His tone is similar in the way I remember yours, the way you’d speak to me gently in your home that sat quiet, mostly. You had a dog that was anxious for my attention, and sometimes I wondered if she was the epitome of your insides- your soul. Had I thought that to distract myself from the truth of how I sat patiently like a dog, waiting on your couch? With this sixth sense of a screeching, a heaviness lingering just past the trim near the door from that bedroom. My room. It called to my senses the way a storm does when it’s coming. Did you feel the storm speak too? I feel like you spoke to her about it all, but I’d convinced myself that maybe the telepathy was our own path to walk. Maybe even mine alone. A game, I’d tell myself. You noticed the hard-to-reach corner cabinets of my mind. A guest in my home, I watched you move carefully- dust gathering at your fingertips like clues. Sometimes I’d compare my loneliness finding you to maybe how mathematicians felt finding their person to interpret, or at least listen.
Will he guide me? The man. Tall and opposite of everything I remember you to be. Do I sense a false darkness, kind of like the way I failed when I sensed your softness before you ever even spoke to me? I imagine him being right in the middle of the both of you, and I wonder all day at my desk: would he speak to me all the same as when he leans in from behind me, takes my computer mouse, and teaches me a new trick for my multiples of open windows? The tenderness, the confidence in his voice, destroys me into submission. I find I hold my breath when he’s near. I can’t look at him, and I know he knows. I am only so good at being a liar. He says my name like he’s testing a reaction. How does he know? Does he know? Did he always? He doesn’t let his voice escalate. It’s like he demands I pay attention.
I think about him across the floor with needles in his possession. “Lindsey.” He waits. I think he likes that I say nothing. I think, like most others, he feels lost in it at times. I think he learns quickly, however. I think I intrigue him in this way.
I don’t fluster, and I don’t say yes aloud either. I nod my head, and suddenly I’m six again in my backyard with the big tree, responding to my mother’s question. I stay standing as if there had been nothing important on my desk to be working on anyways. I keep my gaze on him, and how do I look? Like a child being tricked into a path to follow? Am I a subject to be studied- is he making a map of where my lines exist? To him, now, they start somewhere with needles, and they don’t stop with me watching him repeatedly jab and romantically move them two inches deep into human flesh.
My sight kept itself on his hands as I walked for the audience amongst us, as if they were the very hands to tell me where to go. Had we spawned to Shadowglen, I think I would have followed with the utmost trust of his capabilities to direct me through a world that wasn’t a part of our reality. Maybe there’s a correlation between working under someone older, and sexting older men in World of Warcraft after school, just before my father got home. What did he actually know about holding me? Is it a scent they always sniff out?
He makes me feel like I’m listening to the slowed version of songs in a dark room with candlelight flickering somewhere off in my peripheral. Does he? Or the memory of you? When I follow his voice, I don’t think of you. It’s only once I’ve left, wishing denial would’ve been a kinder friend to me, at least through the summer. I paint every picture of the words I anticipate he’d say to me if his true nature found its way in. He walks in every room I’m in as if he knows I startle easy. He looks at me like he knows.
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