remembering things that aren’t true. I see glimpses of shadows that aren’t there and hear snippets of conversationsthat no one is having. I’ve been keeping all of this stuffed down inside me and not telling a single soul, not even Bane, because saying it out loud will cement how fucking real it might be.
Tellinghimmeans facing the very real possibility that I’m losing my mind.
…Like Lark.
What if I’m more like her than I ever guessed? More than the similar eyes and hair, or the birthdays only a month apart?
What if the corrupting darkness that was inside her is insideme, too?
“Knock knock.”
Antonio looks up from what I’m guessing are horse racing stats on his phone when I rap my knuckles on the open door to the DiCampo Street Social Club. He grins around the cigar in his mouth.
“Ayyy,piccola mia!”
A big smile spreads across my face as I step inside to meet him and he tosses the phone and cigar aside and throws his arms around me in a big hug.
