words

[thestumblesandfalls]

188.

The afternoon light faded, slowly, around where they sat on the loveseat, their planet gliding away from that life-giving star and pulling what small warmth the sun’s rays provided away from the windows of the cabin. They shifted, just slightly, two bodies adjusting in each other’s gravity as well, knees touching in the absent yet loving way that well-worn lifelines fall into. Two pairs of dark brown eyes wicked words off pages, this quiet company unusual for the pair of them. For once, in the safe, Oriental-rug-padded space they occupied alongside one another, they spoke not at all, light piano music filling their ears in sync and other people’s stories, other people’s words, filling their minds instead.

Their silence was not a tense one, not the strained resistance of withholding sending messages from miles away, not the ache they both nursed for the night they slept in separate places with separate lives before dawn broke and they mended themselves and each other. It was peace, and calm, and contented. They walked without walking, side by side, curled up in a barn that was no one’s home, and made it theirs for a time.

[thestumblesandfalls]

crashing.

My headlights pull moths from the darkness, their dull yellow blocked by angled shadows where the overgrown grass between the car and the lichen-dotted wooden fence strands in its path. I can feel it in my chest somewhere as I turn the key in the ignition, cutting the rumbling vibration beneath me to a ticking decrescendo: the sense of something missing, something off and wrong. It isn’t until the headlights turn themselves off, a full ninety seconds somehow elapsed, that I realize I’ve been sitting in silence, eyes semi-focused at the fence in front of me, still and staring and stuck.

He said he should probably go. I tell myself this again, the words clear in my head as though I’d written them in the air in front of me. He said he should probably go and he leaned forward, not away from me, really, but away from where he had been for that pulled-long, magical hour when we shared pieces we hadn’t shared before, that moment bending into the past. He leaned forward, and not toward me, and I told myself to let him go.

I didn’t give him moments to search my face, to see if he would choose to close the space we keep between us except when we’re not looking, when my hand drifts to his shoulder and finds warm, steady sweater fabric to rest on. I didn’t stop in my flurry of fussing over helping him out the door. I got his coat for him when he’d forgotten it upstairs, the universe giving me a chance to stop and change trajectories, ask if he would stay, tell him how it felt to me in my core like he shouldn’t leave, that I didn’t want him to go – and me wasting it, passing it as I climbed the steps without even a backward glance. I didn’t look at him in the car, not directly, just kept him in my periphery and let him give me directions. I had just focused on the tenor of his voice, clear and gentle in the night. And when I braked to a crawling pause next to where he’d parked, streetlights and their reflections constellating around us, I didn’t even hug back as slowly or completely as I wanted to, even though he asked, he asked, and he never asks, he never asks. I didn’t let myself. He said he should probably go.

And I helped him leave.

I replay the feeling of his leg against mine, blankets between us as we curled up on opposite sides of the same brown couch and then extended, slowly, reaching toward each other with our limbs in lines running parallel to our words. The casual, yet not-at-all casual, way his foot slipped from the cushions and he replaced it, gently, carefully, against mine. The way I could feel him watching me as I moved dishes to the sink, gathered my keys with their metallic crunch, even when I refused to look back at him. The feeling, the electricity and chemistry and charge that was being sleepy and standing in the kitchen in the dark with him, feeling completely safe yet thrilled at once.

The moments I could have slowed, touched his hand, stepped just a little closer, shrunk the spheres that separated us, all drift into focus as my eyes shift to look at the dust settling on the glass of the window in front of me. So many chances presented themselves and yet here I am, alone with this burning, screaming feeling that I could call and he would come back, that I might be able to use my voice to turn him around and bring him home to me. The ache and background almost-panic insist that there is no way I felt what that moment was alone, it is impossible that we weren’t on the same page. Hadn’t he told me, nearly promised, that I wasn’t wrong when I felt like I knew what he was feeling? Hadn’t I guessed right more times than could make it plausible that I was wrong now?

I unlock my phone, pull his name up, and hover my thumb over the button that might let me hear his voice again. But I can’t call. We were clear with each other. And, again, my memory drags forward that moment that seems to barely fit with the rest of the night: He said he should probably go.

I give myself one more moment in the car. I rest my head against the cool steering wheel, the hard steel under leather wrappings as cold and resolute as my arguments used to be against my own feelings, the barrage of he is not yours he will not be yours that beat back silent, green hope.

I had never pictured it, not really. I had breathed his name and imagined him holding me as I fell asleep, a hundred make-believe goodnights when my sleepy, uninhibited mind turned electric letters into gestures. What would it feel like to keep his shoulder under my cheek instead of a pillow? Would his fingers be as warm as I imagined them smoothing hair away from my eyes?

But he would have used that moment, I think, if it was going to hurt him the way this now chafed at me. He could have said to wait, at any point, one fleeting moment of blurted-out anything and the whole night could have shifted. He could have if he wanted to, and he didn’t.

I move without deciding to, now. The car alarm goes off as I open my door – I have sat in one spot for long enough that even this machine is flagging my inertia as suspicious – and I silence it automatically. I make it to my bedroom, up the two flights of stairs, without thinking about anything other than the questions that the pit in my stomach bore into me. And here, staring at the bed where the idea of him dreaming next to me has steeped for probably a hundred secret nights, I stop.

My room is the only part of this apartment he hasn’t really seen. I survey the space, the corners of my sheets tucked in before we’d even changed our plans and come here, and wonder what he would see. I wonder how it would feel to share the space inside these four walls with him, a space I’ve shared with no one else, letting my thoughts pause there for one slow inhale and exhale before I reverse my steps out into the kitchen again. The chairs at the table are angled haphazardly away from its edges, and I find myself sliding them back into perfect place, resetting them as if we’d never pushed them out to sit together. The rest of the spaces I move through, clearing evidence that I was unalone here, echo with images of him: bent over his laptop as he ordered our meal, hovering at the cabinets looking for a cup, placing the plate he borrowed in the sink to be helpful. I am speechless with the confusion lacing my hyperawareness of the emptiness of this living space now, the irritating distant offness that rings like a faraway smoke alarm.

I need to sleep. I need to clear my head to do that, and the only path toward that destination feels to be showering off the feeling like every nerve ending is alerting me that he is gone, the hot water cure for missing someone. This means shedding clothes, lifting my towel from the chair it lives draped over, picking my phone back up, typing a fragment of my feelings into that blank oval again, dismissing my hesitation in favor of flailing bravery and unthinking boldness, sending words soaked in subtext into the written conversation they could stain like ink in a glass of water, not imagining them as immediately swirling and mesmerizing and beautiful and irreversible. Showering means leaving that slim electronic lifeline within reach as I twist on the water, standing shivering as it warms, knowing it takes sixty full seconds to heat up.

I don’t get sixty seconds.

He calls me back.

[thestumblesandfalls]

repeat until death.

