when the sun came up, i was looking at you
Kemi knows she’s shit in a crisis- absolute shit. She likes to be chaotic, scream at things until they change—become a hurricane until the world bends to her will—especially when she’s knocked off kilter. So she isn’t sure what it means, that she can barely talk. She’s mute on the plane, shaking her head at everything, biting her bottom lip and trying not to cry and not to think. (Part of her feels foolish, like she allowed herself to get conned into something, bought the phenomenon part of her life had become). She’s too scared to speak when she finally gets to the hospital, later than she wants. She wants to scream at the nurses, ask them to tell her why it took so long to call her but her voice still won’t work. It’s dead in her throat and all she manages is his name. “Spencer. Spencer Hale?” The nurse looks her over with a strange look on her face— and ushers her down some hallway. She was sure they were going to ask more questions but no one does. She sits next to someone an older woman, who has Spencer’s eyes. Neither of them speak. She hears the nurses speak mumbling things about blood toxicity as they look over foreign looking charts. There’s so much noise here, sound of beeping monitors from rooms, yelling doctors- things being wheeled in and out of rooms- it’s deafening. She’s waiting- still waiting, and praying to a God she hasn’t believed in since she was twenty. The older woman leaves without a word in her direction—she doesn’t seem curious about Kemi, but Kemi is too busy trying to find her voice so she can scream this hospital to it’s knees for some answers to question her silence. She doesn’t care. It’s several hours before Kemi gets the go ahead to shuffle into his room, her eyes red from the effort of trying not to cry, her heels in the same torturous heels she’d all but ran off the shoot in. When she sees him, bruised- battered—hurt her voice seems determined to never return. She swallows the sob scratching at her throat and moves closer. The nurse is still having another conversation, this time their talking about pills rather loudly—and trying to tell Kemi something about the amount of pills he takes. She thought it was just medicine—didn’t know it wasn’t all prescribed. She barely listens to them, can’t take her eyes off the boy in front of her because he looks like a boy now. He never sleeps this way, his face erased of all thought. His body might be wrecked but he looks so at peace it causes the first tear to fall. It terrifies her. The nurses leave after a few moments, their words swimming in her head. Things like accident, drugs, broken bones and lucky to be alive. She falls asleep with her head against his side, and a chair dragged to his bedside. No one tells her to leave, no one says much of anything. When she wakes after thirty minutes, his hand is on her back- and he’s looking down at her with a sleepy expression on his face. Her voice makes a swift return- and she can feel it, wrapping itself around vocal chords—knitting itself together. “I fucking love you—do you know that? You can’t..please don’t—don’t go.” She sounds pathetic and she knows it but she doesn’t care. Doesn’t care about anything anymore. She feels his fingers graze her cheek, and it occurs to her that she’s crying—she feels so weak. “I’m sorry.. I shouldn’t be crying.” She kisses his knuckles with a reverence she normally saves for other moments between them, but he’s here. So tangibly here now that there isn’t any other way for her to respond. “Go back to bed love, you must be exhausted.” She manages a watery smile, small and entirely too hopeful. “I’ll be here when you wake up.” She doesn’t need to say that she always will be, it’s heavy in her tone—and as he slips off into sleep, and she relaxes again with her head against his side, he gives her shoulder a gentle squeeze and it’s better than anything he could’ve said.
