I don’t move.
I don’t breathe.
I hear him try the window.
The latch holds.
I close my eyes.
• • •
On the other side of the glass: Cassian. I know it the way I’ve always known it. Before the sound. Before the tap. I know him the way you know weather coming — something in the air shifts and you just know.
He’s right there. Right on the other side of a piece of glass I just locked.
I lie in the dark and I breathe and I wait for him to leave.
And I don’t think about him.
I don’t think about what he feels or how he looks or how he sounds or if he feels like I feel because I’ll break.
It takes longer than I expect.
He stays. Just — stays. Standing at a locked window in the dark, not knocking again, not calling, not texting. Just there. The way he’s always just been there, even when I couldn’t reach him. Even when he was somewhere I couldn’t follow.
I wonder if he understands.
After a long time — long enough that I’ve stopped being sure he’s still there — the quiet settles in a different way.
He’s gone.
I lie there. My hand over my own chest, feeling my heartbeat.
Both of us are broken, I think.
The difference is that one of us broke first and one of us broke alone.
The blue daisy is on the sill in the morning.
I’m not even looking for it. I’m just opening the curtains, my mom’s habit, let the light in first thing — and there it is.
One blue daisy. From her garden.
I stand there for a very long time. I don’t pick it up right away. I just look at it.
This is his language. This has always been his language.
Not words. Never words. Not the explanations I’ve spent years asking for.
This. Showing up to a locked window with a flower from her garden because it’s the only way he knows how to say I’m still here.
I pick it up.
I sit on the floor. My floor. The one that knows me better than anyone. I hold the daisy in both hands.
• • •
And I let myself think about all of it.