It’s nearly three A.M. and she’s still awake, thoughtful and basking in the almost-cool summer night.

There is so much about this place that reminds her of pieces of herself that are gone. The windows to her left are the same she climbed out of and dangled from, feet on a roof she remembers as much less steep, in the dead of night over a decade ago just to see what it might feel like. How many past-midnight phone calls did she take from this corner, the same twin bed holding her as she drifted to sleep on the phone with the first version of you, a boy who treasured her enough to talk for hours but not enough to say so? The same tamped-down pillow, never slept on but always kept, is against the headboard as she listens to another slow song on repeat, someone else's melancholy chords the soundtrack to her mood as she drifts.

She won’t text you. She has already decided.

She’ll think about sending you words, the aching vulnerability of writing the inside of her head down and hanging it up in the brutal outside world, but she won’t text you, not tonight.

She’ll just leave this here.

She won’t tempt the odd feeling that something is missing, the flop of her stomach as if she placed one foot on a boulder that wobbles — still holds, but wobbles — somewhere along her path through the quiet woods of your world.

She told you, once, admitted it — that your silence could feel like a void. You have this power, she meant, I gave you this. You asked and then wavered and it meant I was too much. She doesn’t want to be hurt, so she tucks the sting away, covers it with a warm palm and shakes her head, no, nothing is wrong. The fearless perfection that existed before anything ever went wrong or off or strange has yet to return.

She, instead, will think about other things. She will pull her consciousness away from the urge to reach out, the same way she did days ago, tempted by a window of free time to invite you to walk next to her, sit a responsible distance away, and share melting ice cream in the too-hot sun. She will push it down the way she has more times than she can count now, the internal algorithm she’s developed guiding her away from the risk of feeling not worth it, too much trouble, not today. When you say “not today” to her enough times, she understands every day is today. She respects this request for space, accepts that you can talk when you are alone and not otherwise. The chemistry in person will not shift to easy familiarity; the dissonance between how well you know her when she is alone and the fact that you don’t know her face will not taper. I don’t need more from you, she remembers telling you, and she stands by it. She doesn’t need it. It doesn’t need to grow or progress, it’s not required.

Tonight, she won’t text you. She will think of sending messages through winter months, sharing secret common ground. She will wonder if you will disappear as slowly-and-then-all-at-once as you arrived.

She will go a few more weeks refusing to say that she misses you, because you haven’t said it, either. You’ve painted the words’ silhouette, said it in code, pulled back the way she is trying to, both of you immunizing yourselves against anything you’re not ready for.

She’ll breathe deep breaths of night air and curl up, putting herself to bed, thinking goodnight across a few town lines to you, but she won’t text you.

She’ll just leave this here, and maybe you’ll find it, and maybe you won’t.

[thestumblesandfalls]

deep burn blue.

I will bite my tongue.

It is the right move, and I know it, and I respect that.

I will want to say things like people do in important moments in novels and movies and television shows, things that are monologues only in technicality, a burning dialogue of eyes and actions. Words spoken quietly, into darkness, that make a masseter jump and a pair of listening eyes set in restraint. Words that are sent across the room to clenched fists and a shaking head. Words that sag shoulders.

I will want to tell you I don’t need anything from you, so you don’t have to be okay for me. You don’t have to be funny, and you don’t have to sound smart or clever. You can just be overwhelmed or lonely, you can feel heartbreak even though your heart hasn’t been broken. You can feel alone and be next to someone, you can feel rage and not tame it or chase it out of your head like you can outrun it if you just push hard enough.

I will want to offer to sit with you, in any iteration you feel like or not at all. To walk with you, literally or from far away on the phone. To listen, if you want to talk out loud and feel the release of saying things with the luxury of deep breath and full lungs. I know you never yell, but you can.

You’ll leave this silence here, conversation fading like a struck tuning fork whose note rings into ambient nothingness. And I’ll let you, because that’s the same as saying all of these things out loud, without asking for a response.

I will bite my tongue.

If you don’t already know, there’s nothing I can say that will change that.

[thestumblesandfalls]

187.

There is nothing you can’t know about me.

He presents this as though it has already been established, as though he has said it before and I should already be acquainted with the quiet, humming warmth of this sentence. As though its undertow of open and unashamed sentiment were something I would ever guess at without him putting it into words. As though this weren’t a simple, yet profound, decision it was early to make and early for me to believe. As though he didn’t know it would register, miles away, as gently and personally as tapping his forehead to mine.

It is a mystery to me how some people’s words can reach out over distance and close it.

Likewise and, I respond, letting myself add, I reserve the right to say I won’t text about something.

I want that disclaimer, the option of saving some things for when we’re in the same space, our environments matching up. There’s something different in that setting, something more communal than my being hours away from our shared sidewalks, surrounded by a growing number of strangers at a house party whose music already feels a touch too loud — and him, well, I don’t know what he’s doing, and that feels peacefully fine. It’s not that I want or feel the need to hide from him. It just feels important to point out that I have pieces of myself that I set aside, parts I am not willing to transmit by typing alone.

As do I, he counters.

Sometimes it takes away a little. I leave out that I realize it’s relatively little, for us, considering we write to each other more than we speak. Considering I’ve talked with him about things I couldn’t think of anyone else I’d tell.

It wasn’t always like this. A year ago — a few months ago, even — I could have gone a full day without it crossing my mind that we hadn’t exchanged thoughts. Two years ago, I could have picked a path through the universe that didn’t intersect with his at all, let alone run parallel or overlap. I would never have known that he even existed.

He sends back, simply, I agree.

It isn’t until I’m reading his words that it occurs to me that I was expecting him to concur. Rarely, it is a misguided assumption that he will understand whatever vague idea I verbalize without further explanation. It is also a safe bet beautifully often.

He doesn’t just agree today, though. He expands on what I’ve sent him, his words once again quieting the noise around me as I read and it feels like I’m listening. 

It definitely isn’t the same. As evidenced by me staring and trying to figure out tone lol

I wrinkle my nose over a smile, knowing the face he likely made a few minutes ago in the situation to which he’s referring. His eyebrows would have rearranged to the asymmetrical spots on his face they occupied when he was holding an expectant pause rather than outright asking if something I’d said was serious. In person, he’d verbally scoot around that soft spot in our trust, lifting his voice and sending it out of the right side of his mouth more than the left. He had a way of masking uncertainty with a particular brand of bewildered humor that made it impossible for tension to linger.

Even if shit hit the fan, I tell him, probably unnecessarily, I’d want to talk until we were cool again.

If I get to choose, I will choose not to lose him.

That’s usually how I deal with that scenario, he says, agreeing again. Also I can’t see that happening.

