i can’t—i can’t go, i’m so afraid. i’m so afraid i’m going to open the door and—and it’s going to be all yellow. there’s going to be nothing. she chokes out into your neck alongside full-body racking sobs. your heart breaks into pieces, but you manage to gather yourself enough to keep steady, let a hand drift to tangle gentle fingers into her hair. nothing. i don’t want there to be nothing. i don’t want you to—turn into nothing.

you listen to her cry and wail in silence, as you curl yourself around her on her bed, you hold her as tightly as you can comfortably, draw soft patterns across her back and her shoulders as she whimpers into your neck. she’s terrified, shaking at the prospect of opening your shared front door, and there being—nothing. yellowing wallpaper and moldy carpet replacing your front yard that’s filled with the wildflowers you planted for her a few months back, and the oak tree as old as you both combined. your front porch, decorated with a plethora of color and florals and tiny little things that remind you of each other—gone and overgrown with cheaply made furniture, and broken glass, and clothes whose owner you never would know. everything was gone, everything was nothing, and it calls to her like a scream in an unmapped forest.

i—i don’t want it to remember me, she cries. i want it to forget. i want to forget. i’m so tired. i’m so tired of seeing that fucking—place and you want that, too. wish you could swipe mary’s mind clear, scrub it of everything yellow and bloody, repaint it with anything else than that place. even if it meant she would forget you. even though that place was what gave you to her, and her to you, it haunts her every waking second, despite her own schooling and degrees and years of experience, this has been the obstacle she cannot outrun. not her mother, not her childhood neglect and rotting food and taped up windows—this place.

you turn your head to press your lips to her temple, feeling her sobs begin to soften into pitiful-sounding whimpers. you shh shh shh her until she’s boneless and limp in your arms, all cried out, vulnerable and shaking like a terrified animal. i just want to go outside like a normal person, mary mumbles into your skin, wet with her tears, and you say a gentle i know back to her. she’s so, so grateful for you, really—even if she’s traumatized, full of pent up despair, full of terror and fear at the world surrounding her. the world that has consistently shown her that she isn’t capable, isn’t worth listening to. i can’t save anyone. every locked door, every tight corner attacks her and threatens to rip her apart—but there you are, every time, right before the monster comes and swallows her whole, you’re there, with your warm arms and warmer eyes; your smile that lights up your entire face and the way you whisper her name in the late hours of the nights neither of you can sleep.

i’m a fucking therapist… was a therapist, she always says. i shouldn’t be this afraid. i should know better. and you look at her with sad eyes, every time—every time, you say, you’re traumatized. you’re scarred. look at what you went through. of course you’re afraid. (she doesn’t know how to tell you that she doesn’t just see that place in her nightmares, but her mother, still—or how that place has chewed up those memories and regurgitated them into something else, something worse). but in reality, you don’t say it, not out loud anyways. you just hold her, or kiss her, or do whatever she needs you to do to bring her back to herself. your life is composed of this entirely, now that you’ve both escaped that place—of taking care of her in every single way that she needs, and you wouldn’t want anything else in this world. (you know that she feels like a burden, that deep down, she feels guilty and childish and like she’s a weight tying you to the ground, terrified of you resenting her, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. her education can not save her now. she has become her own mother.)

sometimes, it gets really bad—you come home from work, or from the store, and you find the front windows of her home slathered in wet newspaper, glued down to the glass, the entire front room ransacked and the furniture pulled from its place and shoved in front of the door. you can hardly get inside, but you manage, and you know immediately where she is.

hidden, deep within her closet on the floor beneath the coats, knees drawn to her chest with her face buried away. she’s been picking at herself, you notice, her fingertips and her temples slightly bloody from ripping at them, convinced that they are manufactured—that even her nails and hair are fake and built upon a memory, not real life. you coo oh mary, oh mary sadly at her, collect her in your arms, gently press your palms into her shaking shoulder blades, let her melt into your frontside. let the both of you melt down into her bed frame, a shuddering bundle of sheets and duvet and her wide brown eyes flicker from their passive stare into the void, to your face, mapping out your concern, your compassion. she places a cool hand on your face, trembling violently like the rest of her person, please. i… i need to feel real again. please. i’m not real—i don’t feel real. i’m in that… that place. i’m not here, am i…?

you turn your face to kiss the palm of her hand. her breath stalls for a moment at the feeling of your lips on her skin, something tangible. you’re here, baby. you’re right here, you’re in your bed, in your bedroom. in your home. with me. i promise. i promise.

