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“I’m not going to get worse. I’m going to sleep.”
“Agree to text me or I won’t leave.”
“Fine.”
“I shouldn’t be more than a few hours.”
As soon as the door closes behind him, the last of my control over the shaking gives out. I’ve been holding it together all day, and I can’t. Not anymore. My muscles are worn through. The entire apartment jitters. It looks like a painted earthquake.
This is worse than the acute terror I felt in the cave. It’s fucking with me. Keeping me alive to suffer longer. A heart attack in slow motion.
I drop onto the couch and close my eyes. Try to let it roll through, and past, but it won’t go. The painting is in my head and everywhere. The panic, I mean. When I can’t stand it any longer, I get up and go to the window. It’s not meant to withstand hurricanes. I could break it with anything from Will’s house. I could put my fist through it. It would shatter.
But I’m not here to jump.
Just to look.
Sitting on the couch made me motion-sick. This is probably a futile attempt to force my brain to recognize the horizon. To recognize, for one fucking time, that there’s nothing out there.
The city’s bright with a dark-sky background. Orange light pollution skims the tops of the buildings, a candle held up to the sky. Highlights them. Concrete brush strokes map out the sidewalks. White lines on black for the streets. Red lights burst from their centers like neon sunbeams.
Shadows move along the road. One of them takes the shape of a woman in a gray coat. She steps into the light beneath a streetlamp. Turns her head. It could be Daphne, the first time I saw her.
She moves back into the semi-darkness, but my imagination follows. Look. There. She’s safe. She’s fine. There in her gray coat. I don’t realize I’ve pressed both hands to the window until she turns a corner and is gone.
“No.”
The scene shorts out, replaced with memories or hallucinations or both. The sweet softness where Daphne stands in the negative space of my life hums at the edge of consciousness. You’re supposed to leave negative space alone. It keeps the work in balance. Draws attention to the subject. But Daphne became the subject. The rest of the world is negative space now.
I can feel her out there, existing without me.
Where?
Her brother’s house, no doubt. My mind offers a still image. Her brother’s house. A white, shining castle. A tower with Daphne inside, painting. Daphne inside, happy. Daphne inside, safe.
Safe from me.
Other images appear in cruel strokes. Daphne, forgetting. Daphne, turning toward someone new. Daphne in a white dress. Every moment that separates us takes her farther away, like waves that draw out into the ocean. This time, she’s not sinking below the surface. She’s flying.
Hummingbird.
Where’s she going to land?
With another man. One who rings the doorbell of her brother’s house. One who comes to meet her with a bouquet of flowers. One who asks her on a date to a restaurant. One who has a good family. One who doesn’t have to walk fifteen blocks everywhere he goes. One who never scared her.
It’s steel through the heart. This future explodes from its frames. Mangles everything around it. Another man? Another fucking person, touching her? What was I thinking?
“They wouldn’t—” There’s no one to hear me. “They wouldn’t understand her.”
They wouldn’t see her like I see her. They wouldn’t see her as a person. In an ironic twist of fate, they would see her as an object. A trophy wife. A pretty thing to have at their side. That’s the game I play with Daphne. The game. Because she could never be an object. She is too alive. Too perfect.
Too mine.
Panic rushes in.
It’s a new wave, filling every inch of the canvas, sweeping aside all other thoughts. I’m reduced to a knife-struck heartbeat. It hijacks my nerves. My fingers. My toes. Beats at my head. Pops my lungs.
I’m dying.