I almost can’t picture it, either, some sort of misunderstanding powerful enough for us to flip our phones screen-down and walk away livid and disappointed, both probably more hurt than anything else. A piece of me wants to reject it out loud, call it inconceivable, but I have too many examples of humans pulled from my life to rest mental weight on a theoretical refusal to bail. He doesn’t need to know that I turn off whatever is in my headphones when he texts upset, that I remember his details without trying to at all, that it’s not just that I can’t see that happening — I also don’t want to see it happen.

I send him a gibe instead of addressing any of this. Us talking?  Yeah it’s so rare already.

There is a palpable eye-roll in his next message. Ya that’s totally what I was talking about. It’s not like we send over 100 messages to each other a day or anything.

I can’t decide if I believe this estimate or not. It seems steep. It’s not that high.

Waaant me to count? It’s both challenge and invitation, and as usual I can’t help but read the words in his speaking voice in my head.

I’m curious enough to say yes. Is it really that high, I send back, my disbelief punctuated by the omitted question mark.

It can’t be that high.

So today, he informs me, not counting messages but like how many times we’ve had a back and forth, including this one—

Sixty, I predict to myself, shrugging and deciding that seems reasonable. I squint at the screen almost suspiciously, waiting for his three blinking typing dots to resolve into words.

—is 187.

Oh.

I place one hand over my mouth as though anyone around me would even notice that I’ve regressed, for a moment, to my high-school self, smiling at some sort of messaging platform well after nightfall. My head is shaking in muted amazement already as I type out a reply and then slip my phone into my back pocket.

187. I tuck the number away into a corner of my mind, on an imaginary bookshelf next to the history that should have made it unsurprising. One hundred and eighty-seven pieces of evidence that our minds like one another’s company, like tick marks supporting the two-person moments I circle back to for restful solidarity. The number has a little weight to it. It fits comfortably next to the flashbulb memories of sharing jokes and dessert, giggling over the modern equivalent of passing notes in class, and so many other examples of us making private instants in public places with a split second of eye contact. It adds to them, too; it takes on the significance of past-midnight check-ins and on-call mutual support too sacred for me to discuss with anyone else. In words and pictures and time, we have built a place that doesn’t exist and we hang out in it; we visit — over a hundred times a day.

187, my brain reminds me.

Of course.

My phone buzzes again, and I add another to the tally in my head.

188.

[thestumblesandfalls]

this is on me.

The sunset matches the creamy pinks of the bridesmaids’ dresses for a fading minute before the sky dissolves into darker, dusky colors, the temperature sinking with the sun. Subtle, tasteful fairy lights twined into the rafter-like structures holding the tent aloft begin to win out as the brightest illumination in the near-night, their glowing slipping from unnoticeable in the daylight to ethereal, artificial stars above the wedding guests as they swirl around the white-clothed tables at the perimeter of the temporary marley dance floor. Strangers meet, their “Oh!”s bursting forth as acquaintances are made out of people only heard of vaguely prior to the day’s festivities. Seats are taken by some while others loiter in their conversations, lingering while standing over those who have claimed chairs.

Two near-strangers, with two sets of watchful eyes who noticed but didn’t dare seek out one another, step toward each other now that the day is nearly done. A set of tasteful flats taps forward, reciprocally approaching the chestnut brown Oxfords making their way around milling bodies. Her dress drifts behind her as she walks toward him; he puts his hands in the pockets of his suit slacks as he takes measured paces that try not to become hurried, broader strides. Now empty of flowers, her hands find each other at her waist anyway, and she holds herself there, steadying. His pulse is faster than he wishes it were, his heart not loud but insistent in his own ears as chastened hope persists in his chest.

His light eyes meet her dark ones, and their breath catches together.

They stop two steps from each other, a respectful, cautious, charged distance.

A smile touches her face like a memory, gentle lifts in her mouth and the corners of those eyes. “Hi,” she says, speaking first, one clear word in greeting that is the first thing she’s said to him in years.

He gives her back the same smile he’s always had, the one she described back to him in words lifetimes ago when he first learned what it was to hold her and cradle her secret, midnight thoughts. One cheek — his right — rises first, and higher, his brow assuming the “Huh, that’s funny” stance it settles into when he’s not thinking about it or laughing. His height means that he’s looking down at her even feet apart, and he offers, “Hey,” back, his voice low and warm.

It’s his quiet, personal voice, and she recognizes it from cups of coffee painted brown with light cream, his fingers stroking her hair as she curled next to him, blankets laid over her in her sleep that let her uncurl from the chill of early morning. She knows that voice, knows the shadows of it that used to hold “I love you” underneath passing conversation, the curves she used to skim mental fingers over knowing she could curl them tightly and hold on forever if she chose to. That voice used to wrap itself around her like his hand on the small of her back, rough and claiming and protective. It used to dissolve into her as he did, used to carry such aching weight as he held back rather than spooking her with the naked truth of how much he wanted her.

“How are you doing?” is the first thing she can think of to say.

“You look really pretty,” he says, his expression now somewhere between earnest and miserable.

The tension in her neck is the only sign he gets that she would still rather wrinkle her nose, look down, and shake her head in response to the compliment. Instead, she swallows. “Thank you,” she manages, recognition of their inside joke in her eyes. “You do, too.” She takes half a second to pause before adding, “Although I never really cared about…”

He takes a step toward her at that, the words evidence that she is the same as she has always been. He’s shaking his head, the smile evening out as it gets bigger. “Never really cared about that, I know,” he says, and he would have rolled his eyes if it didn’t mean looking away from her.

“Right,” she says, but the word is all air.

She doesn’t mirror his step forward, but he doesn’t have time to care — the music has started playing and pairs of guests move to the dance floor in unison, surrounding them as slow instruments guide them in sweet circles.

He observes as she glances at them, her gaze thrown toward her right shoulder, then meets his eyes again with doubt written across her face.

“Do you want to…?” He pulls a hand out of his pocket and offers it half in a gesture at the other pairs, half to her.

She watches it move, her own hands still clasped by her stomach, before taking a breath, taking a step, and nodding.

“Sure,” she says, with her mouth and the fingers she slips around his.

He is still the tall, quiet, thoughtful man she used to know, she can tell already. At least, he is still that to her. His presence still makes her stand up straighter, listen closer, feel more awake. The feeling of his fingers inside of hers still evokes that odd sense of depth in connection, the intimacy of being around someone whose brain understands hers completely wordlessly. It feels young and familiar, yet distant somehow — like a part of her that won’t come back, the feeling of reading an old diary or studying a photograph from circumstances too different to understand anymore. She leans into it anyhow, lets him put a palm on her waist and turn so that they face each other, hips barely touching, and start to sway in time.

She finds herself resting her head on his shoulder, wrapping her arm all the way around him. It wasn’t something she decided to do, she just found herself following the natural current that always pulled them together.

“You smell the same,” she murmured, wondering if he’d even hear her over the ambient noise around them.

