• • •
He turns not toward me, just toward someone in the group and I see his face and I see it.
He’s okay.
Not performing okay. Not managing okay. Not the careful, medicated, holding-it-together okay I’ve watched him wear for years like armor.
Actually, genuinely, all the way okay.
And something in me breaks apart quietly. The way things break when they’ve been stressed for a long time and finally find the right pressure point. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just there. And then not there.
I did this, I think.
Not meaning I built it. Meaning I didn’t destroy it.
• • •
Somehow, despite all the ways I’ve been careless with him, despite every morning I wasn’t there and every text I read and put face down and every promise I made and broke somehow he’s still this. Still the boy who can throw his head back and laugh in a fountain square eight hundred miles from everything that broke him.
I love him so much I can’t breathe.
I love him so much I turn around.
I walk back the way I came.
I don’t look back because if I look back I’ll see his face and I’ll go to him and I’ll take everything again and it will feel like love and it will cost him everything and I am so tired of being something that costs him.
• • •
I get on the bus.
I read his texts the whole way home. All of them. From the beginning. The good mornings. The blue fish photos.
The voice memos.
I miss you. I'm not okay. Please.
I listen to that one three times.
And I think: he will be okay.
He will be okay because he was standing in that quad laughing. Because he has an amazing future ahead of him and people who really care about him.
He’s just everything that matters to me.
He will be okay because I am on a bus going home.
I tell myself that.
• • •
I tell myself that until the lights blur and the bus smells like old coffee and my hands are shaking slightly around the phone and I cannot for the life of me explain how I’ll be okay without him.
That I love him more than I have ever loved anything and that going home is the right thing.
Because as long as he’s okay, I’ll be fine.
Eventually he will stop loving me.
