for the very same reasons.
Finally, I am alone with my pain.
While the whole of my body aches,
my chest is hurt’s epicenter.
Breaths and coughs
bring lightning bolts of agony.
I am caught in a vice,
squeezed slowly,
as my ribs begin to knit back together.
To distract myself, I think of her.
She balked earlier
when I said I was fortunate,
but there is nothing truer.
It could have been worse,
there in that alley.
It could have been worse,
this year in Cypress Beach.
I met her, after all.
She is fire: bright, hot, consuming.
All the rest is smoke on a breeze.
For three more weeks,
she is mine, and I am hers.
elise
Mati makes a relatively swift recovery—I know, thanks to Ryan’s updates.
He spends two more days in the hospital, where doctors monitor his injured kidney, where he’s deluged with fluids and curative medicines, where he practices getting around, carefully and slowly, so his ribs will continue to heal.
He returns to his cottage three days after the assault, where he spends more time recuperating. We talk on the phone often, thanks to Ryan’s generosity and a little sneaking around, though I’m still going bananas, worrying about him, lamenting the loss of my own phone, wishing I could drop by and check in on him. But I haven’t forgotten the way his mother looked at me when she walked into his hospital room. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable sharing space with her again.
I want Mati healthy; I want to see him, hug him, kiss him.
I want to stop thinking about how at summer’s end, all I’ll have left to do is miss him.
Ryan knocks on our cottage door a week after the alleyway attack. My mom answers, a rare reprieve from her library and her manuscript, and spends a few minutes chatting him up. She gives me a quick kiss on the cheek as she heads back into the cottage, which appears loving but feels manipulative. She’s been super nice lately, but only because she thinks I’ve omitted Mati from my life, thanks to her crackerjack parenting.
I haven’t talked to her about what happened last week, the thugs who pummeled him because of where he’s from, how he looks, what he believes. I let her go on thinking what she wants to think, because she won’t hear me. She doesn’t want to.
