I stopped at the top of the stairs as soon as I saw them. My heart gave a painful squeeze in my chest. My mother and father were standing in the main room studying the statue of Azazel. Somehow, they looked out of place in the schoolhouse. They looked too ordinary in this seemingly ordinary schoolhouse, but there was nothing ordinary about this place Azazel gave me a sideways glance. Her question was evident to me. Can you do this?
They hadn’t seen me yet. Without taking my eyes from them, I licked my lips and said to Azazel, “Let me go out first.” Wordlessly, she agreed, and I cautiously took a step toward them, my mind running a marathon thinking about the dozens of reactions my mother might receive me with, what my father could have possibly been thinking behind that stony face of his. My father was wearing his signature black tights and a heavy dark hoodie, and my mother was wearing her work cardigan and khakis. Her hair was still up and kept; she had probably just gotten off work. When they heard us approach, they turned to look at me, and a mixture of relief and dread overcame me. My mother surged on me and smacked me hard once across the face. My head snapped to the side and my cheek began to sting, and for a second I felt like I was ten again, and I’d done something stupid and my mom was just putting me in my place.
When I looked back up, tears were in my eyes, and tears were in hers, and she raised her hand to hit me again, but I grabbed her wrists before she could hit me again, and then she started yelling at me.
“Where have you been? Did you get a tattoo? Where did you get a tattoo? Why would you get a tattoo on your face? Do you know how worried I was? Do you know how many times I called you? Where is your phone? What is going on? Why did you do that? Why did you disappear like that? What is wrong with you?” she screamed at me as she sobbed hysterically.
I wrapped my arms around her neck and held her tight. Burying my face in her shoulder, I tried to memorize her scent. She was fighting me frantically and trying to hit me hard, but I held steadily on to her. I didn’t realize how much I had actually missed her until she was here before me, even if she was trying to hit me. The more I breathed her in, the more childhood memories flashed in my head. A wave of bittersweet nostalgia swept over me, and I could feel my tears soaking into her jacket. She wouldn’t stop crying or screaming at me, and it was in the midst of her screaming that I realized when I almost died, I wouldn’t get to hug her again, or smell her again, or hear her voice again, or see her again. It made me cry even more, thinking about how if I had died, I couldn’t even remember the last thing I would have said to her. I hoped it was ‘I love you’. I whispered into her shoulder, “I know, Mom, I’m sorry. I’m okay. I love you, and I’m so sorry I worried you.”
I let her go on like that, crying and screaming and hitting me for a while until she finally settled down and just held me in her tight embrace. After more sniffles, she asked, “Can we go home now, please? And promise me you won’t do this again? Because your father and I were so worried and scared. We didn’t know what happened to you, and we heard about what happened to your grade school teacher, Mrs. Ronson, we didn’t know what to think! And we didn’t know what to tell the cops when we called them, please, can we just go home?”
Holding her at arm’s length, I etched every detail of her face in my mind. The fear was palpable, and there were deep, dark circles beneath her eyes. She looked put together, but beneath her coffee brown eyes, there was a storm that had abetted only once she had seen me. Looking over at my father, he was stony faced, his mouth hard and seemingly unforgiving. But there was an exhausted relief in his eyes. Part of me shattered. I’d never seen my father look so . . . defeated. I could see how much my disappearance was affecting them.
“Dad?” I asked, my voice cracking, and without saying a word, he came and wrapped me in his massive arms. He held me so tight, I almost couldn’t breathe, but I encircled my arms around his waist and squeezed with as much strength as I had.
“Just come home, Ama,” he said, his voice rumbling my whole body. I wanted to stay there, stay in their arms with them and back to the life they made for me. I breathed his scent in deeply, committing it to memory and keeping it safely besides everything that was my mother in my mind. Reluctantly, I pushed myself away from him and looked at them both with big teary eyes. My hand shot up to my mouth, suddenly desperate to contain the sob that escaped my mouth. Fresh tears sprang to my eyes then, and a frantic and fearful kook took over my mother’s face. In a hard but quivering voice, she asked, “Ama, what’s wrong? What’s going on?”