His rumbling chuckle — she realizes she already knows what it feels like through her cheek — answers. “On purpose,” he says, immediately completely honest.

She doesn’t pause in their swaying, but she takes a moment before she takes another breath as though she might speak.

He moves his hand at her waist instead, pulling her to him and resting his head on hers.

“It’s okay,” he tells her.

She stays there with him; she doesn’t pull away or shift under his hands, she doesn’t move her head so it’s not tucked under his jaw. He tightens his arm around her in a suggestion of the way he used to, the way he’d hold her to him with the raw ache of holding his feelings back but letting them bleed into his actions, and he knows they can both feel it. He knows both of their minds are back in his living room, dark carpet under bare feet and lights barely on, her sad eyes and his certainty wrapped around them in the silence they shared for as long as she could then.

They dance in silence for as long as the song lasts.

[thestumblesandfalls]

K

“Can I ask you something?” I hate starting conversations this way, but I do it anyway. It’s a warning more than a request — and, truly, a do you have time to get into something query more than anything. I’m wincing but in a gentle, sorry-to-impose way, waiting for him to tell me to either find a different time or go ahead.

Maybe, I find myself hoping, he’s in a rush, and he’ll have to —

“Sure,” he says, his eyebrows up just enough that I can tell he didn’t anticipate this level of vulnerability from me.

I hesitate, daring myself all over again to seek out his response.

He takes a step toward me and folds his hands in front of him, waiting openly for me.

“Do you think,” I start, tilting my head and focusing on a spot slightly behind him on the floor, “that I might get my friend back, ever?” I meet his eyes, trying to veil the sadness in mine because I’ve come to my own answer and just want someone to tell me to fully let it go, it’s ruined and gone, time move beyond this alone. “Or…do I just lose him, because he came up with an idea of me I didn’t match in real life, and I turned him down?”

It’s a big set of questions, and not really the only two options. It’s also disclosing a lot more than I may have decided to ahead of time. But it’s been weeks of this, me tiptoeing and avoiding and making myself invisible so that his feelings don’t get hurt because mine have been for the same reasons in the past and I would rather avoid being culpable for a sleight I’d experienced the other end of too many times myself. I am asking for his advice because they’ve talked about it, or I wouldn’t have heard about it from other people through whom the information eventually filters to me.

“It sounds like he took it really hard when she turned him down. He really liked her,” I’d overheard, around the corner as two of his friends clustered by our communal coffee machines. I listened and waited, picturing one of them tipping the lip of her water bottle under the motion sensor and letting a stream of water plunk into the container.

“Yeah, we were talking about it last night. Poor guy.” The second voice I knew belonged to someone dating one of his closer friends. So the whole school knew, then.

I had rolled my lips in on themselves and stood there, waiting for the heat to leave my face and the roaring in my ears to die down. I felt worse hearing about it, learning about how much damage he’d decided I’d done when I’d gone out of my way to be as kind as possible. Who goes on a three-hour walks with someone they don’t want to date in order to make sure they’ve talked everything to death and have a hope at maybe being friends again someday? Who does it a second time when the first time leaves him with more questions even when she’s run out of energy to rehash the whole thing again? Who places the metaphorical ball squarely in his court and backs away, surrendering all of the power in the someday-could-be-a-friendship to him when she knows full well that he might not wield it well?

I had, thinking maybe I’d increase the odds that I wouldn’t have yet another person walk out of my life.

That choice, or the series of them, which had felt like honoring myself in real time, now makes me grimace out of humiliation like it might have been a slow cascade of mistakes.

Sort of like asking one of his friends about the whole situation might have also been.

That friend, in his defense, seems to consider me for a minute, sympathy blankly on his face. He should be on the You Hurt My Friend We’re Enemies team, I know — they’re closer, they see each other more, they’re each other’s brothers or whatever guys call their people. Yet he looks at me like he knows more about what happened than the angry, in-the-moment version he might have gotten earlier in this mess of a story. He opens his mouth and closes it. He looks around behind me. He’s not going to answer.

Which, if I’m being as honest with myself now as I was with his friend on both of those long, tiresome walks, is plenty of information.

I wait for a beat longer, reading the pity on his face and accepting it as half of an apology. He could have just told me “I don’t think so, even though that sucks.” He could have grimly shook his head or even just declined to talk about it with me. Somehow, this says even more. Him at a loss for words speaks to him disagreeing with the whole thing and existing in his powerlessness to say or do anything productive to change it.

“Thanks, I…I kind of thought so,” I tell him. I’m already shaking my head, dismissing the whole thing again. It’s kind of an offering itself, letting him off the hook of verbalizing anything in his head right now.

I turn around and wrap my sweater around myself more tightly, suddenly a little colder than I had been when I’d geared up to ask the question in the first place. More sure now of its answer, I close a door in my head as I walk away, and I can almost hear the latch bolt click into place. Not locked, just shut and divisive, cutting off some of that dull, roaring, disappointed noise in my mind.

I thought the quiet would feel more familiar.

[thestumblesandfalls]

elastic heart.

I stood outside of the hospital room door, my bare arms crossed in front of me because the place was refrigerated compared to the three-digit temperature outside. I couldn’t hear the machines beeping away, proving that the kid did have a heart and that it was working properly, but I could see them through the diagonal grid of the shatterproof window. I couldn’t see his face, either, but the back of his head, all brunette and curly, was enough for me to know it was him. I hadn’t asked for the room number, hadn’t wanted to admit to the nurses at their front desk that I was here to see him, if only to see him. I had wandered through these hospital hallways, so at ease in this kind of building that no passers by even gave me a second look. Part of me had even tried to believe that I’d do the lap of the floor, get back on the elevator, and leave again.

But then I’d glanced through this window, and now I was its satellite.

His parents were probably on their way, though it was possible that since this was the fifth or sixth time their kid had wound up here, the rush had worn off. It was possible that they knew better than to believe him when he said these things were accidents, possible that they’d stopped hurrying whenever he got hurt because some part of them knew they encouraged him this way.

No one had known that but me; no one else had seen him with — or really against — his parents or known him well enough to read this white scene and find the darkness there.

“He’s asking for you,” someone said behind me.

I let my shoulders adjust accordingly, but didn’t turn. I knew she was talking to me, but I didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want the words to be true. I didn’t want this to be happening.

I was unsure whether or not she was even really talking to me. Based on the way she came up next to me, sweet-smelling and blonde, I figured she hadn’t spoken for my benefit but more to work her way through what was going on in her own life.

“They sedated him.” She said it in a matter-of-fact, look-it-stopped-raining kind of way.

I wanted to be able to close my ears to her words, wanted to go back to not caring because of the damage he did and the person he was. I wanted to un-hear her, to have the option of shutting out her words the way I could shut out his presence by sliding my eyelids closed. The way I could walk away from here, or could have, before I came inside and upstairs and found him.

