“There’s nothing I can do,” I sobbed. “There’s nothing I can do for him and we’re gonna lose him, Aaron. We’re gonna lose him.”
I felt Aaron take a shuddering breath in when I said that, and soon I could feel tears falling into my hair, Aaron’s chin resting on the top of my head, as he held me close.
“I know,” he cried. “I know. So please—I can’t lose you too. Please.”
He kept whispering and we both kept crying. It felt like a piece of me was coming back together while every single part of me was breaking apart.
“He’s not … he’s not a bad person,” I said eventually, not wanting to talk more about our dad, instead focusing on defending my choices, like I needed to assure him that I was going to be okay. “He’s got a lot of issues and he lied a lot to me, but I think he was lying a lot to himself too. I think he wants to try. I really do.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s a safe person,” Aaron said, still rubbing my back in strong, soothing strokes. “I mean, he clearly isn’t a safe person. He put you in real danger, Rosie.”
“I know.” I nodded, swiping at my nose. “I know. And I’m not—I don’t think I’m ever going to see him again.”
Saying it out loud, letting those words ring in the kitchen, in the pale light of the morning that was just starting to bleed into the kitchen, sucking out the darkness, reminding me that I was human, that it was daytime, and that I was supposed to be awake soon, in the world, ready to be an active participant in my life, made the tears start all over again.
Aaron rubbed my back harder, shushing in time with the movement of his hand. Not in a patronizing way, not to get me to be quiet, but like he was trying to calm a spooked horse, like I was a wild, untamed thing that he had to treat with steady hands or I’d hurt him or myself. That made me cry harder.
“Rosie,” he whispered. “You don’t know that. You don’t know that you’ll never see him again. Maybe you will. It’s gonna be okay.”
“No, it’s not that,” I said after a moment, once I’d gotten just a tiny bit of my breath back. “I’m not crying because I’m going to miss him.”
That wasn’t entirely true. I think I am going to miss Damien. But I think Aaron knew that I was lying, just a little bit, to myself just as much as him, and he let it slide. That made me feel more understood and cared for than any of the physical affection or soothing words.
“It’s—” I sobbed. “He’s alone. He’s so alone. And I know I won’t see him again because I can’t. He can’t. If he’s going to change, he has to move on completely.”
“That doesn’t seem healthy,” Aaron said.
“Maybe it’s not.” I sniffed. “Maybe choosing to isolate himself and run away will mean that he’ll never get better. Maybe it’ll be just like before, like the people he loved before, when he was my age, that he can never go back to.
“That’s what I’m scared of,” I whispered. “He’s left so much destruction in his path, hurt so many people so many times, and he doesn’t seem to know how to stop and it all started when he was my age.”
“I thought Damien’s ability started when he was way younger,” Aaron said, like that was the important thing.
“But the real trouble—all the really bad stuff he did, or, at least, the first round of really bad stuff, I guess—”
“Yeah, really not thrilled this is the person you’ve been spending most of your time with,” he mumbled.
“That’s when he was my age. And that’s—that’s—”
“That’s not you, Rosie,” Aaron said, finishing my sentence for me. “That’s not you even one bit. From everything I know about him—”
“Everything you’ve read in my thoughts, you mean,” I corrected.
“Can you just—” Aaron sighed. “Can we just agree to go easy on each other? At least for the rest of this conversation? Especially when it comes to our abilities. Because we’ve both fucked up. And we’re going to keep fucking up. I mean, first off, we’re human beings and we’re you and me so … you know…”
“Fuckups.”
“Right.”
“You know that’s not true, right?” I sat up, pulling myself out of the safety of his arms to look at him through my puffy eyes. “You’re not a fuckup. Neither of us are.”
He scoffed. Rude, but … fair.
“I mean, okay, yes, we are,” I conceded. “But not because neither of us went to college or because we don’t know what we’re doing in our careers or because we both have failed to bring home a nice Jewish girl—”
That made him laugh and the sound was like the wind of shimmering light that ran through all the best dreams.
“But we’re not fuckups at our abilities.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, yes, fine.” I groaned. “I’ve fucked up. So much. So, so much.”
A sob started to rise in my throat and Aaron’s arms tightened around me.
“No, you’re right,” he said solemnly. “There’s a difference between making mistakes and being a bad person.”
“And that’s the difference between fucking up and being a fuckup?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. We … we’re learning,” he added after a moment. “That’s the important bit, I think. We just have to keep getting better. We have to try.”
We have to try.
JUNE 2ND, 2017
My eyes feel so dry and puffy, my throat raw, from all the crying I’ve done lately, but finally, today, that outpouring of emotion led to something good.
Emily leaves for her summer internship next week and asked if she could see me before she went. I agreed immediately—we’d barely talked since texting about my dad when he was in the hospital and I couldn’t tell if she had been giving me space out of respect for my need for family time, or if she was trying to avoid talking to me so she didn’t have to do the hard part of ending things for good.
So when I met her in the Common today, I was sure that this was it—another nail in another coffin of my disastrous year. But, much to my surprise, she really just wanted to talk. To truly hash things out.
