BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 52

SATURDAY
15 DECEMBER, 1990
DORIAN

               Heathrow Airport is so bright and noisy, I think I might be sick before I make it through the bag drop. I'm not, though by the time we arrive at the security check queue where my parents will no longer be able to follow, my fingers are numb and pins pierce my palms. The floor is cracked ice; one wrong step and I plummet. How can I, looking up from rock bottom, still be afraid of falling?

Aba squeezes my shoulder in a way I know he believes to be reassuring. His smile is the same one he wore before my piano recitals when I was a child and still deserved casual encouragement. 'You'll excel at this.'

I stare at him. The little breakfast I managed to force down lurches in my stomach.

I don't want to excel at this. Yet part of me wonders if I'll be able to stop myself. I have been trained to be exceptional at everything I do, to never settle for less. I've become such a perfectionist that if conversion therapy were ever to work, it would be with me.

All I can muster for my father is a tight smile that lasts a single second. Then my mother does something she never has before: she hugs me.

I'm taller than her and she rests her forehead against my shoulder while I stand there, unable to reciprocate. When she pulls away, her hands frame my face like a painting she wants to hang on the wall.

I wonder what she had to do to convince Aba to marry her. After all, from the little I do know of her childhood in Jamaica, she was poorer than Isaiah and I can't imagine my father doing more than curling his lip. Thoughts of magic love potions flit at the back of my mind along with the question that, if she wasn't my mother and we weren't born on islands on different sides of the ocean and into different generations, would we have been friends? But whoever Ima was back then is long gone.

'We'll see you when you're better.'

The worst part is that she's sincere.

Perhaps it's that which finally breaks the film over my tear ducts, allowing my eyes to well until her features blur. 'I don't want to go. Please don't make me go, Ima.'

She merely continues to smile and caresses my cheek. 'You know you have to...'

'I love him.'

To anyone observing, we look nothing out of the ordinary, nothing but parents farewelling their child for what might be the first time and the parting makes them all a little teary. They don't see the blood, the hole in my chest like a shotgun wound, or the red hands my mother embraces me with.

'You won't forever, Dorian.'

The words are a caution sign and after nearly eighteen years, I finally understand. Dorian, doron, gift. The name was not given to me because I'm her gift, she chose it so that every time she called me, I would be reminded that she's the one who gave me the gift of life and she can take the gift back anytime she wants. Dorian. Dorian. Be grateful, Dorian...

Hours later, when I board the plane, I'm relieved to find I have a window seat. It minimizes the social interaction I'll suffer in the next ten hours.

My gratitude is premature. I've hardly crammed my bag under the seat in front of me before the woman in the middle nudges me. She takes in my miserable appearance (my eyes still red and puffy). 'Don't fly well?'

As much as I want to ask her to leave me alone, I try to mirror her demeanour, relaxed but also attentive. 'No. I'm not great with planes.'

It's not a lie but I don't normally have breakdowns.