“But before then,” she kept going, her voice clear and steady and uncomprehending, “he was asking for you.”

If this were anywhere and anyone else, I might have apologized to her.

Her voice broke when she spoke again. “You were all he was asking for.”

“Now,” I said, the word angry and apathetic and derisive at the same time.

She looked small, crumpled and disregarded. He’d hurt her, too.

I took one last glance at his head on the hospital pillow and then left, wondering if she would follow my lead.

[thestumblesandfalls]

paint.

I wanted to ask him for a hug, because looking at him hurt in a way that reminded me how much I loved him even if I wasn’t in love with him. Maybe a little, still. Or maybe a part of me. But not enough to override all the factors that had driven me away in the first place.

“Do you want a hug?” he asked, in his uncanny way of reading what I was thinking. Maybe part of it was that I was staring at his chest, half-remembering and half-imagining what it was like to be curled in there, my head under his clavicle and his arms anchoring me to the safe, warm spot. All of it made my stomach lurch, like he’d tugged some inner part of me toward himself.

I shook my head, because I worried the “No” wouldn’t come out if I tried to say it out loud.

“Are you sure?”

I thought yes at him, and he seemed to understand my silence. He couldn’t have known that I felt like every time I touched him I hurt him a little more.

Or maybe he could.

“Okay,” he said, or maybe he didn’t. It wasn’t, nothing was. We were two magnets holding something in between us, unmoving and unable to change. We were drawn in, pulled together, and always holding ourselves carefully apart.

I looked away from him, reminding myself to breathe in and out slowly.

I closed my eyes.

All I knew was that it hurt, and at least that meant I felt something.

I held on to that.

[thestumblesandfalls]

5.26.2014

The problem is not the food. It has never been the food, and it likely never will be. The problem is in the way that they talk to each other, with one towering over the other because his words boom and because she is strong enough to let him win. Because she will let him feel strong so that she can keep the peace, so that she can protect her children from the man he might become in an open fight.

It has been years since I have watched them like this, but not long enough to forget: this is how they fight when we are in the room. She is a lawyer. She is strong and smart and can outmaneuver him in a heartbeat. She can invalidate each word he says; she knows how and maybe the arguments bubble up inside of her. But she doesn’t. The chances emerge and pulse with availability, but they ring out into silence and disappear as he moves, he acts, he walks away. They use her language, but his terms.

Their conflict has nothing to do with me. I am a spectator, just there, just watching, from the same seat I used to take when watching included bangs against my eyebrows and two fingers plugging my mouth. But it has become my conflict, too, now. And this is how they taught me to fight.

This is how they taught me to feel guilty when someone else wronged me. This is how I learned to stay with someone who argued because he knew I would stay silent, to love people who hurt me, to get a handprint of purple on my arm. As they sit there, together but not, I recognize the tension. This is where I learned it. This is how they showed me. He manipulates, is selfish, and hurts. She takes it. She does not stand up. She can, she could. Yet unlike him, she is fair.

He is wrong. He is unjustified in the way he speaks, with his words aiming to injure and his anger in plain sight. He pulls at her conscience until he dredges up guilt, the corners of his cheeks sagging below his downturned mouth and his eyes evading hers as though he is too disgusted to look.

She is the one who should be disgusted. He is fighting against the rules they vowed to follow, pushing her away and forcing his half of the blame onto her shoulders. She knows better, but does not say so. She lets him feed from her, allows him to leech power and indignant pride from her silence as she keeps her mouth shut against the arsenal of facts in her head. He is making her feel guilty. Strike one. He is not taking responsibility for his more-than-half of this problem. Strike two. He has not asked her how she feels, has not included her in the equation he promised he would keep balanced As Long as You Both Shall Live. He told her he loved her, he would tell you that now. But here, he forgets that; he does to her what is not done to someone who is loved. He puts himself before her, before both of them, the woman he loves and their daughter. Strike three.

Perhaps his body reads the signs that his brain is actively ignoring. It has always seemed as though all empathy and morality shut off with his car engine in the driveway. But perhaps he knows we’re waiting for it, because he stands to go and takes his irresponsible disapproval with him.

I wait until his back is turned, until he leaves to let neutral, televised information flash past his face, doing the something that is doing nothing so that it will lull him to sleep. And when he leaves, I let my face collapse, let my shoulders fall and the heat rush to my head. I lose the strong, angry, fighting words I know how to say but never have, and when I open my mouth, I give my thoughts to her. I tell her, because she will never tell him, and, like this, nothing changes.

[thestumblesandfalls]

the way i am.

“Okay,” he said, and motioned for me to scoot closer to him. “Which one is it, again?” He twirled the roll in his hands, eyebrows puckering as he searched along its circumference for the ridged edge of the tape. The cylinder was almost comically small against his wide palms, and the delicate task of picking at the corner of the tape edge to lift it seemed like a ridiculous use of his strength.

I perched on the bottom left corner of his bed, balancing my weight back on the heels of my hands, and raised my left foot vaguely toward him. My head lolled back as I watched him shuffle toward me absently, focused on the task at hand and letting his memory and peripheral vision guide his movements. I rolled my lips in on themselves as he twirled the swiveling desk chair around so that its seat faced me, fighting a smile in response to the flourishes in his movements.

He sat down slowly, still fiddling with the tape, and took a moment before he raised his eyes to meet mine.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t call me out, but the tiny crescent of an almost-dimple dented in just past the corner of his mouth as he caught me staring. His lips twitched in and out of a smile as he deflected his eyes down to my dangling foot. “You, uh…” he began, and the slightest stain of a blush bloomed at the tops of his cheeks. When his eyes flicked back up to mine, he was an inch away from a grin. “You’re gonna have to take the sock off,” he said, teasing but gentle.

I swallowed, forcing my awareness back to the present, and nodded. I pulled the cotton off to reveal my purpling ankle, wincing as it meant I rotated the joint unpleasantly. I let him gingerly touch my skin, pulling at my leg so that I could rest my heel on his knee.

His fingers were steady and sure, strong yet gentle. Each touch was comforting and simultaneously electric, as though every point of contact were burningly important. The ankle had been crushed and overused; it was weak and unhappy — it hurt. But the skin around it was awake, alert, and somehow more sensitive, acutely aware of every subtle shift of his hands.

As he repositioned the angle formed by my leg and foot, he paused periodically, tilting his head as though rehearsing the process of wrapping the yellow adhesive around the joint in his head. “Okay,” he said finally, and as he slid his fingers away, he looked up in response to what I realized was my own sharp intake of breath. Reading my face and seeing he hadn’t hurt me, he turned his focus back to the injury. “Ready?” 

The yellow tape was stiff and athletic-looking, and once he had smoothed it against the curve of my foot and the incline of the sore ankle, he took his time chafing his fingers over the fabric adhesive, warming it against the skin below so that it stayed. He was careful, the slight tension in each movement cautiously confident. There was a safety to the way he handled me, an awareness and calmness that was easy to trust.

