[ON HOLD] LOVE ME LIKE ART

9

— ZACHARY "ZEUS"
A. CHOI 🙂‍↔️

I QUIETLY STEP back into the house, back into the rumble, with a heart full of avoidance. I peel off my mud-soaked trainers that represent Emily and I's muddied marks of incompatibility. It's a visceral reminder, a trinket that I would never want to keep. My eyes are trained on the hallway for a silhouette, carrying a fragrance of maternal influence, that I hope will remain in the shadows.

Because, I don't want to talk.

I don't want to talk about the desperation or the disaster. I don't want to talk about my splintered hope.

I don't want to talk about knowing that I was right. That Emily was and still is this caustic bee in a field of flowers when knowing that, isn't enough to carry me.

I don't want my own quiet sorrow to become theirs too.

I don't know why I leant into my Mum's quiet seed of hope or why I believed, foolishly and stupidly, that distance could soften Emily and her stone heart. Or that meeting her again now and not before when everything used to be an issue, would be of any benefit. I thought that this might be a new lock to pick, a new door to open but it was a door.

A door firmly locked on the other side.

"Hey, shitface." Sammie bursts down the hallway in full tilt and in song, almost blowing my cover into shards and shards of shrapnel, scattered in the hallway.

"Inside voice, Sam." I entreat that she should keep her volume to a minimum, holding a finger up to my lips. "Please." Because from one mouth to another, information will spread and I will be the one standing at the dock.

"Who are 'ya trying to avoid?" She cuts a glance behind her, presumably for cover.

"Mum," I say with the wind beneath my chest.

"Ha! She has you ducking for cover in your own house," Sammie's lips are upturned because nobody's chasing her tail, not even my Mum. The terms that she lives her life on are freeing. Nobody has clipped her wings yet,. "That could never be me."

"The tide won't always be this calm forever, kid." I say, hanging off the door ledge. With Sammie being the youngest, the constraints that Oliver and I lived our entire childhood under wasn't a collar she wore. She didn't want to slum it with us and eat dinner at the table? Fine, exceptions were made. She wanted to stay buried in her room, because of her dying social battery? Also, fine. "You're up next, fish."

"I'll talk to Daddy." She says, fluttering those eyelashes the same way she does with him. "How was your date?"

"It wasn't a–" I'm about to ready an explanation that it wasn't that, because a date implies Emily wanted to slum it with me in the grass fields, but I'm stupefied as to how she knows, "How do you even know that I went on one?"

"Mum." Sammie gives away, "She's been running her mouth all morning. You know how she gets." I unfortunately do.

And so, I realise that all this quiet padding into the house is for nothing. If Sammie knows, everyone else knows. It's like a seed, on the verge of growing out of the ground.

"Of fucking 'course."

"And how was it?" Sammie asks and my mind is like a rolling tape. A tape that replays when Emily's battling spirit met mine again, where I realised that our destinations were fixed. There was nothing I could've said, nothing I could've done that would've meant Emily would've swapped her militance for something softer, like speckles of understanding.

"Fine." I force a quiet smile, not really wanting to give Sammie the lowdown on how disastrous, how humiliating it felt for Emily to be the one to pull the cord, not me.