Krystyna would stand in the kitchen, sunlight catching in her hair, moving between the stove and the counter with practiced ease. The same coffee, the same perfume, the same voice.
“Did you sleep well?”she would ask sometimes, glancing at me briefly.
I never answered, of course, and as time passed, I stopped having any form of facial expression as well. It didn’t really matter to Krystyna, because the question was never really meant to be answered. A performance of the version of reality she preferred, and during the day, she became something else.
Her attention shifted in ways that were subtle enough to seem almost natural to anyone who wasn’t paying close attention. But I was. Ialwayswas.
She started standing closer. Letting her hand linger a fraction longer on my body when passing something across the table. Her eyes resting on me.
“You’re very beautiful, Rowan.”
The first time she said it, I didn’t react. At least not outwardly, but something inside me recoiled. As if the words themselves didn’t belong in the space they were placed in. She smiled when she said it. Soft, almost proud.
“Those hazel eyes…”she added once, tilting her head, looking at me.
“They’re not common.”
Hazel.
I had heard the word before, but the way she said it made it feel like she was naming a possession, not a feature.
Her gaze would trace across my face slowly. My jaw, my neck, always the neck. Her fingers would follow sometimes, light, almost absent, but not absent enough.
“You’re going to be… very striking when you grow up.”
The words settled somewhere deep in my body. Because every time she said things like that, something inside me responded.
Violently.
I started thinking about breaking myself.
Not metaphorically, but literally. Each word she gave me, each look, each moment where her attention lingered too long… it layered something inside me that had nowhere to go. And eventually, it needed release.
I remember standing in my room one afternoon, staring at the wall across from my bed, and I had a very clear thought. If I drove my head into it hard enough, repeatedly, I could change my face. Enough to ruin whatever it was she thought she saw. The thought didn’t scare me; it probably should have, but it comforted me. Because it was something I could control.
Another time, I sat on the edge of my bed and pressed my fingers into my eyes. Not hard enough to do damage, but enough to imagine what it would feel like to remove them. To take away whatever it was she kept looking at. To erase the thing she seemed to want.
The images came too easily.
My jaw, my neck.
I would sit there sometimes, my hand resting against my throat, feeling the steady pulse beneath the skin. And I would think about a rope being tied around it instead of her fingers. Even that would be better.
You see what happens, don’t you, little Ghost?
When something is taken from you in silence, the mind doesn’t scream; it redirects. It turns inward. Begins to dismantle the only thing it still owns. But I didn’t break myself, not physically.
Instead, I found something else, something more sustainable.
I started reading.
It began as an accident. Krystyna had a library card; she mentioned it casually one afternoon, almost as an afterthought.
“If you’re bored, you can borrow books,”she said, waving her hand toward the small stack of papers near the kitchen counter.
“Just take the card.”
So I did.