promise..? she squeaks. pinky. you reply with another kiss to her index finger this time. her eyes are filled to the brim with tears, and you reach to wipe them as they fall, cascade down her pretty face. you kiss each tear stain, until you taste her salt on your lips, and you know that she needs to be reminded that this dimension is the correct dimension, so you move your way to press your mouth to hers—she responds beautifully, kissing you back with a fervor that is equally as heartbreaking as it is desperate. she is desperate, to know that she is within her body, as you are within yours, and not locked away anymore, stuck behind windows and mirrors and thick concrete walls—you know how to handle her in this way perfectly. soft, warm, gentle, real.

hands support her back, easing her down into the bed slow, careful. she is panting already, please. please. please. help me. help me. she begs quietly, her voice mere hiccups and pieces of sobs. she’s still afraid, but less so now that you’re here and she can feel you—not like earlier, when you were gone, even though you had to go, had to get enough food to feed you both for the week. no, earlier was… terrible. everything turned yellow, sick pasty yellow—she’d left the bedroom and fallen to her knees wailing, screaming in horror because she’d never left that place. people that weren’t actually people hid within her walls, scratching at the insulation trying to get to her—her mother shouting from the ceiling that she had let them all in—all these months afterwards were a lie, pumped into her memory like gas and she had to keep it out, pile everything she could to the ceiling, keep a barrier between it and the both of you.

she wants to vomit at the memories burned into her retinas of that place and how it still manages to possess her, how it entangles with every god-awful memory she has and spits them out even worse, but you don’t allow this. you don’t allow it in because you’ve pushed her button-up up to her collarbone and sank downward, your lips pressed against the underside of her breast. she shudders as you drag your tongue up her chest, following a trail of smooth skin until you kiss right above where the gold heart pendant she wears sits.

it’s dark in her room, save for a wash of golden light from the bedside lamp that covers the duvet. it paints over her as you undress her, bit by bit, as slow as possible, kissing every inch of skin that becomes exposed, until she’s the one forcibly kicking off her underwear and dragging you on top of her. please. please. help me feel real again. you waste no time, because she needs it like oxygen, letting a hand drag up her leg and up her inner thigh, trace comforting patterns across flushed skin. the sound she makes as your fingertips slip and press and curl between her legs, it’s like a whimper and a cry of your name mixed together, it burns into your brain as it does every time. you swallow the rest of the beautiful sounds that escape her when you kiss her deep, keeping your mouths connected as you let your fingers caress and paint soft circles into her.

you sink down til you’re on the edge of the bed, she whines at the loss of your body against hers, and you slip your hands to wrap around her hips and press her into your mouth. there is no teasing or buildup, because that’s not what she needs—she needs it fast, desperate; you waste no time and she’s eternally grateful as told by the way her back arches and how broken her cry sounds. it doesn’t take long, this time around, to get her there, your mouth is buried between her thighs for what seems like mere moments before she’s writhing and grabbing at your hair, her hands plastered to your forehead and tugging you closer. she pants and groans, words unintelligible, and ruts her hips up into your mouth with no real rhythm—you find her with your tongue over and over until she stills, then wails, the hold she has on your hair near painful—of course you don’t fuss in any way, this, making her feel like this, making her remember that she is real, is worth any pain, any discomfort or disturbance in your life tenfold.

when you make your way back up to her, she clutches onto you with her arms wound around you and sobs and sobs into your shoulder, your chest, your neck, wherever she can bury herself into. she hides away from everything, the faint light of the streetlights filtering through the curtains, the creeping darkness that is shrouded in the corners of the room, the way the shadows spiral up blank walls and tell horror stories through crooked motions and twisted faces. she hides from it all, except for you. you’re there to kiss away her tears and make her real again and to shoo away any of the shadows that dare try to slip too close to her again.

i’m—i’m sorry i trashed the living room again. i’m sorry. i can clean it up. i’m sorry. i’ll probably do it again, but i’m still sorry.

don’t apologize. it’s okay. you’re okay. i don’t care what the house looks like. you can trash it every day, as long as you’re okay. we can fix it tomorrow.

don’t leave me. please. please, God, don’t leave me.

never. i will never leave you.

and you don’t, relentlessly staying true to your word. no matter how much you lose, you stay, here, with mary—stuck in an endless loop of pain and despair and primal terror, spinning back around into comfort and love and whatever bits of peace you can muster. you fuck her when she’s spiraling and is convinced she’s fake, a copy of her former self that has been puked up by that place. she fucks you when you start to get homesick for the life you left behind (for her, you both know but you refuse to admit because it would sting just too much). you’re together at least, can sink your own suffering into each other, melt it into liquid just enough for it to be absorbed back. it’s toxic, you know, she knows, but it’s what works for now, what keeps you both at bay enough to keep surviving. maybe over time, it will change, she will get better, maybe she could manage to go outside again—but you don’t get your hopes up nor do you care if she gets better. she is perfect just the way she is, to you, and if you have to hole yourself up in this house with her,