I opened my mouth to speak, to explain to her that this wasn’t something I could just walk away from, that there was a lot at stake, that now only had my life been on the line, but Jo’s and Bond’s and Eve—I wanted to explain that I couldn’t go home, but my mouth betrayed me, ready to say “Yeah, we can go home now”, but my throat saved me as it closed up, and I choked on the endless tears. A look of new terror came over her face. Something within my crumpled, and I felt Azazel ready herself behind me.
“No, no, it’s—it’s nothing like what you’re thinking,” I finally forced myself to choke out.
“Ama, if it’s this cult, we can get you away from this, it’s okay,” my mother said, coming to me, and I took a step back, shaking my head.
“No, Mama, it’s not like that, it’s not like that at all,” I said quickly, feeling part of me falter in my decision to stay here with Azazel. My parents were right in front of me, ready to take me home. School was waiting for me back there. A normal, stressful life was waiting for me, beckoning to me in the form of my parents, and I almost, almost gave in to that call.
“Ama, please, just come home with us,” my father said in a low pleading voice, and that was it. My heart shattered in my chest. My father was a proud, composed man. He rarely let his emotions out, and to hear him using that voice—a voice I’d never heard—on me, pleading with me to come home, it broke me. Hastily, I wiped away my tears and took a deep quivering breath, and I tried to say steadily, “I can’t go back with you because there is something really important I have to do.”
“What? What can be so important that you can’t come home?” my mother exploded suddenly, and I couldn’t help but flinch at the shortness of her tone, but I quickly recomposed myself.
“I have to stay here because they need me here,” I said quietly, trying to pull myself back together.
“What do you need to do?” my father asked desperately. “We can help you. Look, if you’re in trouble, it’s okay, we can help. You don’t need to do anything alone.”
“Oh, Dad, stop it,” I whimpered. “I have to—I have to–”
“She needs to save the world,” Azazel finished for me. I whipped around to see her finally emerging from the top of the stairs. My parents both stared, shocked and very confused, and they looked between us, trying to discern if this was an illusion. I looked at her, and then at the ground, feeling as if I’d been caught in a bad secret. She came to stand beside me, and she looked at my mother and father unwaveringly.
“Are—are you twins?” my mother asked, her eyes wide. A quick, smart remark shot to my tongue, but I swallowed it back down. I looked at Azazel, and she looked back at me, and she and I said at the same time, “Not quite.”
“What the hell?” my father said slowly, looking between us. “Oh, this is freaky.”
“Yeah, it’s . . . it’s pretty weird,” I said sheepishly, still feeling the weight of a heavy decision on my shoulders.
“Your daughter needs to stay with me,” Azazel said, looking between the two of them.
“She is the only one who can save the world.”
“What are you talking about?” my father asked.
“Father and Mother Johns, your daughter is very special. She is more special than you could have ever hoped for. It would be a curse for any other ordinary human, but this is what she was born to do,” she answered with an inspiring confidence. Squinting my eyes slightly, I folded my arms and said nothing as she tried to reason with my parents. This was a façade in the purest sense. She didn’t believe the words she was saying, and it almost made me angry, but if I were her, I’d have been doing the same exact thing. Well, I am her. . .
“I—I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” my mother said, shaking her head. Azazel looked at me, and I looked at her, and I nodded silently, and she nodded back. She looked at both of my parents with an unwavering gaze and she said, “Father and Mother Johns, my name is Azazel, Second of the Final Trinity, Protector of Man, Maiden of Arms, Bearer of the Divine Fire.”
My parents looked at her for a moment, and then my father burst out laughing and my mother’s face quickly became furious, and I took a breath, put a hand over my eyes.
“Are you trying to tell me you’re the angel Azazel, like in the bible and like this cult?” my father asked disbelievingly.
