The water pounds down on my back and chest as I move around, biting into my tight muscles and making me feel pure after a day of gross bodily fluids.
The fact that it gives Silas more time alone is just an added benefit. I’m not coddling him.
I’m not.
I’m frustrated with myself more than anything else. I don’t know what else I can do. We contorted our brains to figure out insurance—which it’s still kind of new to me to have—and all the rest of it so he could get actual care. He did six months of intensive therapy that was so time consuming, his life was basically that and work. He still has it twice a week. We talked,we learned, we grew; I’ve made it as clear as I can that I’ll move the fucking Earth if I can to make him feel better.
His dad is 1,500 miles away and never setting foot near him again. Not unless he wants his nose to meet the inside of his brain.
I never expected him to be magically fixed. I’ve spent too much of my life around addiction and trauma and everything else to expect anyone’s brain to ever bounce back. It doesn’t work that way.
But I didn’t expect it to still be this bad. It makes me worry I shouldn’t leave him alone like this on his days off, but then that seems like a feral, possessive sort of thought that shouldn’t be entering my consciousness.
He’s still an adult. He’s not hurting himself. He’s truly loved, probably for the first time in his life.
He’s just… lost. And in a way that seems so much more internal than before, not that objective touch-starved sadness that I could easily abate.
I don’t know what to do. I need an adult, and none of the adults in my life are giving me anything more to work with thanbe patient,keep doing therapy,keep taking the meds, it takes time.
This doesn’t feel right, though. He should be able to fucking eat.
I force myself to stop moving for a second. Deep breath in, hold, breathe out.
Silas has an app for breathing that’s supposed to help him if he has a panic attack, and it’s ended up helping me out more than I expected. I do a few more, not because I’m panicking, but because it helps me level myself out internally whenever things start to feel chaotic.
I can’t control how Silas feels. I can only try to help.
It’s become my fucking mantra, even if it’s as useless as I am most of the time.
Exhaustion dogs at my heels as I get out of the shower and towel off. I pause for a second, staring at the floor. This has been happening more and more recently, and I don’t know why. When I moved in, it seemed like a rational choice to switch to the master bedroom. It was bigger, it had the attached bathroom, and the whole plan was for us to chase out all the old, dark memories that were dragging Silas into the past.
I’ve been doing my best to fill this house with light and some kind of normal life for him. At least one to look forward to. He says it helps a lot. He says with so much conviction that he thinks about his shitty childhood stuff less and less, even if the psychological after-effects are still dragging him down.
If anything, I’m the one who’s thinking about it more. When Silas came back to me after almost absconding to fucking Canada with the shitheel who spawned him, he walked me around this house and spilled all its secrets. The truth about his mom and how sick she was, and how his dad basically left her to spiral out of control, and baby Silas along with her.
“This is where Dad found me the time he thought I was dead. I was cold when he touched me. ‘Like meat.’”
That’s what Silas had told me when he showed me this spot, the words clawing their way into my chest and making themselves a fetid, rotting home.
I’ve touched and carried the bodies of people who were dead or almost-dead. The feeling is not something you can truly understand until you experience it. It’s not just the cold, or the literal dead weight of them. There’s a weight to their presence as well. Like a stiff, unnatural feeling that seems out of kilter with the living world around them, and your body pulls away from it on some instinctual level.
You get used to it quickly, and it doesn’t bother me anymore when I’m at work. But it does mean that I have this completely realistic hypothetical sensation that my mind has attached to the memory of Silas’s words, and whenever my eyes catch on that one spot on the floor, I can’t help but think about it.
Like I can feel his skin—baby-soft but stiff; turgid, as the blood pools underneath because no one found him in time and he’s really gone—stretched tight over his infant frame.
My stomach lurches at the thought. Maybe I ate too much, after all. I wasn’t expecting to eat Silas’ sandwich as well. He likes that one. Sometimes when I get it for him, everything’s fine. He had the day off today and I was hoping he would be feeling relaxed.
Instead, he seemed more tense and spaced out than I’ve seen him in a while. He didn’t have any appointments. I wonder what he did all day?
Tearing my eyes away from the bathroom tile is a struggle, but it’s not the first time I’ve had to do it and it won’t be the last. I wander into the bedroom, slipping on a pair of ratty sweats and my NOFX hoody with all the holes. It’s comforting for some reason. So fucking destroyed it looks like it’s about to fall apart, but keeps me warm anyway.
There’s a parable there. Or a metaphor, or something. Whatever the fuck it’s called.
I let myself sigh once, and then forcibly drag a sunny-fucking disposition over my face. If I have my way, I’ll spend tonight wrapped up in Silas so deep that neither of us want to come up for air. I wasn’t lying when I told him that work was fine, but it was also kind of grating. We had more than one call out that we wouldn’t be seeing if they had more money or if the healthcare system in this country wasn’t so fucking diabolical, and that shit always puts me in a foul mood.
Tristan always tells me to chill. You can’t save everyone, but you can kill yourself trying, and dead men don’t save lives.
It fucking sucks, though. The people who make all the decisions don’t have to be elbow deep in fentanyl overdoses and dying grandmothers they could have saved. I do.
