"You don't have to do everything alone; that's why I'm here, too. I know you can do it all alone, and that you want to be everyone's hero, but I’m here too, and I’m willing to let you use me." I touched her cheek, and she let me. "Come on, let’s go to the place that always made us feel better when we were there. I promise I'm not trying to confuse you. I want to make things clearer between us."
She nodded, and that small gesture felt like a victory.
She was finally willing to give in.
When we finished our hospital shift, I waited for Lily by the door, and then we went to the park, “our place,” as we liked to call it. This time we were lying on the grass, our backpacks propped up behind our heads, watching the sunset side by side.
"Do you remember the first time we came here?" I asked her.
"How could I forget? You threw up on your first day at the hospital and almost quit when that man came in with a nail stuck in his arm."
When I first started volunteering at the hospital years ago, I thought the tasks would be simple, mostly helping patients already under care. Instead, the very first thing they had us do was review every case that came through the emergency room so we could learn how to perform first aid.
I almost quit that day, but Lily convinced me to come here to calm down, and it became a routine when one of us felt overwhelmed. But then it became more and more frequent until we no longer needed an excuse because we both knew we wanted to be here.
"Hey, at least this time, I was able to help that man and make it to Friday without wanting to run away," I said proudly. "And the nurses love me; they say I have a natural talent."
"Seriously?" Lily asked, "Because I saw you run to the bathroom several times."
I pretended to be offended. "Hey, I’m not perfect! I didn’t even remember half of what happened in those first weeks, but at least I’ve gotten better, right?"
When you have the chance to do things over again, something inside you makes you feel like you can't make mistakes this time. I've felt that way all week, pressured to be better than the first time, to try not to be a coward, to face things head-on, to be perfect. The need to get everything right the second time around was exhausting.
We're not meant to live life looking over our shoulders, second-guessing every choice. And even with the advantage of knowing what's coming, I couldn't control everything. No one could. And trying to do so was a quick path to madness. Ihadn't realized until now the weight I also carried from being so focused on trying to control everything around me.
But perfection was an impossible standard, even for someone who'd lived through all of this before. Maybe especially for someone who'd lived through it before because the stakes felt so much higher.
You can't screw up this time, Kyle.
I looked at Lily, a little more relaxed this time. So, I decided to talk more about those memories we tried to forget a long time ago. We talked more about cases that came when we were here the first time, some things that happened in school, and a little bit about my family and the situation I was in right now. My plan was for her to clear her mind of the things that had been blocking her today, and little by little, I felt her become more and more comfortable.
"Kyle? Can I ask you a question?"
"Of course?"
"Why did you really come back? In our present, I mean."
I remained silent, trying to formulate the words correctly. How could I explain something I barely understood myself? The pull I'd felt to come back, the restlessness, the sense that I'd left something unfinished?
Sydney was good for me for a while. I wanted to simply escape from it all and start over in a faraway place where no one would know me. It was as if life had given me another chance to do things right this time, to not make the same mistakes I'd made once before. But part of me always felt like I was running away.
This wasn't how things were meant to be. That's why Lily never left my mind, no matter how many people I met. Because I knew there was something in my life that never had the proper closure, and I blamed myself for that.
I turned to her, and she did the same, meeting my gaze, like she wanted to shut out everything else and focus only onme. The way her eyes locked on mine made my chest tighten, and for a moment, I remained silent just appreciating her face.
"I liked Sydney, but it never felt like home to me."
"Sometimes I feel that way, and I've never left this city," she confessed. "I've been saving as much as I could this whole time so my father, Leo, and I could finally leave the state when he got out of prison, to see if we could finally forget and heal."
We'd both been running, in our own ways. Me across the country, her into herself. But neither of us had found peace. "So I imagine seeing me again wasn't part of your plan."
"I hadn't thought about it until now," she answered honestly. "But it's very sad to know that the memories will always haunt you, no matter how much you run and how much you want to get away."
And so it was. The past wasn't forgotten by changing environments; I tried for many years without luck. "Regrets don't go away even if you try to be a different person somewhere else."
We spend so much of our lives running from pain, from fear, from brutal truths we don't want to face. But no matter how far or how fast we run, our shadows follow. The only way forward is through, not around. Through the pain, through the memories, through the hard work of healing.
"That's why coming back felt like the right thing to do," I told her, "I wanted to be able to fix everything so I could finally heal and move on. Because no matter how hard I tried, running away didn't work."