Without missing a beat, Azazel said, “Yes, I am she.” My father laughed again, and it quickly turned bitter and angry, and he said, “Ama, I don’t care if you don’t want to come home or not, but you’re coming with us whether you like it or not. You scared us to death, you disappeared without a word, you lied and you’ve already missed a lot of school, and do you know your job fired you?”
A sigh escaped my mouth, and I made a face. Of course they had. There was an entire life seventeen years deep that I essentially abandoned for what could have easily been just a reckless, desperate try at adventure. Beyond all common knowledge, it had quickly become something that I couldn’t just walk away from. This resolve wasn’t mine, and I didn’t have a choice when my options were based solely on not an if but when. Azazel and I exchanged a look resolution, and I said, “It’s crazy, and I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. She’s an angel, and I have to help her save the world, because something really bad is going to happen sometime maybe soon, and I don’t want that something bad to happen. No one does.”
“Amor Elise Johns,” my mother suddenly snapped, her hand darting out to grab my wrist, “Get your ass in the car now.”
“Mom, stop!” I yelled, yanking my arm back. At the same time, Azazel unfurled her wing and stared challengingly at my parents. Their expressions shot from anger to stark disbelief in an instant. They both stared at the glorious wing, not saying a thing, probably not knowing what to say. Even I was at a loss for words upon seeing it’s fully glory in the light that streamed in from the windows.
Though I’d seen her wing in my dreams—her memories—it was nothing compared to what I saw before me. The top feathers were actually crème, but they reflected a brilliant gold in the sunlight. The feathers directly beneath were a glossy and luminous black. They reminded me of the sheen you might see on a black stallion. The feathers on the bottom, and the ones that reached far out, were not just a deep scarlet red, but they flickered like fire itself. Where there was scarlet, light reflected and played off of the individual fibers, giving the effect of a living, wavering blaze in the shape of feathers. Her wing itself seemed to give off a light, luminescent haze, and I was completely at a loss for its utter beauty.
Shaking my head form the mystification, I slowly unfurled my own. Standing side by side, we made one person, and it must have been an interesting sight to see us like that, especially to my now discombobulated parents. When my wing came out to its full length, they looked at me with even more astonishment, studying me up and down to make sure nothing else changed about me, and I said slowly, “It’s crazy, but Azazel is an actual angel, like, the angel, and I’m kind of like her incarnation.”
“Her what?” my mom gasped, still staring at the wing on my back.
“Her incarnation,” I said carefully. “That’s why I have this wing. I promise it wasn’t always there, but this is kind of what I have to deal with now, and this is why I can’t go back with you guys. This is why I have to stay here.”
My mother approached me slowly. Her mouth was closed, but I could see the awe and wonder that had taken place in her eyes. She looked at me and asked in a soft, dazed voice, “Can I feel it?”
I nodded, and gingerly, she raised a hand to caress the dark feathers. Slowly, she ran her fingers along the top part of the wing, along the bones, and then she grazed her fingers along the inner feathers. She moved behind me and examined my back to see where it connected to my body. She came back to stand in front of me again. I didn’t know what to say to her, or if I should have said anything to her, but I stayed uncomfortably silent the whole time she inspected my wing, its authenticity. She stared at it a second longer, and without saying another word, she wrapped her arms around my body and held me close.
“I always knew there was something special about you,” my mother and father said at the same time. I was at first surprised, but then I folded my arms around hers and held her close again. My father inspected Azazel’s wing, and he looked at her and asked, “Are you anything like Amor?”
“I do not know. I do not believe I can say either yes or no definitively,” she answered. “It seems we are alike in some ways, however.”
“So, my daughter is an angel,” my father sighed, looking between the two of us, still trying to process both us and this newfound reality.
With a humorless chuckle, I said, “I guess so.” The energy seemed to spill away from his body then, and he suddenly looked very tired. My mother let me go and took a step back. She came to stand in front of me and she said, “If this is really Azazel, then you really can’t come home?”
I shook my head sadly and said, “No, Mom, I can’t come home, at least not for a while.”