He inspected his work for a moment longer, then leaned forward and kissed my bent knee. His gaze met mine as he did so, watching my face.

“Feel okay?” he checked, and for a second his eyes went guarded and suspicious, the question of whether or not he’d hurt me lurking somewhere behind them.

“Thank you,” I said quietly, not meaning for my voice to shake but also somehow unashamed.

“You’re welcome,” he nodded, and the small, satisfied smile lit up his face again.

[thestumblesandfalls]

look after you.

The clock only reads a little past ten, but I’m already exhausted by the time we take the turn to my street. He pulls the car over to the side of the road, nosing it in between snowdrifts before putting it in park and getting out. He’s left the engine on, and I savor the blasting heat for one last moment as I gather up my hockey skates, hat, and wallet from the compartments around me in the passenger seat. When I’m ready to emerge into the quiet cold, ready to count my words and then scurry inside, he’s already made his way around the front of the car. I free a few fingers and gingerly tug the latch on the door open, letting myself half-fall out of the cabin and onto the snowy pavement. I use my hip to nudge the door closed behind me, watch as the interior lights fade off, and then stop to look at him.

There is a split second of a pause, maybe not enough to notice but enough for me to know I’m stopping my muscles from moving. Enough for me to know that I’m fighting this inevitable moment in my silent, futile way. I take a step and close the distance separating us just as he opens his arms to me, to catch me.

In layers of soft cotton, he’s warm and comfortable as he crushes me to his chest. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t shift self-consciously or lean away and so I pull him closer, tucking my head against him and letting the breath sigh out of me. He makes a small sound and rearranges his hold around my shoulders, his steady hands firm and sure and unabashed.

“Don’t go,” I say, my words muffled in his shirts. My voice comes out like a confession. I move a finger against his back just to make sure he’s still there, then shuffle forward a fraction of a step. As though being closer to him could make it feel less like he was leaving.

“Come visit me,” he says, in the quiet and gentle voice he never uses as a joke. The words are so low, I can feel them, and they’re enough to tease a broken smile into the corners of my mouth. The offer makes this goodbye only temporary, our last cup of coffee not our last. This is not the end, and for me, that is enough.

So I loosen my arms and I let my chin tilt up so that I can see his face, so that I can watch him back away as I feel myself do the same. 

[thestumblesandfalls]

something I need.

The rain threw back each sign and streetlamp in a constellation of brightness so that the small glows hung throughout the night like a world full of Christmas lights. Each faded in and out of focus as the wind breathed over puddles, rumpling surfaces that then smoothed back out into mirrors. Passing cars would have scattered headlight beams into the atmosphere, hissing past as tires sliced across damp pavement. The movement would have danced off of the slicked store windows, whiteness whisking back and forth through the air before sizzling away into the distance.

Tonight, though, there were no more cars. Even on this main street, all felt hushed and still. It looked starkly different from the busy, yellowy bustle that circulated through the shops and cafés during sunnier hours. There was a nonliving dormancy to the aisle of businesses, and their temporary abandonment gave the impression of bated breath, of a hiatus whose reprieve was as sure as sunrise.

Just stay there, he’d said. I’ll be there in ten.

I checked my watch again. It was the only clock I owned that I’d set precisely on time, the only clock whose second hand I trusted. It had counted seven minutes and thirty-four seconds since I’d last checked it, the skinny line of an arm jolting involuntarily forward with a tiny mechanical heartbeat. In the quiet of the night, even its faint, dry clicking reached my ears.

Another light-scattering breeze sighed past, and I pulled my jacket around myself more firmly. I dug my fingers into the pockets to keep the unzipped edges closed. As I moved, my joints creaked in a way that betrayed the hours I’d spent working instead of sleeping; my muscles were only gently sore, just reminding me that they wanted a bed as badly as my eyelids did. I could feel the cold of the metal bench through my jeans, and as the seconds tapped past, I let myself imagine the warmth being leeched from my legs to the bars beneath them. Exhaustion weighted my shoulders, heavy and thick and stifling. I stopped counting seconds and let the time span out before me aimlessly, a flat expanse of nothing without expectation of end or limit. The presence of my wristwatch tugged at my consciousness, but I forced myself not to look at it. He would be on time, as he always was. Better not to count the minutes, I figured as I closed my eyes against the cold, than to impatiently watch them slug past.

I heard the truck before I could even squint to find any visual sign of it. The bass was its giveaway — the tiny back seat, really a glorified, under-padded plank, had been partially removed to make space for a portable subwoofer. In a way not at all out of character, he had traded out the capacity to transport more than one passenger in favor of an earsplitting boost in the lower notes of his electronic music. Now, the pulses of low frequencies drowned out the grumbling snore of the truck’s sizable engine. It rendered the sound of his approach both jarring and unmistakeable.

I waited until I could hear the splashes of his oversized tires through stagnant rainwater, then opened my eyes to watch him pull up in front of me at a speed I wouldn’t have dared use to approach anything as solid and stationary as the stone curb. He somehow yanked the pickup to a halt a perfect six inches away from the end of the sidewalk, letting the whole vehicle relax backward an inch as he put it in park. When he leaned over to pop open the passenger door, his silhouette did so with the grace of routine; the face unveiled by the tinted window swinging aside was open and welcoming in recognition.

“Hey,” he said, his voice up and a cheerful expression on his face. He twisted so that one arm rested on the steering wheel and the other was slung over the back of the passenger seat. “So, um…” his lips pursed in confusion as his eyes narrowed and he glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “…good morning,” he finished, nodding to himself and then looking back at me. “As of a couple hours ago.”

I must have made a face, because his broke into a broad, boyish grin and he leaned back in his seat again, shaking his head.

“Come on,” he encouraged, and when he looked back at me, his smile had faded into the familiar lopsided, content expression I’d grown to find comfort in. “Hop in.”

I sighed, uncomfortable where I was but still reluctant to move from my spot on the cold bench. I counted to a bracing three in my head before forcing myself into a standing position and shuffling over the soggy pavement to the front of the truck.

He watched as I hoisted myself into into the cabin, one hand wrapped around the helper handle on the side of the car next to the windshield, the other set of fingers scrabbling toward the far side of the car seat. Had I been any less tired, I might have minded that his eyebrows shot up as I fumbled with my own weight, flopping exhaustedly into the seat after a moment of awkward struggle. It also might have bothered me that chuckled lightly as I reached for the door, groping in midair before I could find the inside handle and tug the whole heavy object toward me.

The moment it was closed, though, he moved a broad hand toward the dashboard without waiting for me to buckle in completely. He shifted all of the vents my direction with small flicks of his fingers. After a moment’s hesitation and a meaningful look at me — I’d stopped with the seatbelt pulled halfway across my torso, waiting for him to move again — he cocked his head to the side and twisted the knob to the heat all the way up.

