SIXTEEN YEARS OLD
• • •
Things didn’t change all at once.
If they had, maybe I would’ve noticed sooner.
But somewhere between sixteen and seventeen, Cassian started slipping through my fingers in a way that felt different from all the other times.
Not absence. Not distance. Something harder to name.
Like he was still there but had stopped being mine.
Even though I was a fucking idiot for even thinking he ever was.
• • •
The anxiety had been a quiet thing for years.
Background noise. Something I’d learned to manage, to work around, to mostly ignore. Panic attacks came and went. I knew the shape of them by now. I knew how to breathe through them, how to find the edges of a room with my eyes, how to wait.
But this year it got louder.
I don’t think it was a coincidence.
My nervous system had always known things about myself before my brain caught up.
• • •
We’re hanging out in my room after school.
He’s half-draped over the bed, brooding, headphones in. I’m sitting cross-legged across from him, pretending to dohomework — but really I’m just watching him. Trying to figure out when he started feeling so different.
Not different like the pool at fifteen. Not the good kind of different.
Just — further away. Even in the same room.
“What.” He rolls his eyes, tugging one headphone off.
“Nothing, just…” I hesitate. “What do you wanna do?”
“I am doing it.” He slides the headphone back on, already gone again.
Okay. Fine.
I grab my homework. English exam tomorrow. My focus keeps slipping — not to the book but to him.
The slight stubble of his jaw. The way he breathes when he’s almost asleep.
This is fine. This is homework-adjacent. Completely productive use of my time.
At some point I realize an hour’s passed and I haven’t read a single thing.
He’s asleep on my bed, still sitting up.
I let myself look.
Really look.