Fresh tears welled in her eyes, and she rubbed them away silently. Wanly, I said, “Ah, Mom, don’t do that. You’re gonna get me going again.”
“Do you know when you’ll be able to come home?” she asked as my father came and put an arm around her shoulders. The gesture seemed more for his own benefit than hers, and my face softened. They stood apart from me, and though it was less than five feet of distance, it felt like there was a chasm between us. I always knew there was something separating me from everyone else, but this wing on my back made it seem like we were worlds away from each other, now. Shaking my head again, I looked to Azazel, at a loss of what to do next. Do I just say goodbye now? Do I explain more? Does anything else need to be said?
She looked at them and said, “I do not know when we will be able to resolve this, but you have my word that your daughter will return safely.”
My mother clutched my father’s hoodie but didn’t look away from me. Her eyes took on a fierce, mother-bear quality, and she looked at Azazel and said in a surprisingly strong voice,
“What are you getting her in to?”
Azazel pursed her lips gently, and she glanced at me. She looked back at my parents and said slowly, “In this world, there are humans, there are angels, and there are what you call demons. The demons are plotting to something sinister. That is the war that your daughter and I must fight.”
A look of disbelieving indignation flashed across her eyes, but her face remained unchanged. Instead, she turned to put her face in my father’s shoulder, and I could feel the weight of this knowledge crushing her. My father rubbed her shoulder, consoling her silently, and he asked, “Isn’t there someone else you can have do this? Does it have to be our daughter?”
Azazel shook her head gravely and said, “It cannot be any other person but her. She has my wing, and I can only do this if I have both.”
“Then can’t you just take it from her?” my mother cried out, whipping around to stare at her.
“I do not know what will happen to Amor if I try to forcefully take it from her, and I do not know if it is something she can choose to part from. As you saw, it is part of her body, just as it is part of mine.”
“Are you saying she could die if you take it from her?” my mother cried out again. There was a conflict within her, and it almost felt like an attack. She was caught between letting her only child go off and save the world, or letting her only child go off and die. Those were the statements she was battling within. To save the world? Or to let her die?
“That seems to be the most certain possibility, yes,” Azazel answered in a low, resigned tone. My mother let out a sobbing gasp, and my father asked quietly, “What will happen if she comes home? What happens if we just take her home with us?”
I took a deep breath, caught off guard by the implications behind the question, but Azazel said in a straight and dire tone, “She will be hunted down by demons, and if they do not find her first, then they will find you. They will tear my wing from her back and kill her, and they will make you watch and then they will kill you.
“Father and Mother Johns, as much faith as you have put in your daughter in her own safety, and I know you have, demons are not a threat anyone can prepare for. There is nothing humans can do to protect her from them. I wish there existed the option for Amor to go home with you both and live her life the way any other adolescent human would, but that possibility does not exist for her, and the safest place for her now is with me.”
“How do you know that?” my mother snapped, and I opened my mouth to say something, but my heart crawled to my throat and choked me out for a second. Swallowing it back down, I said, “Mom, you need to know that I have almost died twice since I left home, okay?”
She opened her mouth to protest, but I held up a hand and said, “Azazel saved me both times. Azazel was the only one who could save me because it was demons who tried to kill me. The safest place for me is with her, okay? And I hate to say that, I really do, but she’s right. If I went home with you guys, I’ll be putting you and everyone else in danger, and I don’t want to do that. I really don’t.”
“Why am I standing here just taking this in?” she cried all of a sudden, giving in to the side that said I was going to die. “I must be on some type of drug! Angels can’t exist, they just can’t!”
“Mom,” I said, my heart breaking, “If angels don’t exist, then neither does your god.”
“No, no, don’t turn this on me, no!” she yelled out, rage and disbelief and sorrow battling for precedence in her eyes. She started to yell hysterically, and my father had a quiet, resigned look in his eyes. He looked at Azazel, and he said in a terse and threatening voice, “You bring back my baby girl back safe and sound.”
