Anemone

Plum: Laurel

Amias Yeo was a brilliant man, Dr. Naran thought as she looked over his file for about the hundredth time since their sessions started.

He was a pediatric surgeon with a heart of gold, a popular doctor among the children and who read them stories and played sock puppets and made their pain go away for just a little longer. He volunteered in projects for awareness and movements, graduated salutatorian at his high school, was adopted at five years old into a nice family...

But the things he fell into shouldn't be measured by the person he was or the person everyone thought they knew. His tallies weren't a punishment or a lesson to be learned from.

Unfortunately, it was life that decided the circumstances. And just like tallies, they were things that were out of their control.

Dr. Naran kept her patience as Amias sat across from her again, his eyes perusing over the books on the walls. The maroon cotton of his t-shirt clung loosely down his arms.

"Isabel liked to read," he muttered softly. "She majored in astrophysics and her favorite book was Corduroy."

"The children's book about the bear and his button?" she questioned. Amias nodded once.

"She always had a copy of it with her. Top of her class, well-liked in the school, and read Corduroy before she went to bed."

He gazed down at his wrist.

"She's my second tally," he said. Dr. Naran remembered his marks so clearly from before, a couple months ago when it was winter. The first was white. The second was black. The next ten or so were purple.

The second was black.

"I knew she was sick, but the three years we spent together were happy. I was happy. But I couldn't save her," he murmured. His eyes gleamed with unshed tears. "Nivek visited me and told me how sorry he was that I lost her. I... don't think he knew he didn't make things much better after that."

She observed his despondency.

"And what did you do?" she asked. Tears didn't end up spilling down his cheeks, but they brimmed to the point where she thought he'd start crying. She slid forward the tissue box just in case.

"I left."

"... Left?"

"I couldn't stay in that city anymore," he clarified softly. "So I packed up my things, moved across the country, and didn't look back. I thought I could leave everything behind and that it would all be alright."

Amias' deft fingers grazed the purples lines on his wrist.

"I moved seven different times since. Seven other places I can't return to because all I'd be reminded of would be of the people I let go," he said. He met his therapist's concerned stare. "Seona still lives in the city where I met Nivek and Isabel. Isn't it amazing she can still worry from so far away?"

Dr. Naran clicked her pen and set it on the desk next to her notebook.

"What else does Seona worry about? Besides your... tallies," she questioned. Amias shrugged and directed his focus back out the window. The leaves hadn't quite grown back on the tree, but it was warmer. Stuffier. Buzzier.

He never liked the bees that came with spring.

"It's like I said before. I let things happen. I don't fight for what I want. I don't change anything. I don't want to know what's next," he said. Dr. Naran didn't like the resignation in his face and wished what all therapists would of their patients: to find a way to solve their problems and help them live. But this was the first line of new information she'd gotten from him since he'd shown her his tallies, and she so hopefully wanted to say he was making progress.

"Why don't you want to know? Are you afraid of something?"

"Afraid?" he repeated. His voice mimicked the thrum of a low percussion instrument struck once and left to echo in the silence."Afraid... Maybe I am."

"And what are you afraid of?" she pressed lightly. Amias turned his head to look back at her and her warm brown skin and her perfectly side-swept curls. His smile was back, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. It never did.

"For it to happen again."

"For a mark turning purple?" she guessed. He shook his head as his left hand crept over to glide over his wrist.

"For a mark appearing red."