“I don’t think I ever really got over the fact that you had looked into my head, seen all of those private pieces of me, and I had no idea,” she explained.
“I know.” I nodded. “And I’m so, so sorry. But I promise you, I would never do that again.”
“That’s not really what I’m worried about, Rose,” she said. “I just…” She swallowed, looking out over the Common, and I could see a pinprick tear at the corner of her eye. “I’m not sure I even really know who you are, Rose.”
It felt like a lance through the heart, even if I knew she was right.
“You do though—” I started weakly, but she shook her head.
“It’s not like I expected to know everything about you right away, but…” She took another deep breath.
“I’m not sure it’s possible to know a person completely,” she continued after a moment. “And that’s fine. That’s life. And there are things that you don’t know about me, things I’m not sure I’ll ever share with anyone.”
“I want you to share everything with me,” I pleaded. “Everything you want to share.”
“I know.” She smiled softly and I couldn’t tell if it was genuine or pitying. I hated that I couldn’t read her expressions in that moment, like coming forward with my secret had pushed her into hiding somehow.
“But it’s unrealistic to believe that we’ll share everything with each other,” she said. “Or even that we’ll share all of the harder stuff right now. I mean, we’ve only known each other for eight months—”
“I know,” I jumped in, “but I really, really like you. I don’t care that it’s only been eight months, the way I feel about you—”
“I know,” she said, grabbing my hand and holding it in both of hers. “I know, I feel the same way.”
“Then what are you trying to say?” I asked. “It sounds like you’re…”
I didn’t wan
t to say it. Even though voicing it out loud wouldn’t change the outcome, I didn’t want to admit that I’d thought she was breaking up with me for good and I was terrified of that prospect.
“I’m…” She pulled away and I wanted so badly to reach my hand out and snatch hers back. But she was looking back over the park again, a clear signal that she needed thinking space.
“I don’t really know what I’m trying to say.” She sighed. “It’s like … it’s like if I had been dating you for eight months without knowing that you liked cooking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, cooking is pretty fundamental to who you are, right? It’s your passion. It’d be like if this entire time I never mentioned poetry or fandom.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’d feel like I’d missed something huge.”
“Exactly,” she said. “I think I knew, on some level, that I was missing a big part of the picture. You were already hiding pieces of yourself, whether or not you meant to. I thought I could break through your shell, but I—I never expected this. I’m … I don’t want you to feel like I’m freaked out because of what you can do…”
I could see her wanting to believe that, wanting to just take everything I’d told her in stride. But I let her off the hook.
“It’s okay to be freaked,” I told her. “I know it’s … weird.”
“It’s incredibly cool,” she said, a real Emily-grade smile blooming across her face for the first time in this entire conversation. “You have a superpower. You can go inside people’s heads!”
“It doesn’t creep you out?” I asked, even though I definitely didn’t want an honest answer.
“It’s … a lot,” she admitted, being nicer to me than I think I deserved. “And I don’t want you to—you can’t use it to try and be the person you think I want. But it’s still exciting. It’s fantastic, it’s—it’s—I mean, I wish I had an ability, but just knowing they exist … it’s everything I’ve always dreamed of.”
She winced.
“No pun intended.”
There was a beat where we just looked at each other, wondering how the other was going to react, waiting for permission, and then Emily’s mouth twitched at the corner and we both burst into laughter.
It felt so good. It felt like all the information I would ever need was in the melody of her joy and as long as I could harmonize, we would never need anything else.
But that didn’t last. A relationship cannot be built on joy alone because life isn’t like that. I’m not like that, and neither is Emily. She is more than her infectious laugh and bright, wide smile.
“I want you to know me,” I breathed once we’d settled down. “I want to tell you all the hard stuff. I want to share all of it with you. I mean, just telling you—”
“I know.” She nodded solemnly. “I know how big of a deal it must have been to tell me the truth. And this isn’t just about you, I get that. But now that I know … it changes things.”
“Does it have to?”
“Rose, it’s one thing if you’re sleeping through the day because of a medical condition, it’s another if you’re choosing to so that you can go into people’s dreams.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Yeah, I know. But I’m not doing that anymore. Not as much. And I’ll never go into your dreams again. Not on purpose. I promise.”
“It’s not about that,” she said. “Not really. It’s that the person who is going to sleep so she can mold someone’s dreams is a different person than the one I know.”
“You’re—you’re right.” I sighed, terrified at the admission. “It really does feel like I’m two different people sometimes—Dreamworld Rose and Real World Rose. And I don’t know if it’s always going to be like that or which person I want to be, but … you deserve to know who you’re dating. That’s, like, pretty baseline.”
I tried to smile at her, let her know that I understood how much I was asking of her—how much I had been asking of her—and she rewarded me with a small smile of her own.
“Look,” she said, “I barely know who I am. I mean, we’re technically still teenagers. We’re not going to have it all figured out. But I want to try to get to know who you are now. Not every gory detail”—she smiled bigger and my heart lifted with the corners of her mouth—“but the truth of who you are. There’s this enormous piece of your life that I knew nothing about and I … I want to know.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.” Her smile grew again and soon I was fully smiling back.