Azazel nodded, and she got down on one knee and bowed her head to both of them, her wing splayed out as if to curtsey. I stared, shocked and slack jawed, and the motion was enough to pause my mother’s ranting. Azazel spoke in a ceremonious tone, “Father and Mother Johns, I vow to you that I will bring your daughter home to you. I give my life to this vow.”
There was a strange feeling then, all around. The world itself seemed to gasp at her gesture. My parents were frozen, caught off guard by the enormity of her words, and something deep and heavy settled somewhere within me that told me that this was true, that she would give her life in the efforts to get me back home to my parents. Looking up at them, I was looking for some sort of indicator of how I should react, but they were just as astonished as I was.
Azazel stood a second later, and she said with a final note, “Your daughter is safe with me, Father and Mother Johns.”
My father blinked once and then nodded. He looked at me and gave me one last hard embrace. Maybe it was because I knew I wouldn’t see him for a while, or because he didn’t know when he would see me again, but his arms around me felt like a painful good-bye. I didn’t feel any idea of “come back soon”. I held him, as hard as I could and buried my face in his massive chest, and I whispered into his hoodie, “I love you, Dad.”
“I’m proud of you, Ama,” he said back. He was like me. He didn’t have any particular scent to him. His hoodie smelled like clean laundry detergent, and it was then that I realized it wasn’t that he didn’t have a scent. It was rather that he smelled like home, because when I got that whiff of laundry detergent, I saw my laundry room. I saw how crowded it was, littered with everyone’s clothes, and right next to it his was technological man cave, filled with computers and his bodybuilding trophies and race medals. I saw my kitchen, and I saw my room, and I saw my parents room, and my living room, and I saw my dog. My dog that only seemed to love me when she was scared, but that’s why I loved her so much. I could at least do that for her.
My father let me go, and my mother was crushing me in her arms next, and I forced myself to memorize every sensation of her touch and her smell. She and I were the same height now, but I still remember when I had to look up to her, and she just always seemed like a benevolent goddess to me. She would carry me with her for as long as she could until I got too big, and then she never let me out of her sight. Her love was smothering, but if I forgot everything about the world, I at least would remember how much she loved me, and that was something no one could ever replace.
“I love you, Mom,” I said into her shoulder.
“I love you, too, baby. Please be safe, okay, please come back to us,” she wept, and I nodded vigorously as I forced myself to let her go. She wouldn’t have if I left that up to her. I turned to my father, and I asked, “Dad, can I have your hoodie?”
Without saying a word, he took the huge garment off and handed it to me, and I held it tightly against my body. He nodded at me with stern, loving eyes, and he turned and walked toward the door with my mother. Azazel walked after them, but I couldn’t bring myself to follow. I felt if I walked them out, I would end up running with them to the car and trying to drive as fast as possible back to a normal life, back to school and its overbearing presence and its tendency to put me with people I didn’t like. Back to my normal life, where I lost a job that I was getting too old for anyway, back to my normal life where I could fantasize about the colleges I wanted to go to, but then laugh bitterly realizing I couldn’t go to any of them without mountains of debt following me for the rest of my life. Back to my normal life where the things that bothered me the most and kept me up at night, were now things that I wanted to bother me the most and keep me up at night.
“I love you,” I whispered into the hoodie as I helplessly watched my parents walk back to their normal life of working and paying bills and watching after Nochi and doing whatever else middle-aged adults do with teenaged kids. Would I know how to do that when I got there? Would I ever get there?
Azazel came back to me, and her expression was unreadable. Without any warning, she put her arms around my shoulders and held me close. I couldn’t explicitly hear her thoughts, but I had very explicit impressions, like how Madison had said before. With that impression, words came across. I cannot know the pain you feel, but I feel it with you.
There didn’t seem to be any more tears left. My parents took them all with me. There was a deep, darkness welling in the pit of my stomach that intensified in Azazel’s embrace, and I knew then what she meant by her impressions. She could feel this pain with me as I felt it reflected in her and reverberating back in me. It was agonizing.
