What if…he needs me?
On a deep exhale, my hand finds the door, fingers trembling between push and pull, freedom and captivity, sense and madness. For one suspended heartbeat, I’m still running, still escaping, but I’m not moving. And I need to know why. I need to know what it is that makes it so damn hard to walk away.
My fingers curl around the edge, logic losing its war with uncertainty…and I close the door.
February 2nd, 2023
I’ve been writing in diaries since I was a teenager, and I just had the strangest thought.
Who am I actually writing this for?
Not myself, I don’t think. Or not only myself. Because if it was only for me, I wouldn’t choose words so carefully. I wouldn’t go back and cross things out and find a better way to say them. You don’t perform for an audience of one.
So who, then?
Some future version of me, maybe. Someone I’m trying to leave a record for—here’s who you were, here’s what you wanted, here’s what kept you up at night when the rest of the world was asleep.
Or maybe nobody. Maybe the wanting of a reader is just the most human thing there is. The need to be witnessed. To say I was here and have it mean something to someone somewhere.
I don’t know.
I just know that when I write in here, I don’t feel entirely alone.
Like someone, somewhere, is listening.
20
RETH
Flashback
The key fits on the first try.
I stand in the open doorway for a moment before I go in. Not caution. Ritual. The last second before crossing a line I’ve been circling for months. I step inside and pull the door shut behind me, closing my eyes as I inhale deep.
Her apartment smells like her. Warm and specific—something floral underneath something sweeter, the unique layering of a woman’s space that no lens has ever been able to give me. I’ve watched this building for weeks, watched her come and go. None of it prepared me for this. For the way the scent of her hits the back of my throat like something I was starving for without knowing it.
I don’t move immediately. I just… breathe, letting it fill my lungs. Hold it there. It’s a unique kind of intimacy, breathing someone’s air in a room they don’t know you’re standing in. It does something to me. Something that starts in my chest andmoves outward, like honey through veins, the way heat moves through cold muscle.
I’ve found myself standing in some of the worst, most fucked-up rooms multiple times in my life. Rooms that smelled like fear and copper, that staleness of places people don’t come back from. I’ve stood in them and felt nothing. Filed them. Moved on. This is a woman’s apartment in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, and it’s the most dangerous room I’ve ever been in.
I take my time, my gaze raking from corner to corner, then decide on the living room first. I move through it slowly, not searching, just absorbing. Everything in here was chosen by her. Every object has passed through her hands, been decided on, been kept. That matters. I want to understand the logic of her, the particular grammar of how she arranges her world.
Throw blankets on the couch are in colors that shouldn’t work together—rust and sage and something close to dusty pink—layered and slightly tangled, the way they get when someone actually uses them rather than displays them. I press my palm flat into the nearest one. It still holds the faint impression of her, the detail of fabric that’s been slept on, curled into, dragged across cold feet on winter nights.
I leave my hand there longer than necessary.
There’s a book face down on the arm of the couch, spine cracked, pages bent at the corner where she stopped. I pick it up carefully, read the page she left open. There’s a sentence underlined in pencil.“Love is not the butterflies you feel when you’re with someone. It’s the brokenness you experience when you’re apart.”She underlined it twice, the second line pressed harder than the first, like she needed to make sure it stayed. The words mattered to her.
I read it three times.
I put it back exactly as I found it. Face down. Same page. Same angle.
Her shoes are by the door in a pile that defies explanation—five pairs, at least, none of them put away, one on its side like it finally gave up. I crouch down. Straighten the one that’s fallen, then stay there for a moment, looking at the apartment from where her shoes live. There’s something about the view from here—small and slightly chaotic and entirely warm—that makes my chest do something I don’t examine.
I stand. Move to the coffee table.
Left there from this morning is a mug, lipstick on the rim in the shade of red she wears. I wrap both hands around it the way she does. She always holds mugs with both hands, I’ve watched it more times than I can count, this specific small habit of hers. I feel the weight of it, stare at the chip on the handle that’s never seemed to bother her, then bring it to my lips. Not to drink. Just to understand what she touches every morning before she faces the world.
