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i.
You didn’t think you’d make it past fifteen.
The thing is, you are (only) fifteen, and you already know what it looks like when someone breathes their last breath. You are (only) fifteen, and you know how it feels to die – you know what hell looks like and you have known since you were twelve. You know what fear tastes like; metallic, bloody; how it sits, acidic, bile-like in the throat, how it feels; like an anomaly – being fundamentally different and being fucking terrified about it – what it sounds like; your father teaching you how to be a man, take a life. The sound of a gun, firing. You learned how to pull a trigger before you learned how to ride a two-wheeled bike.
You are (only) fifteen, and you spend every night grieving who you used to be, because no one else seems to do it. No one else seems to care about the boy who was found in the quarry and buried all those years ago – it wasn’t real, they tell you, but you, better than anyone, know that it was. You know an important piece of you withered and died back then, you felt it when he was ripped from you, and you spend every night digging into his grave with hands that are cold like a carcass, uprooting the worms and the bugs that are residing there. You never find him, it is fruitless work, and you wake up with dirt beneath your nails and in the spaces between your fingers. You are the only one who can see it.
Maybe you are the only one who cares enough to look.
After all, you spend every night, like that. Alone. Digging. Hoping to unearth something – some part of you knowing you will never get it back.
But you are never truly alone, are you? Because it sits there with you, your grief. When you were younger, you believed the moon was following you. Now, it is your grief that greets you every morning, now it is your grief that accompanies you during rides in the car, now–
it is your grief that coats your lungs and makes it hard for you to breathe.
ii.
At five, you made your first friend; you, on that swing on your first day of kindergarten (Kindergarten! you hear your mother say). Alone, until you weren’t anymore. Alone until he’d walked up and asked you what no one had ever asked you before: Will you be my friend? And you'd known then, that you would never be alone again.
It had meant everything to you, back then. It had meant everything to you, when he’d told you, years later, that extending his hand to you was the best thing he had ever done. It had meant everything to you, still, even when he’d started rejecting you, when you had your first fight, there, in his parents’ garage. It had meant everything to you, still, when you’d been trapped in that car with him, holding out your still-beating, pumping heart for him, treacherously beating for him, while telling him it was someone else’s.
It still means everything to you, if you’re being entirely honest.
And you look at this boy, this beautiful, brilliant boy that you have spent all your life dreaming of. It was always going to be you, you want to say, always, because all things return to their beginnings, and your life began when you met him. When he held out his hand and asked you something no one had ever asked you before. When he showed you how to not be afraid, when he was afraid for you, so you didn’t have to be.
You will never tell him, because while your life began when you met him, his began when he met someone else. Someone who isn’t you, and it aches in that peculiar way; a pain you only feel when you think about it, but is there, all the time, like the hum of a refrigerator.
The source of the pain, is of course, your first fight with him, and although the wound has long since scabbed over, although the pain has long since dulled, you still think about it sometimes, mostly at night, while you are elbow-deep in graveyard-soil. You keep picking at it every time it starts to heal. Even now, at fifteen, you think it might be the greatest hurt you will ever experience: the sound of rain drumming on the roof, your weakness, the thing that made you wrong, spat right at your face from the one person you thought was incapable of such cruelty, such callousness. The one person, you’d live and die for.
(What he thinks about sometimes, when the night falls: how regret smells like rain, and sounds like words he can never take back. How it looks just like you; your face when it changed from open, raw, vulnerable, to hurt and then, finally, to nothing at all. Like your back, as you drove away from him in the rain.)
iii.
And yet, despite it all, you love. And yet, you are filled with tenderness; it overflows from your hands like water. Your softness should’ve died back then, along with the boy you used to be, but it remained in you, and it looks like this:
I'm not gonna hurt you, you say, oh so gently, in a bathroom stall, staring down at a tiny, living, breathing remnant of the hell you had escaped less than a year prior.
I'm not gonna hurt you (- I can't), you think, when you watch her, your sister – if not by blood, then by circumstance – be in love with the boy you have dreamed of all your life.
I'm not gonna hurt you, you tell the boy who stares back at you in the mirror, because he is only fifteen, and it is all he has ever known.
You didn’t think you’d make it past fifteen but here you are, and it doesn’t even matter. You already know how your life will end. You know it as certain as you know the callouses on your mother’s steady hands, the curves on the back of the boy you have loved for forever.
It will end with your life for theirs. There is no other way; this is the path you were made to take, from the moment you were chosen. All things return to their beginnings, and everything started with you, and that, more than anything, more than the boy you used to be, more than the boy you are in love with, is what keeps you up at night. The guilt constricts around your throat like a noose, it lives inside you like a parasite. You stare at your friend, you stare at her hospital gown, her dull coppery hair which used to be so full of life, her pale, sick skin, and you think it should’ve been you, because none of it would’ve happened if you hadn’t been taken back then.
You never tell anyone, you don't dare to, but here is another thought that keeps you up at night: none of it would’ve happened if you hadn’t come back.
You take comfort in this: with you, it started, and with you, it will end.
(What you don’t know yet: your unrelenting tenderness will save you, the softness your father wanted to kill will be your greatest strenght, it will become a blade for you to wield. You will look evil in the eye, you will wield that blade, and you will live. You will live past fifteen, long past it. Long enough for all your scars to heal, properly this time, long enough for you to take your experiences, and turn them into something else.
You have the hands of an artist, your mother used to tell you, and it’s true. Your father may have taught you how to shoot a gun before he taught you how to ride a two-wheeled bike, but what he never understood was this: your hands were never meant for destruction. They were meant for creation.
And once you are long dead, the world will continue to remember you, the world will remember what you have created, and through it, it will know what you did with all your tenderness.)
iv.
You are back in your childhood home, and the world is ending. Despite everything, despite your hurt hovering over your shoulder, despite the guilt in the back of your throat, you make space for gentleness. You make space for ordinary things, because when else, if not now? So you play chess with your older brother, you share sticky orange slices with your sister. You play cards with your friends, and they make you forget, even for a short while.
You litter your sketchbook pages with the boy you know you will love forever; his back, his shoulders, the slope of his nose, his smiles, and you think: this will have to be enough.
(What he would show you: the painting you gifted him, framed on his bedroom wall. The folder under his bed, filled with your drawings, filled with you. The box of letters he couldn’t send you, all signed with love. Softly, do you get it now?)
Your mother cuts your hair in the bathroom like she did when you were small, and you tell her you love her just to watch her eyes smile at you in the mirror, to watch the wrinkles around her mouth deepen.
(What she would tell you: you are love. You have always been, from the moment you entered the world, and you will be, long past the moment you leave it.
And you were never going to be anything else.)