Looking more closely, I noticed some pictures from the summer printed out and tacked to the wall. I saw a throw pillow that looked new. It was a navy-blue shibori pattern instead of fluffy and soft.
It was the room of someone who was in the process of turning into someone else. Someone who would gain things, sure, but who would also leave parts of herself behind.
I’d already given Ella all the advice Alex had given me before I jumped for the first time. She was one of the first up to the top every Friday, because she was one of the fastest. But then, week by week, everyone else jumped and she didn’t. I was waiting for her in the water, but she never came down.
“You don’t have to do it, ever,” I said, there in her room. “Like, ever.”
“Yes, I do.”
I understood. I’d been there before.
Ella’s jaw was set. “There’s nothing worse than failing in front of everyone.”
There was something worse, actually.
It was not committing to the jump. If you ran for the edge and then stopped, or hesitated, or jumped halfheartedly, you wouldn’t get far enough.
If you didn’t go hard, if you mistimed the leap at all, you could break on the rocks below.
107.
now
Yolo snuggles up close, and I start to sing him songs.
Yolo only ever likes it when I sing, not my mom or dad or Jack, because my voice is not too high, not too low; it’s just right. It’s the Baby Bear of voices for Yolo.
I sing him the song my mom used to sing me, but with his name.Yolo, Yolo Fielding. Yolo, Yolo Fielding.I sing him “Rock-a-bye Baby” and a song about cat food that I make up and then an old song by Bruce Springsteen called “Downbound Train” that my dad loved.
I had a job, I had a girl
I had something going, mister, in this world
That last song is pretty sad, but I’ve always liked it and Yolo does, too.
He’s purring, curled into a warm comma in my lap. “Are you lonely?” I ask him. “Do you wish there were other cats to hang out with?”
He purrs harder, kneads his claws into my thigh.
He doesn’t. He only needs me.
I’m enough.
My heart fills.
It’s not an enormous world, this one town, but also it is. It is every house every tree every pocket of space underneath a bush.Every chair sitting on the sidewalk outside a restaurant, every swing in every park.
No one else is here and so all of it is ours.
“You’ve got a point,” I tell Yolo. “It’s not all bad.”
As I think about my town, the lights that come on later as the sun will set tomorrow night, the last night, as I think about the starlight that will shine through when it’s dark (click, says God, and on the stars go), I feel the most dangerous thing.
What if I get used to this?
What if I give up?
It would be
