Even awake, the dream slides in through the side door.A hand at my throat that never squeezes, only presses to remind me where I belong.A fork skidding off a plate and kissing the floor—minor, brutal punctuation.The heat of an apology that writes itself across my cheek.His breath, always mint and verdant, always clean in a way that stung.I learned to vanish without leaving the room.
“Curtains,” I whisper.For a second, the word unravels.It means fabric drawn midday, so the camera can’t see.It means a light soft enough for the version of me he preferred.It implies a stage that runs whether I show up or not.
I say it again.“Curtains.”Nothing changes.The ocean keeps throwing itself against the cliff, trying to grind it down.I press my palm to the rock until grit bites the skin and sudden pain becomes something I can hold onto.If I bleed a little, no one will see beneath my clothes.Old habits die slowly.
It occurs to me that I have no plan beyond running until the world narrows to air and falls.If I keep running, I will lose the small things that tether me: tea poured by hands that have learned how to stand back, a man who knows how to sit on the floor until my eyes find his.If I leave for good, there is no neat return.
I remain seated and name the differences between the pain of now and the pain he gave me.The ache in my calves is a burn I can treat with rest and salt.My toes go numb and will warm again.This hurt is mine.It records itself on the skin and will heal.His hurt was engineered to erase.It came wrapped in charm and rules and left lessons carved into privacy.That pain unstitched me from myself.
I breathe into the bruise of memory and count the times I survived it.I count them like medals I am ashamed to own.The cliff does not judge that list.It only holds me while I consider the edges.
People imagine courage as some great act.It has become smaller for me: getting up, walking back, and letting someone stand close enough that I feel their presence and do not recoil.Maybe someday I will be brave in the loud way stories like.For now, I will practice the small returns.I will practice asking for a hand when I need it and not as a bargain.
The ocean learns its own rhythm.I let mine catch up.My breath slows into a pattern that keeps me attached to this rock and to the thought that I might go back.Not because I have the answer, but because I can hold the possibility that staying alive is worth the work.
If I stay, the rain will come, and I will get colder and colder, and my body may try to decide for me.I refuse to let it choose.My body is tired of running and trying to save me when my mind can’t focus or find a way out.
I push myself up, take one step toward the path that leads home, and then the wind hits.I don’t know which way I’ll fall.
ChapterEight
Cleo
A sound lifts from the house.It freezes me and probably everything around me, including the air.
It’s familiar, the way a backstage laugh used to cut through after a show.It crosses the gorge and lands at my feet: a guitar, just fingers finding a shape that doesn’t hurt.It’s not even a song yet.Three notes, then five, then a mistake, and then the mistake again because it liked how it felt.
I can’t help but smile in ways I haven’t done in what feels like forever.
That’s what Barret’s music does to me.It wakes me in ways no other melody can.His music is skin-close, tracing the small histories between us—the late-night jokes, the quiet when a lyric landed, the time his hand found mine when no one was watching.It knows how my breath stutters and my laugh folds back into me, and somehow, when he plays those seams stitch up for a minute.
Barret plays carelessly for himself and reverently for everyone else.With Eddie and me, he plays like no one else has in the history of the world.His music comes close, as if he’s tracing the shape of the space between my ribs; it’s intimate and ridiculous, and it knows the places I keep secret.
Right now, the notes float like little rafts I’m both grateful for and embarrassed to climb aboard.He doesn’t know I’m out here trying to shrink into nothing for their sake—trying to become a ghost so they don’t have to worry.They haven’t come looking.They give me space, and some minutes that feels like love.In other minutes, it feels like a test I have already failed.
I sit back, listen to whatever he’s trying to play, and try to decide what to do next.The sea keeps being itself.A long time ago, my grandmother told me the ocean doesn’t owe us anything.It’s not a mirror, a cure, or a clean thing.It eats and forgets.I thought she was being poetic then, but I know better now.
I lay my palm flat on the rock and try to list the things that belong to me.Fingers.I didn’t pay for the sweater, but I wore it anyway.The word that ends visits.The right to say no to tea now and yes later.The way my breath fogs when I laugh, which I haven’t done in a long time.The sound a string makes when Barret misses on purpose just to make me smirk.
I look over the edge.The sea doesn’t care if I’m brave or a coward.It would take me the same as driftwood and gulls.I whisper please and I don’t know if I’m speaking to myself, the ocean, or the two men I’ve been trying to avoid since I woke up three days ago.
This is the bit in dramas where a man appears with an umbrella and says something simple that rearranges the weather.No one appears.
Good.I wanted that.
Yet, I hate that I wanted that.
I lean back and let my spine find the cold behind me.The sky is the color of old nails.Fog thins near the cliffs, and the light tries to happen and mostly fails.My teeth chatter.It’s not cute.I tuck my hands under my thighs so I don’t do anything stupid, like stand without knowing which way I’m pointed.
I think about all the girls who smiled when told to, who lowered their eyes so the camera would love them.I think about the ones who learned to be rooms for other people’s appetites and survived on steam.People saysurvivorlike it’s a ribbon, not a name you get when the worst thing doesn’t finish you.
I am not brave enough to live, but that is not quite true.I am not courageous enough to live like this, which is truer.
The guitar stops.The gulls argue and forget the reason.I press my nails into my palms and think: if I go back now, it doesn’t make any of this less true.
If I return now, I am still the girl who walked to the edge because she believed it would save everyone.I am also the girl who didn’t jump.Both can be true, and that makes me want to retch.It makes me want to sleep for a year.
I push to my knees.The rock complains.My legs don’t love me, but they cooperate.I take a step back from the line, then another.It feels like leaving a friend to do a job I promised.I apologize to no one and everyone.The words stay inside me.
