The Brightest Star in a Constellation

40: A Plastic Jar, a Door Slightly Ajar

☆ Evan ☆

I want to stop this feeling. I want to stop ruining this—ruining it like I do with everything else.

But it's my fault.

I kick the beanbag chair in front of me. It rustles against the floor, and it serves nothing to get rid of the helplessness attacking me from every angle. I don't cry—but I don't have the tears to form an ocean. I don't even have the tears for a raindrop.

Peter starts to reach his hand out, but he hesitates. We both do. I don't get to come back from this, and neither does he. I can't swallow the words, just like he can't pretend that he hasn't seen it.

"You can tell me," he says, and his voice is all low, all sympathy. "You've been holding onto it for a long time."

He's right. I don't like admitting it, even to myself. I can talk about my father for ages, and I don't shy away from mentioning Elaine. But a mother is a nebulous thing, and it was her that taught me that baring my soul would only leave me exposed. It would leave me in the same story I've been in for years. The story where I don't say what I mean, and I don't know how to feel.

I don't know how to feel.

"You were right. It was a metaphor," I mumble.

Peter steps closer, even as I turn away from him. Even as I don't face him. "Sorry?"

(Why does he have to apologize like that? Why?)

"The drawing of my room," I explain, digging the toe of my shoe into the beanbag chair. "You said it was like loneliness. It isn't—it's like home."

He lingers behind me. I can feel his presence—I can smell the fresh pine infused with the sharpness of the cold that fills the ski resort. This far away from the waterline, the thick scent of the ocean spray is gone. It hits me that I can recognize Northwood—that one hundred and seventy-three days from now, I will stumble out from the known, and into the unknown.

I continue as I lower myself to the floor, "A house without somewhere to sleep is not a home. It never has been. That day you were at my apartment—why did you write, Everything is temporary?"

"It helps," he answers, "with all the thoughts I shouldn't think. With all the things that I shouldn't say. And it reminds me of you, with your countdown. Isn't that why you're counting? It brings you closer to getting to the end. That this... this year will fade if you keep your eye on the clock for long enough."

(This is the ending I want. It's the one that makes sense.)

"The countdown isn't about going anywhere in particular. I mean, not really," I utter. I seek the skiers in the snow like ivy, like veins twisting through the earth. My breath fogs up against the glass of the window. "It's about getting away from home."

I guess I'm supposed to feel sick when I leave Northwood. I guess it's supposed to hurt. The people in a small town are not well-versed in goodbyes. I don't know homesickness like Randall does. I used to think it was like a thread unspooling. And if I left Northwood, I could only get so far before I ran out of thread, and I'd be reeled back.

I say, "If I tell you everything, I can't take it back." I can't reduce us to passing strangers after this.

"If you disappear, I'll just pretend that I forgot," he tells me, and he acts like he's kidding, but somehow it's comforting.