She hiccupped, newly sober with my help, but esophagus still spasming from the blue raspberry slushie she’d painted across the alleyway.
“I’m here,” I murmured in the dark.
“Lay next to me?”
It was all I’d wanted to hear in every lifetime. In this one, everything she said sliced through me. Therapy, medication, religious trauma counseling—they were the sort of topics she no longer wanted to hear. After leaving the church, she’d decided I was psychosis. She imagined me to cope, and as such, I was as much a part of herself as my legions were fragments of me.
It was truer than she realized, given her command over me.
I settled on the far side of the bed atop the covers, extending my hands. She stained her pillow with mascara, voice muffled as she said, “What if you’re real?”
What if?
Thousands of years ago, I’d met Shala on the edge of the Dead Sea and experienced something that felt like empathy. So curious. Interesting. New.
Each emotion, each life, each cycle, she taught me more about myself than I ever could for her. Love was uniquely herself in each life, no matter who, or where, or what.
I hadn’t thought I’d ever experience a newness that I’d hate.
“I certainly might be,” I said softly. “Would that be okay?”
Another hiccup. A choked sob. “No.”
I squeezed her hands, more for myself than for her. “Why not?”
She released my hands, rolling onto her back, staring at the basement apartment ceiling and the cheap, blue-green glow-in-the-dark stars left by the previous tenant. She stared up at the fake constellations and said, “You were my fox, and I got the shit beat out of me for it. You were my angel, and I had a fucking exorcism. I left the church. I take my meds. I go to therapy. And…”
She shoved the heels of her hands into her eyes.
I watched as each moment was a new nightmare. Every drop of her pain was something I’d never experienced before. Something I wasn’t sure I could withstand.
“And?” I dared.
It was my duty to remain calm.
Only one of us could break, and these emotions weren’t hers to carry.
“If you’re real…then denying you? Praying you away? The life I’ve spent trying to medicate, to ignore, to push down, to pretend…you have to be fake, Caliban. You have to be my imagination. If you’re real…”
She rolled back toward me, extending a hand toward where my face would be in the apartment’s inky blackness.
Another hiccup.
“You can’t be real,” she insisted. “I couldn’t live with myself if you were, knowing what I’d done to you. Another failure in a lifetime of failures. My biggest, cruelest?—”
“Love.” I cut her off gently, brushing a piece of hair from her cheek that had been plastered by tears. “If I’m fake, then enjoy me. Savor the imagination. Let yourself have fun.”
A hiccup. Her eyes squeezed shut. “And if you’re real?”
I had to swallow the shimmering tears that glazed my laugh.
If I’m real? I would save you from the Dead Sea.
I would stay with you when you asked me not to go.
I would marry you to a Greek general then banish your husband to years of campaigns and conceal his death so we could be together.
I would follow you on the ice, spend decades as a wolf, a spirit guide, a friend, supporting more than a hundred years of your guidance as you lead your tribe.