Putting my head down on her shoulder, I clutched the hoodie tighter to my body and exhaled deeply. Her arms tightened around me, and it was an odd comfort.
“Ama?” a man called from the doorway. My head shot up at the familiarity of the voice, the swelling of the darkness temporarily halted. Standing in the doorway, with his head almost brushing the top of it, was Vance. He looked tired, as if he hadn’t slept, or hadn’t been sleeping well, and he looked thinner than usual. Azazel turned to see who had called my name and
caused this sudden rift between our empathy.
As I called his name, “Vance?”, thoroughly confused, she called someone else’s in loving surprise, “Azrael?”
He looked between us, not sure what he saw, and he asked, “You have a twin?” Azazel was before him in an instant, running her hands over his face, calling out to him, “Azrael, you have been here? How long have you been here? I have missed you beyond measure, my beloved.”
The love that sprouted to life within her almost physically pushed me back, and all of a sudden I was awash in a tide of her memories. Azrael when he was first created. Azrael when he first spoke. Azrael when he first laid with her. Azrael, Azrael, Azrael–
Vance flinched away from her and grabbed her hands and put them at her sides. He looked back over to me and then down at her again, and he asked, “Ama, who is this? Why do you guys look the same?”
His voice brought me back to my sense, and I said, trying to gather my bearings, “Um, Vance, this is Azazel.”
“Azrael, do you not remember me?” she asked, aghast and taking a step back.
“Azazel,” I said slowly, coming up behind her and placing a hand delicately on her shoulder. Her turmoil struck me like a spear. It was a distinctly different sort of pain than what I’d just dealt with when my parents left. “This isn’t your Azrael. This is Vance. He isn’t an angel.”
“No, of course he is an angel!” she exclaimed. “I can see it in him as clearly as I saw it in you!” Vance glanced at me, confused, and she said more adamantly, with anger then, “He is an angel, I can see it. Azrael, how have you forgotten?”
“Azazel,” I said more assertively, tightening my grip on her shoulder, “He is not Azrael.” A sharp jolt ran through my arm and I yanked my hand back. She turned seething eyes on to me.
She glanced furiously at Vance, and then stormed off behind me. Letting out a sigh, I looked up at Vance. Exhaustion suddenly washed over me like a massive wave. Without saying a word, I just put my head on his chest, and he wrapped his arms around me. I felt small and frail in his arms, and it was oddly comforting.
“I hate being tired,” I breathed into his shirt.
“You haven’t changed at all,” he murmured into my hair.
“Neither did you. How did you find me? Why are you here?”
“Your parents were losing their minds over you, but they didn’t want to get the police involved yet, so they asked me if I knew where you were.”
“But you didn’t.”
“You’re right, I didn’t. Modern technology helped me find the last place you were, though, and so it led us here. I went with them because . . . I don’t know. I just, I had to make sure you were alright.” Looking up at him, there was a sort of pained look on his face. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and his face looked more angular than before. I wondered how many nights he’d spent awake, or how many nightmares he’d had. My face softened and I reached up to stroke his cheek, but he grabbed my hand, and he said in an agonized, almost broken tone, “You can’t do that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked dumbly, putting my hand on his chest. He rolled his eyes almost impatiently, and he said, “You can’t just disappear like that, Ama. You’ve got so many people who care about you, and everyone was just going crazy. I was going crazy. You can’t just disappear.”
I moved away from him noiselessly, and I studied his shoes then. They seemed easier to look at than those sad, sad eyes of his. That sadness had no place in those beautiful, hazel eyes.
Without looking up, I mumbled, “Please don’t look at me like that.”
“How should I look at you, Ama?” he asked, almost incredulous.
After a moment of silence, I realized he was actually waiting for a response. Still staring down at his worn out shoes, I muttered, “I don’t know, relieved? I’m alive, right? Or mad? I think I’d rather see you mad.”