I stared at him, oddly touched. In all the time I’d known him, I’d learned that he was not the kind of person who cranked the heat to full blast, ever. He was the kind of guy whose version of air conditioning was dangling a bare arm out the window. Even in the dead of winter, he was more likely to throw on three extra flannels than touch that knob.

I sighed, smiling sheepishly, and he gave me a small nod. He must have hated it, but he’d done it for me anyway.

“Thank you,” I told him, trying to push the words into him so that he felt their warmth. I’d released the seatbelt and let it recoil back into the body of the car, and now I leaned forward and toward him. It was instinctive, like getting physically closer would make it impossible for him to miss how much I meant it.

“No problem,” he said, looking out his own window instead of back at me.

I gave up and sat back again, worrying my fingers together as their numbness subsided to a dull sting. “Thank you for picking me up,” I added lamely, going for quantity of gratitude since its magnitude fell short. “I appreciate it.”

He turned to flash another smile. “No problem,” he repeated, and our circle lapped again.

I looked down at my reddening fingers, then folded them together and stuffed them between my thighs for the warmth. My shoulders hunched together slightly in the cold, though the temperature in the small truck cabin was rising steadily. When I looked up at him again, he’d relaxed in his seat and was watching me like he was waiting for me to speak again. I blinked trying to formulate a sentence, and then shook my head as though that would help. “So,” I began, pitching my voice higher and more cheerful. “Where to?”

His blank face broke into another grin, and something inside me settled into comfortable ease again. “Depends,” he said, but he cleared his throat quietly so that I didn’t have to urge him to continue. “Have you eaten?”

I glanced at the clock on the dashboard, thinking back to my last meal and realizing I couldn’t recall it. “Not since…” I shook my head as my stomach, suddenly at the front of my awareness, gurgled in unhappy confirmation. “I don’t know when.”

His face crumpled for a moment in concern, and the hand closest to me, which now rested at the bottom of the steering wheel, uncurled slightly. I half expected it to unhook itself completely, for him to reach out — but then my eyes flicked back up to his face and I saw that a confident resolve had replaced the worry. “Perfect,” he told me, “I’ve got just the place.”

I hesitated. “It’s almost three a.m.,” I reminded him cautiously, “are you sure…?”

“That it’s open?” he asked, a bemused smirk tugging at his mouth. “Yes, I’m sure.”

I blinked.

“I’ve been an insomniac for a very, very long time,” he said with the calm self-assurance he used whenever I wound up at the less-informed end of our conversations. “I know three a.m.”

I laughed, then contained it in happily pursed lips as he shifted out of park.

When he looked back at me, he gave me a satisfied nod. “Buckle up,” he said, elbowing me as his left hand flicked on his blinker. “Let’s go.”

I yanked the seatbelt over to my left hip and snapped the metal tooth into place obediently, looking up at him to signal that I was ready.

For a moment, before they moved to check his mirrors and blind spot, I could’ve sworn his eyes looked tired and worn. Hundreds of previous nights spent alone, in this truck or elsewhere, had made him older than he’d ever let me see.

[thestumblesandfalls]

my fault.

He is sitting outside on the cement stoop, leaning his elbows on his khaki knees with his plaid jacket zipped up to his chin. It is the odd time of night where it isn’t quite light out yet, though it isn’t exactly dark anymore; the sky is a noncommittal shade of pale gray over the spidery black tree branches that sprawl above us. He is looking away from me. The tilt of the back of his head hints that he is looking upward, maybe blankly and maybe thoughtfully. He doesn’t move until I let the screen door bang closed behind me; it jounces once against its frame before settling crookedly into place.

“Hey,” I say, and he ducks his head down. It is a response, though not exactly a welcoming one. Part of me is instantly ashamed; the pinch in my gut urges me to turn around and scurry back inside, leaving him alone with the empty street. I fight it back, though, set my jaw, and shuffle over slowly toward him.

When I reach the top step of the stoop, one above the stair he’s chosen as a seat, I pause. “Can I sit?” I ask, my voice as soft and cautious as I can manage. I want to sit, I realize. I want to sit down next to him, to be next to him. I want him to say yes. In the silence that follows, I wonder if the burning behind my words has bled through from my thoughts to reality. More than that, I wonder if it might affect his answer.

He lifts his head again, takes a small, bracing breath, and then turns to look at me.

His expression is unreadable but not closed, sort of a careful poker face. He blinks once at me, then nods and turns back away.

“Okay,” I whisper, and then I fold myself down onto the step beside him, pulling my knees up to hug them. I can almost feel the heat radiating off of him on the side of my arm that runs parallel to his now — or maybe I imagine it. Either way, I am hyper-aware of his presence, of the fact that I am next to him and that he’s allowing it.

He glances at me once I’m still, just a quick look that could mean anything.

“I’m sorry,” I offer, though I’m not sure what it means.

He inhales and then turns to stare at me. He is shaking his head just barely and I feel my shoulders fall unbidden.

“I just mean…” I begin, but then I’m biting my lip and the words have flattened into blank, straight lines. “They joke about us, and I don’t know how that makes you feel." It's not what I set out to say, but it settles into the space separating us and I leave it there.

I have to count to ten before I can drag my gaze up to look at him again, and he has been watching and waiting for me to turn.

When I finally do, his eyes flick back and forth between each of mine, and then he exhales a breath he must have been holding.

He turns away once the pause has expanded too far for him to bridge it with any of his own words, then shifts his weight slightly and wraps his arm around my small shoulders, anchoring me there.

[thestumblesandfalls]

say something.

I had always wanted to be invisible. I had wanted the ability to jump into no space, hold my legs to myself and hold my breath, to make myself so small that I could be without being seen. I had wondered at that ability, wondered if it could give me more than what I already had. I had wondered if it could let me hear thoughts admitted only to some people, if it could mean I knew more and had more and felt more because I could do more without it being known that I was doing it.

But then the door swung open. I saw his face, saw it change when it found mine, and then react.

His features compacted into hard impassivity; some form of aggressive stubbornness spread like dark ink wicked across the thin paper of his face. He shut down and retreated, but with brute force and the loudness that told me he’d poured half of his anger himself. After a shuffle, he stepped back and away from the doorway, raising a hand in a blunt gesture, and then he was gone. His voice echoed down the stairwell once, then rang silent.

Its own heaviness swung the door back home with a thud. It was quiet for a heartbeat, and then conversations resumed as though the interruption had changed nothing.

It had changed nothing.

Yet now, his past sank into the room. It pulled me down with it, its weight a steady pressure on my shoulders as I stood, breathed, and made myself move.

I let the shiver run through me, the sad drag of bad news oozing into my bloodstream, and let my tired eyes rest for a slow second.

