In the days after I realized you were missing, it occurred to me that something was wrong. I cried endlessly in bed, living between the sheets of my mattress. As I snuggled deep in my blankets, I snapped out of my haze of sorrow and felt an immense wave of disgust.
It was a minor detail, something I would have never noticed if I didn’t practically spend most of my time rotting in my room, but the texture of my bed was off. The pillows, blankets, and sheets were too crisp, fresh out of plastic packaging. It wasn’t my bedding, soft and worn from years of use. Although it was the same color, the gray blankets, cream pillows, and pink floral sheets nearly indistinguishable from what I always slept in, the smell of your vanilla perfume and the green apple laundry detergent weren’t there.
From that point on, the details of the rest of my room unraveled. The walls were too clean, smelling like a new coat of paint. Your fish doodles were missing from under my desk, so thoroughly wiped away that I couldn’t even see their outline beneath the eggshell white layer. The desk itself was also new, larger than the one I had before, equipped with steady legs that held a shiny PC setup.
On the ceiling, the familiar sight of the boob light was replaced by a stylish lantern that looked straight out of a furniture catalog. I stood on my bed, not quite believing what I was seeing.
These details shouldn’t have bothered me the way they did. It was my room but slightly improved. Any sane rational person would have ignored those changes or accepted them as they were.
I went ballistic. After all the treatment I went through, I was back to being insane in the eyes of my mother. I wrecked my room, shredding the mattress and crippling the bed frame. With some reserve of inhuman strength, I even threw the desk out the window.
At first, my mother was calm, her anger suppressed with clenched fists and a placid expression on her face. She asked me what it was that upset me, taking an unusual interest in my emotions. Ordinarily, she had people paid to deal with them, courtesy of Mr. Watanabe. I should have taken it as a good sign that someone who had recently become my mother’s boyfriend was willing to invest so much in her only child, but his being in cahoots with my mother only made me feel more alone.
Foolishly, I told her exactly what bothered me, listing the little details of my old room that I missed. I saw her write them down and inquire more about the things she didn’t understand, like the fish under my desk.
The next day, the hypnotherapist paid the house a visit. After a few soothing words, I drifted off into a trance. I don’t know how long I slept, but when I woke up, I was back in what looked like my old room. My rampage was forgotten and any little detail that would have indicated that the house wasn’t the same one we lived in before vanished.
As I walk through this memory and watch myself wake up in the foreign room again and again, I come to the conclusion that after my first session with the hypnotherapist, my mother decided to move to a new town. Because it wasn’t just my room that changed. The entire house was different, with more rooms to walk through and an exterior coat that was a shade of blue darker than the home I’d always known. There were more trees in our part of the town and the classmates I grew up with my whole life weren’t there.
Somehow, all of this escaped me in November when I woke up and didn’t see you in my bed. In hindsight, it made perfect sense that no one knew who you were. You never lived here. Eleanor Moore was never in the town census.
By the time I realized you were missing, you had already been gone for a month. And yet, for what I assumed was for the sake of my mental health, my mother had me believe otherwise. Because you caused my breakdown, she wanted to erase you from my life.
But that was impossible. I could never forget you. You are forever etched into my soul. Dead or alive, you still live within me, eternally young and happy.
It was just unfair the way things ended. As I pace around in my head, I’m assaulted by a deluge of thoughts. Specifically how it should have been me instead of you since less than half of the people who loved you had loved me. It was distinctly un-utilitarian for you to have perished. The sea ruined the days of more people by choosing to spit up my body on the shore instead of yours.
I also thought of a multitude of ways that night could have ended better. If I took that knife out of your hands, you would have never stabbed us. If I never gave you that bottle of vodka, maybe you would have never thought of giving our bodies to the water. If I paid attention to the first sign of you needing help, we would have never been near the pond after the dance. I would have taken you home and forced you to sleep through your misery until the sun came up again.
Could have. Would have. Should have. None of those things happened, but in my imagination they do a thousand times.
I was with you the night you never returned. Out of everyone in the universe, I was the one who loved you the most. So why couldn’t I have been the one to save you?
“Maybe I didn’t want to be saved,” you said, appearing next to me. “It was my life. You never had any control over it.” You wore your devil costume, grinning cheekily at me.
“You wanted to be saved.” I felt the feathers of my angel costume glued to my back. “You had all those dreams. You were going to be more than someone who lived in our town.”
“What if I changed my mind? Would someone who wanted a better life behave as I did? I had a mission that night and I accomplished it. Well,” you said, running your blue eyes over me, “half of it.”
“You didn’t mean it,” I rebutted firmly. “You weren’t yourself.”
“I still did it. You can’t change that.”
“Why did you take me with you?” Frustrated, that question erupted out of me unbidden.
“You feel guilty.” A sly smile crept over your face. “You shouldn’t. I did it because I love you.”
“I am guilty,” I shoot back. “I kissed you in the water. I knew what you were doing and I let you do it.”
“You did it because you love me. I understand it perfectly well. Whatever you think you did to me, I forgive you for it.”
I tugged at my hair in frustration. Death made you maddening. Well, that and infuriatingly beautiful.
“I killed you,” I said desperately. “Don’t you hate me for it?”
You kissed me lightly. “I can only love you.” With that, you disintegrated into a puddle of goldfish, wet and glittering.
You were always like that, slipping out of reach. I dug through the fish, hoping to pull you back out, but the effort was just as futile as turning back the hands of time.
I wanted to cry. If you really loved me, you would have never left. It was selfish of me, but if you endured it for my sake, maybe you would still be here. But regardless of what you said to me before we made that leap into the water, one thing was clear.
My love wasn’t enough. And I don’t hate you for it, but it was the truth. You were used to the love of a whole community. When that soured, turning to hate and derision, you withered. Only you could have saved yourself from that kind of devastation.
Inside the shelter of my mind, I cried with all of my past selves. There was the Nana that woke up to you missing and the Nana who came back from that pond alone, both weeping furiously over losing you. And then there was me, the Nana of the present, regretting how weak I was through it all.
Something had to change. I couldn’t keep cycling through the past, forgetting and remembering what happened between us. I need to wake up knowing what we did that night. I can already picture myself in the hospital bed, eyes blinking cluelessly as I searched the headlines for your murderer even though she stared back at me in the mirror every day.
There was no guarantee that even if I miraculously remembered, I would be allowed to without my mother calling the hypnotherapist. But this time would be different. This time, I won’t break.
12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡm93ifylc68