“Maybe we could start fresh?” I asked, feeling like I was reciting a line from one of the rom-coms that Emily loved. Her smile re-formed in a way that made me feel like that was exactly what she was thinking too.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “I would like that.”
She shuffled on the bench a bit, straightening up, squaring her shoulders, and clearing her throat. Then she stuck out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Emily Rodriguez, I’m a creative writing student, I spend all of my spare time writing about fictional characters kissing, I have two older sisters who I love but have always felt inferior to, and my greatest fear is that I’m going to live a life that is completely unremarkable.”
She said it all in one breath, not looking at me, and I fell in love with her a little bit more.
I took her hand.
“I’m Rose Atkinson, aspiring chef.” Her mouth twitched, but she lifted her eyebrow, like she was challenging me. I took a deep breath and dove in.
“I don’t really know who I am,” I said, the words catching in my throat. “Eight months ago I found out that I’m a little bit magic, which was much more of a surprise than it should have been, considering everyone in my family is a little bit magic. And I thought that it would make me closer to them, that I’d finally feel like I belong, but it’s just made it harder to connect with anyone. So I’ve been going inside people’s heads to try and understand who they are and I think I lost myself in the process.”
I was gripping her hand tight in a handshake, my arm shaking either from effort or nerves. Emily adjusted her hand so she was just holding mine, and brought our joined hands down to her lap as I took a shuddering breath. When I first saw her in that urgent care, thinking that the hands on our non-injured arms were made for holding each other, I never would have expected that we’d end up here.
“And I’m worried it’s too late,” I said, one tear escaping from my eye and rolling down my cheek. “I’m afraid that if I don’t figure out who I am right now, I’m going to lose you, I’m going to disappoint my mom, and I’m going to miss any chance I had at being friends with Aaron, which I think is maybe the only thing I’ve wanted for my whole life, even more than being a chef. I’m terrified that I’m going to lose my dad, a little bit, every single day, and never find myself, you know?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” She nodded, the tears gathered in her eyes reflecting mine. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose someone that way, but all those fears … I get it. I’m so scared so much of the time. I’m scared I’m never going to be a good enough writer to make a living, but more than that I’m scared that my writing is never going to connect with anyone, that my family won’t be proud of me. I worry that I’m going to be too focused on trying to have an extraordinary life that I’ll miss out on all the beautiful, ordinary parts and it’s even harder to focus on those things now because everything I thought I knew about how the world works kinda changed the other month when this magical girl told me that superpowers are real.
“I don’t know who I am either,” she whispered. “But I’m so afraid that there’s really nothing remarkable about me at all and that there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
“You are remarkable,” I said, and she scoffed. “No, I’m serious—I know that I’ve got this ability, but you—you’re the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met. I didn’t know that people like you—people who are kind and passionate and strong-willed and good—actually existed.
“I think I’d like to let you try,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I’d like to see what you see.”
I smiled, a giggle escaping through the remaining tears, and Emily laughed lightly back. Before I had a chance to think about it, I kissed her, quickly and just on the cheek. But it made her cheeks turn red, which made me feel warm and tingly. She laughed and blushed harder, burying her face in my shoulder.
So we sat there, her face turned into my neck, my arm around her shoulders, just enjoying each other’s warmth. Enjoying the silence, now comfortable between us with so many secrets laid bare. I thought about how to let someone know you when you don’t really know yourself. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe no one knows who they are and we’re all just trying to build the pieces of ourselves with the help of other people.
I don’t know what the future holds for Emily and me. And I don’t want to know. I don’t want more cryptic hints from my mom, don’t want to plan out the next year—five years, ten years—of our relationship. Or my life. I want to understand how Emily sees me. I want her to understand how I see her. And maybe we’ll learn something about ourselves in the process.
community/TheUnusuals post by n/thatsahumanperson
Thanks to everyone who messaged me with their stories about That Place. Some of it was really harrowing to read but I heard from one of you that, at least in the division near me, things might be changing for the better. I really, really hope that’s true.
And I think those of you who told me to stay away from inserting myself into that whole mess were right. I wasn’t able to stop my sister, but she’s okay, somehow, thankfully, against all odds. And I think … I think we’re okay. But keeping things that way is going to take a lot of work. From both of us.
I feel like I’ve been doing the same thing with this community that she’s been doing with her dreaming—using it as a personal diary, a place to come and dump all my thoughts and worries without actually sitting with them. And I don’t think that’s always a bad thing. You all have helped me so much since I got on here, and in this past year especially, and I think there’s real usefulness in anonymous communities. I mean, it works for alcoholics and people addicted to drugs right? And that’s basically what therapy is too, telling someone all your deepest, darkest secrets without the consequence of them being a person in your real life who might judge you. But all those things also encourage you to take what you learn into the real world, which is something this community has encouraged me to do and I just … I haven’t been listening.
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