Feeling sick, feverish, I stumbled past him. “I need some air,” I choked out.
“Anya,” he called after me, catching me just as I reached the door. “Wait. Please. Just give me a moment.”
“No,” I croaked, shaking all over. “I need to be alone.”
And I did need to be alone. I needed to stay still and breathe clean air and think through my panic and decide what was best for me to do. But then his hand closed around my wrist, warm and firm, and somehow in all his glaring misery, I found him to be more beautiful than ever. I wanted him so much then that I feared I would betray myself just to be touched by him one more time.
“Don’t go,” he pleaded, the expression on his face so wounded that it rattled the air in my lungs.
“Kai,” was all I was able to utter, touching my forehead and finding it damp, throbbing from an extreme, unnatural pressure. I felt bound beneath my skull, the entirety of my humanhood packed and confined up there.
Gradually, as he realized the pain this conflict was causing me, he withdrew his hand, his face growing grimmer with every inch of distance brought between us. His mouth pressed into a thin line; his eyes became blank, unseeing as they fixed upon the darkness of the window.
“You know,” he said at last, the muscles of his throat straining, “I woke up today because I heard your footsteps in the hallway. I heard the floors creak. I was barely conscious, but I knew it was you walking toward the kitchen. And I knew you were going to get a glass of water even before you did. Like it’s a secret language. The knowing of you.” He turned his face, and our eyes locked once more. “How do I unlearn this, Anya?”
Blinking down at a floor I could hardly see, I stammered, “I… I don’t want you to unlearn it. This is not what I want.”
“I know what you want,” he said coldly—frighteningly cold and certain of these words. “You want an escape. A distraction.”
“No.”
“That’s all I am to you. That’s all this is.”
“No, that’s not true!” I protested, panic rising in my blood. “I meant what I said—”
“If you had meant any of it,” he cut me off sharply, “I wouldn’t be standing here begging you to stay and talk to me. We would be making a plan. Even if we were to go Outside we would be deciding it together. You wouldn’t just spring this decision on me and then shut me out like I don’t matter. Like this doesn’t affect me.” He made a sudden downward gesture with his hand, slashing the air in mere emphasis, but for some reason it startled me, and I flinched back with such swift violence I crashed against the door.
Gasping, Kai lurched forward to catch me. “Are you alright?”
But before he could close me in his arms, I grabbed the front of his shirt and capitulated myself to him. “I’m sorry,” I cried, my insides twisting. “You’re right. I’m sorry. Please, don’t be angry with me anymore.”
Kai watched me through pained, tear-stained eyes, looking for an answer I didn’t have to give. “Anya,” he exhaled, his hands reaching for my shoulders with a hesitance unknown to them. “Yes, I am frustrated. And hurt. And confused. But that doesn’t mean I’ll take it out on you if that’s what you’re afraid of. Even if you want to end things between us. It’s okay. It is safe for you to be honest with me. You know that, right?”
“I know,” I heaved, words coming out of my mouth faster than I could process them. “It’s not that. I just don’t like us fighting.”
“People fight. It’s inevitable,” murmured Kai.
Frantic, I shook my head. “No, I don’t like it. It scares me.”
I didn’t know why I said that. Why Ifeltthat. Thoughts and emotions were racing through me, devoid of logic and coherence. I just knew that I wanted everything to stop. Like that night after the assessment. I wanted to escape again. I wanted for life to expand so it could fit the vastness of this fear.
Kai opened his mouth to speak, to ask. I didn’t let him. “I really need to get some air,” I croaked, pressing a hand upon my shaking breastbone just to regain the sense of my body. To feel like a real person again, corporeal and in control of myself. “We’ll talk later, okay?”
Something terribly vulnerable touched his eyes. A fear of his own. “Okay,” he agreed. Then, just as I cracked the door open, he called out to me once more. “Anya?”
Shivering, I turned to him. “Yes?”
Without hesitating, without any reservation, he said, “I just want you to know that if I were given the choice, I would never delete you. And if I could turn back time, knowing everything, I would change nothing. I would love you all over again.”
It was then I realized the expression on my face—what had made him say this to me. I felt it deep in all the unknowable parts of myself that I was looking at him like it was the last time. And with this certainty, another came, a sense of clarity that seemed to reach me from another world. “I would love you all over again too, Kai,” I promised.
Outside, after the first mouthful of harsh sea air, I grew numb, borne forward by an unseen mechanical hand. The path ahead was a mere black void. No faint glow of distant houses. No streetlights hanging luminous and buzzing overhead. No moon to cast a single shadow. Nothing. There was an absolute lack of contrast, as if I’d fallen into a two-dimensional world.
Blindly, I made my way toward the laneway, not knowing where I was going, not fully understandingwhyI was going either, just that I had to keep moving forward and far away from everything that was sustaining this place. The Center, the assessments, the procedures, the others Outside all collapsed into each other as mere concepts. Nothing tangible. Nothing explainable. Except for Kai. The only saturated, explicable part of my life. My point of connection and, at the same time, the reason I could no longer visualize my own future. Because it couldn’t contain me alone anymore. It had to contain him too. Because I loved him. Because he loved me back, and wasn’t that a miracle? To love and to be loved in return. To have the responsibility of not hurting each other, of being our best possible selves for each other, of limiting our individual lives and desires in order to live and desire together.
That was what life was for. That was why we were here. To connect. To ourselves and to each other. The world was made of many worlds, and they were all profoundly and inextricably connected.
And yet, the only way I could secure this miraculous connection was by betraying my own self, by returning to a reality I could no longer be a part of. I couldn’t because I knew the truth now. I could see it clearly. That the dilemma was manufactured. The idea that existence could be only one thing, that there was only one way of living, one singular reality, had already revealed itself to me as an illusion.