He let out an exasperated sigh and I could feel him looking up. His gaze fell back on me, and I thought to allow myself to feel how he felt, but I didn’t know if I was even ready for his emotions; his especially. He stated in a dour voice, “Of course I’m relieved you’re alive. I’m ecstatic, okay? I’m so happy that you’re here and that I even get to see you. I’m not mad at you for disappearing like that. I can’t be, I don’t know what’s going on, so I can’t just throw a fit because your life doesn’t bend around mine. I’m sad, Ama. I’m sad and I’m upset that you didn’t tell me anything, that you didn’t let me in on any of this. I get that I’m not Esteban or Joana, but I at least thought we were close enough that you could tell me if you’re in danger or if you’re scared or you’re hurt–”
“How do you know I’ve been those things?” I half protested, my eyes studying the small tears along the rubber of his shoes. He was quiet for a second, and I glanced up to see what he was thinking. Vance closed his mouth and made a face, but he answered sheepishly, “I’ve been dreaming about you, and you’ve been terrified and you were hurting so much and you were so sad, and I just wanted to make all of that stop for you. I never wanted to see you like that, and yet here I am, miles away from you and seeing you like that. I want to be there for you, and it feels like you’ve shut me out from your world. It’s not even that you didn’t answer my texts or calls, or even bother to call me except that one time. It just feels like you’re moving away from me.
“It feels like you’re leaving me behind, Ama, and I kind of always knew it would be this way, I just didn’t think it would happen so fast,” he said, looking down at his feet his voice taking on a dejected tone. He took a deep breath and looked at me with a patched together resolve, and he said, “I guess I came all the way up here to see you come back with us and spend some time together before you outgrow me, but I don’t know. You’re staying here now. Maybe you’ve already outgrown me.”
Inside my chest, my heart clenched painfully, and I held my father’s hoodie closer to me. I couldn’t look at him then. The pain in his eyes was evident, and if I opened myself up to how he felt, I would have felt it in agonizing waves. I looked up at him with earnest and pained eyes. There were a thousand things I wanted to say to him in that moment. I wanted to tell him that I hadn’t outgrown him, that I probably never would, that I wanted him around me as much as possible. I wanted to tell him how I missed him more than I thought I could, how he was my safe haven when things got to be too much for me. He was my best friend, and that he knew me better than anyone, and that I felt like I knew him better than anyone else but at the same time that I felt so blind to him. That was his beauty. My beautiful enigma. I wasn’t cutting him off. I was leaving him out, but I didn’t want him, of all people, mixed up in this mess I didn’t even fully understand myself. He was the one thing I wanted to preserve from this new part of my life and keep safe and unsullied from the horrors of the things that made you question your world and your place and who you are.
I wanted to protect him from all of that, and most of all, I wanted to protect him from myself.
I stood there, mouth opening and closing like a landed fish, unsure of what words I could put together to ease his mind and heart. But that’s exactly what I needed to protect him from. Word play was a handy skill that I used with most people I didn’t want to be around, but that’s all they were. Words. In that moment, there were no empty words I could think of that would have made him feel better. Anything I could have said, in any given order, could have made a difference to what he was feeling right then and there, and it pained me to know I was the reason for it all.
He scoffed quietly, “I know you aren’t good with telling how you really feel, but can you at least say something to me?” I opened my mouth again to say something, anything, but nothing came out. Maybe it was best, because above all, I wanted him by my side. I wanted him here with me, and if I said anything, I would ask him to stay, and I knew he would. I held the hoodie closer and closed my mouth, looked down at his worn shoes.
“It’s funny, kind of. You said we should do something when we saw each other next. I didn’t think it would be saying good bye,” he exhaled heavily. The sound was like a bitter slap to the face, and I said without looking up, “Let’s get food.”
“What?”
“Let’s go get some food,” I said louder, looking up at him. He gave me an unreadable expression, but shook his head and murmured, “You’re so hard to read.”
Despite how I was feeling, I managed to crack a smile.