BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 35

FRIDAY
15 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               Ima hasn't sent me a follow-up email. I'm not sure whether to be relieved or stressed and the indecisiveness doubles my anxiety. When I was at Coeus, Ima wouldn't wait more than twelve hours to phone me if I left any of her messages unanswered, and now she won't bother with a second email when I ignored the first?

Perhaps she doesn't expect me to come after all. There is a possibility it was only a casual invitation and the weapons I found when I tore it at the seams were coincidences (even I'm not that naïve). I scuffle from the lobby to our room only for any thought of my parents to shatter.

Isaiah is sat at the foot of the bed, brows knitted, lips pursed, eyes shut. His bag is packed at his feet.

I can't ask (don't leave don't leave don't leave) so I slump beside him without words. 

His hands are trembling. I forced myself to stay awake until he finally drifted off but sleep seized me soon after him. When I woke at eight, he'd already got through a quarter kettle's worth of coffee. He probably didn't sleep more than a few hours. Not that I feel as though I did either.

'You should go back to Oxford.'

My chest is hollowed and the stones that drop into my stomach send harsh reverberations through it. Like hitting a metal pole with a hammer, they scuttle up my ribs, discordant at first until they morph into Rachmaninoff's Études-Tableaux.

'You should go back to Oxford,' he repeats when I don't respond and finally opens his eyes. 'You've tutorials and deadlines ­— loads too, I assume, considering you're to graduate in six months. I really appreciate your help, but you need to get back and I've still got stuff to figure out here. You ain't fucking up your degree for me — this is your dream.'

I shake my head at his back. I want to say it doesn't matter but whilst my tutor granted me absence, he gave me no extensions and I can't lie to Isaiah when it's trust I'm trying to nurture.

Still, despite everything, our time here revealed exactly what my life is supposed to be and I won't go back to university, pretend none of it happened, and settle for whatever my existence is without him. I have written more music in the past week than in the past year.

'I shouldn't've never let you come here,' he mutters. 'I won't survive a second time.'

Survive what? If only I could ask questions like that. I have to plead guilty.

'I won't leave again.'

'Course, you will.'

He stacks his spine with a sharp inhale.

'Nuttin's changed. Actually, I'm poorer than I were, I'm worse where halakah is concerned, my health is deteriorating, I'm still a mamzer. So if I weren't good enough for you six years ago, I definitely ain't now.' He reiterates: 'Of course, you'll leave. Nuttin's changed.'

'I've changed.' I hate how my voice scrapes out of my throat, quivering and barely audible.

I hate how I sit, pathetic, with my palms symmetrically on my thighs; nothing like the romantic and agonised way players plead in old stories, clutch their hearts and beg with every inch of their bodies. At least once, I'd like to hear bad news and collapse.

All I'm capable of is numbness.

I turn to stare at him but Isaiah the laminate on library copy of The Black Tulip that segregates my half of the bed from his. I'm forced to appeal to his tapered hairline, overgrown to a fuzzy curl. 'Please, Isaiah, don't push me away now. I understand you don't trust me, and I know I can't fix that overnight, but can't you give me a chance? Nothing you said to me last night has made me love you any less.'