All the Little Pieces

1. THE TRUTH

I’ve done a lot of weird things in my life, but I have to say, preparing for my own Death Ceremony has to be the weirdest.

“FocusNaya, concentrate!”

I was sitting on a wooden floor, attempting to meditate, but Zach’s voice kept penetrating my head. It’s really hard to think when someone’s yelling orders at you. After thirty minutes of solid effort, I finally gave up.

“Zach, no offence, but this is bullshit. No other word for it. Bullshit. I’m never going to be able to do this.”

“If you keep running away from it without even trying, then of course you’re never going to get it.”

With a sigh, I slowly rose, refusing to look Zach in the face.

“Who says I’m running away?”

It was a whole month since I’d begun to learn this, and I still hadn’t managed to master meditation. I wasn’t even close. Every time my mind started to clear and my body began to slow down, I’d experience a brief flutter of panic, a short yet sharp reminder of what I was attempting to do. There was some subconscious part of myself that was forcibly rejecting the idea. But after weeks of trying to help me, Zach had had enough. With a barely suppressed groan, he flung down his jacket and walked out on to the balcony.

It was a beautiful day. The sky was an unbelievably bright shade of blue, without a single cloud. The sun scorched down, mercilessly burning any that lay in its path. It was just like any other day of summer in Melbourne.

I walked out on to the balcony to join Zach, even though standing outside in the blistering heat wasn’t the smartest of pastimes, considering it was forty degree weather.

He didn’t look at me when I stood next to him. Instead he continued to gaze out at the stillness of the ocean, his eyes flickering from the water to the glowing beach. He appeared to be deep in thought. His tanned fingers gently tapped out a rhythm on the railing to some silent music that only he could hear. He had a habit of doing that.

When Zach finally turned his head to look at me, he didn’t speak. He merely stood there and looked, and then kept on looking some more. I was about to crack and yell at him to stop creeping me out, but like a true gentleman, he saved me the trouble.

“You don’t want to learn how to shape-shift, do you?”

I have to admit, the question threw me a bit. Here I was expecting Zach to tear me apart limb from limb for this revelation, and instead he just stood there, calmly asking me something that I had been keeping locked inside of me for weeks. 

“How did you know? I never said anything to you.”

“You didn’t have to. Today, and every other time I’ve tried to make you relax and meditate, you got scared or mad. Every time I try to talk to you about shape-shifting, you look like I’ve punched you in the gut. You really suck at hiding your emotions... We’re going to have to work on that.” He added the last comment as an afterthought, a vocal expression of his mental processes.

Sometimes, Zach scares the shit out of me. Even though I’ve only known him for a few short months, he can read me like a book. It’s as if he literally knows every thought that runs through my mind. Hell, he probably knows what’s going on inside my screwed up head better than I do. Or maybe I really am just that bad at hiding my emotions. Who knows?

“Naya? Are you going to tell me about it?”

I looked over at his questioning face as he stood in front of me, waiting for me to answer him, waiting for me to tell him the truth.