I did not want him to see me. I did not want to see him see me.

I wanted to be invisible.

[thestumblesandfalls]

bad blood.

I’d been drifting. My mind was toying with the edges of sleep but letting it evade me, letting it slip away before I dipped into dark nothing for the night. I could still sense the closeness of my covers around me, the safe weight of them present against me in a way that reminded my tired body of falling asleep next to him. I’d left my desk lamp on, and its light leaked in through my closed eyelids. Maybe that was why I was only halfway to dreaming. Maybe the light was anchoring me to awareness, maybe it was the reason I was still thinking and wondering with the rest of my consciousness.

I heard the squeak of the bathroom door down the hall and waited for the clack as it swung closed again. I heard a trail of footsteps, my ears following them down the hall and away from where I was until they faded into the humming, living quiet. A skateboard coasted outside, its wheels jumping heartbeats over the cracks in the sidewalk. It faded away, hard wheels on rough cement, until I could no longer find it in the white night noise.

I must have drifted farther. I could sense that the time had passed, but had not experienced it passing. There were more sounds now. Another pattern of footsteps tapped in the hallway, then stopped abruptly.

That was wrong.

BAM bam bam.

The knock came hard and fast, ending in a silence so complete I wondered if it had ever been broken. I stiffened, waiting, my ears tasting the moment and almost ringing with strain. Quiet poured into them, deceitfully calm. I made myself breathe, feeling my heartbeat kick up a bass beat in my empty eardrums and willing it to slow down. The covers were still bundled around me, but their safe heat had disappeared. Goosebumps fizzed like hackles along my arms, tingling up to the nape of my neck before they settled into my body as a dull shakiness.

I sat up. The air in my room was cold and still around me, its once-cozy blueness frozen away. I waited for another moment, wondering if the knock would come again. Wondering if he knew I was home. Wondering if he was listening, if it would be better to hold still and be invisible to his ears.

But the crack under the door was interrupted by two foot-sized shadows, unmoving and unmistakeable. He wasn’t going anywhere.

My feet found the floor, cool wood pressing back against my bare soles. I flipped the covers back over the space I’d left, wanting to hide at least that small home. Somehow, concealing it felt like keeping it for myself. I pulled a sweatshirt on over the cold and hugged it around my arms.

Slowly, I approached the door. I hesitated after each step, knowing already that I’d twist the lock and find him standing there, expectant. He would be waiting for me.

I paused close enough to reach out and touch the knob, realizing how few inches of safe dark wood separated me from the door. He must have heard me walking; the foot shadows shifted slightly. The movement rushed me.

With a bracing breath, I reached for the cool metal of the doorknob. I wrapped my fingers around it, purposeful yet careful. I rotated my wrist. The latch unhooked with a deep click and then I was letting the yellow hallway light spill onto my face.

There he was, sloping shoulders and baby face. His lips pouted limply and eyes were round, staring at me as though they expected an apology. He was slouched forward with his legs locked so they looked distorted, bowed out of proportion with the rest of his body. His shirt was too big, and cut so that the neckline was a lopsided boat. He was wearing too-tight jeans with an odd flare at the ankle where they ended at just the wrong length, and he had them partially tucked into a pair of long, shiny, lace-up boots I’d never seen before. I barely recognized him from the slouchy boy I’d fallen for.

“Hi,” I offered, because I didn’t know what else to do.

“Hey,” he responded, and then his stance shifted. He wanted to come in. He wanted to talk and to tell me his thoughts because I used to ask for them. He wanted to change things, to clean up the mess we’d torn our future into.

But he didn’t speak, for long enough to let me know. He was swaying, too drunk to stand still and too drunk to realize it. He was breathing, loudly, through his nose, unaware of the animalistic character it gave him. And he was staring, giving me undivided attention but not seeing me. Not reading the disinterest on my face, or the exhaustion. Seeing my face as close and looking back at his, instead of watching me sigh and shake my head.

I shouldn’t have answered the door. My thoughts rewound, and I watched myself roll over and stuff a pillow over my ears to block out the existence of the boy in the hallway looking for me. I watched myself breathe slowly in and slowly out, my consciousness settling into peaceful dreams. And I watched him knock twice more, sigh, but then leave. I watched him give up and walk away.

Now, I turned to look over my shoulder at my bedroom as it really was. The bed was messily made, and my towel was still draped over the back of my desk chair. The floor was blank wood, the walls white, the ceiling high. It was my place, my sanctuary and home. My room.

I took a step back into it, looking for the comfort it held with a closed door. A locked door. A door that blocked out the millions of things that made my heart pound. That shut away the angry fingers on my arms, that muted the sound of my name used as a swearword. A solid barrier against the desperation and the begging, the guilt and hurt and bad. My locked door, which barricaded him out and kept me protected and warm in its cozy volume.

But with the door cracked open, his eyes probing inside and his voice groping through the air, it was different. With him here, it didn’t feel like a room anymore. This was just empty space.

[thestumblesandfalls]

hang with me.

“Come on,” he said, and he held out his palm like a suggestion. “Dance with me.”

Dance with me.

I stared at his hand, suspicious. Dance with me. It would have been a benign invitation had I not known him, had I not watched him pick up three girls in a row the night after Their Talk. She had changed him, maybe temporarily and maybe not. Or perhaps she’d just set him free. Either way, I leaned away from him. Before I could configure an inoffensive question, my mouth asked, “Why?”

My face must have scrunched up into something like a grimace, because he rolled his eyes and flipped his hand through the air, renewing his offer. “Just dance with me.” He shook his head as though that could brush off my thought processes and skid us through this moment the way he wanted.

I crossed my arms over my chest slowly, pursing my lips and intentionally narrowing my eyes. I wasn’t disgusted with the idea of dancing with him. We were comfortable enough that the prospect didn’t hit me with the self-consciousness that crippled most of my first impressions, but I knew his track record. I knew his penchant for self-destruction. And I knew that this was the moment I could pass on the opportunity to let him hurt me alongside himself. This was the offer, the question, the line. The place where I decided whether or not to care.

“Give me a reason,” I insisted, raising my eyebrows at him. A challenge. He could deal with a challenge.

With an exasperated sigh, he let his hand flop to his side. “I don’t know, because I’m asking?”

I blinked, waiting.

“Because…” he searched for a second, then shrugged. “Because I want you to. Because this is a great song. Because it’s fun and we could both use that.” He sighed. “Because we’re friends. I don’t know. Whatever reason will make you say yes.” He bounced a little on the phrase say yes, as though he were a little kid begging for something.

I paused for a moment.

“Because we’re friends,” I repeated, enunciating friends with a small, accepting smile.

He eyed me skeptically out of the corners of his eyes, watching me hop down from the barstool.

When he offered his hand this time, I closed my fingers around his wrist and pulled him into the crowd.