Wearing My Smile | ✔

Sunday, June 10th, 2007

Around two months after your funeral.

I finally decided to tell Luce about my change of plans. It was Sunday evening and I asked her to have a dinner with me at home. As we ate, I could see her waiting. She wasn't as patient as me, but she was there and she had always been a more perceptive person than I was—at least right up to that point. I don't know how I am now, but I'm learning as I go.

I told her everything from the start. Where I had began considering the options, where the idea came from, the projects with Dr. Quintana, then with Penny and the school, the march which would happen in one or two months. Then about my change of major, university, the academic scholarship I'd applied for, then my plan on leaving this town for university. She looked sad at this part, as if she knew this would be me leaving for good, not just for school. I didn't say anything to acknowledge her unspoken sadness. I couldn't promise you that I'd ever come back here either. Too many ghosts and they all clung onto me.

After finishing my stories, Luce just sat there and studied me. I could tell then she was concerned, but she really didn't need to be. This was my decision. She asked, “Are you sure, Roo?”

“I am.” I imagined you sometimes, Sam, what you would've said if you'd been there inside that room and I found that I couldn't.

“But, Roo, didn't you want to take photography major before this? Are you—”

“Lucy, I know.” I put my hand on hers firmly on top of the table. “I'm sure.”

For a second, she seemed like she wanted to argue, but she held back her tongue. Her thumb was soft as she caressed the back of my hand before she pulled it back again. Clearing her throat, Luce said to me, “Know that whatever you choose to do, I just want you to be happy, Roo. Do your projects make you happy? To be a help for people?”

“Not yet,” I answered honestly. “But maybe.”

“I'm worried, Roo.”

“What are you worried about?”

“This is like—this is like you with Sam all over again.” She seemed unsure how to explain. I found how sweet it was, and yet in the same time how painful that this was still something Luce or my father or Penny had to tiptoe around.

I took pity on her. “What? Codependency? One-sided compassion without getting any in return?”

She looked surprised, then nodded.

“How long have you thought about this?”

“About what?”

“About how toxic Sam and I were to each other. How deeply, unhealthily codependent we had been.”

She was quiet for a little while, studying the abstract pattern of our dining table. Then, “Years.”

Then I couldn't stop it anymore because I wanted so badly to bare myself to her, to someone, to anyone. “Do you think I'm weak, Luce?”

“Roo,” she told me ruefully, “we all need help sometimes.”

And I crumbled, Sam. The walls, the whole foundation I had built upon, everything crumbled in a choked sob. I tried to stop the tears from coming but they rolled down ceaselessly, on and on, as though they would never stop. I whispered to her my last deepest, darkest secret, “It shouldn't have been Sam, Lucy. It shouldn't have been him.”

“I know.”

“No, you don't get it. No one does. It should've been me.”

“Roo, don't say that.” Her tone turned sharper.

“Lucy.” I raised my head. She was a blur to me. The whole world, Sam, sometimes it looked like nothing but blur after you were gone. “Lucy,” I murmured, “I won't live past thirty.”

“What? Stop joking around! What are you saying, Rumon?” Luce choked on her words. I knew what she was thinking: our mother in the hospital bed, too sick to even walk to the bathroom. “That's not true. You've never been sick.”

“Lucy, but listen. I'm not going to live past thirty. I saw it. I've known it for a long time.”

She wanted to protest, I knew she did. I saw it in her eyes. I wondered then what you would have thought if I'd told you this before you committed suicide. Maybe you'd have been angry. Maybe you'd have yelled calling me a liar. But I didn't get to tell you and now sitting before me was Luce who loved me more than she had ever loved anyone else and it hurt me just the same.
“Why do you even think that?”

“I saw it in my dream.”

She knew. “When?”

“Since I was twelve.”

“That can't be true.”

“It feels real.”

“Maybe it's just a dream.” But her voice wavered. She'd known about my dreams. She always knew. She had been the first person I'd told after you and she had been the one who offered to accompany me to see a therapist in the first place, but this was why I couldn't tell Dr. Quintana why I blamed myself so much—because everything about me came from dreams. My dreams, my nightmares shaped my whole reality, even when it was related to you.

“You know it's never just a dream for me.” I sipped my drink. Parched from crying so much after months of dry eyes.

“That's not quite true. Your usual nightmares are always just dreams.”

“But the visions always came true. I saw it before Sam shot himself. I saw myself running. I saw him doing it.” It surprised me a bit how flat my voice was, how toneless, like it didn't affect me in the slightest. I recalled that night I woke up with my heart racing. How I ran across to your house.

“That means nothing.”

“No point in denying what would happen. I have accepted it for a long time. You should, too.”

“That's fucking bullshit, Roo!” She was angry now. Luce was always the explosive one. Maybe it was because she was the way she was that she liked you at all right from the start. She understood you when I couldn't. I wonder if you had ever known how much she'd loved you.

I didn't reply to her angry shouts, but I noticed when tears started falling from her eyes. I saw it when my mother was going to die. I told her about it, that my mother would sleep and the doctors and nurses would whisk her away. She would sleep inside a black box with white flowers surrounding her and I'd asked Luce why she kept on sleeping. I saw it when Luce was accepted in the university she wanted. I told her about it, telling her the exact date she would know and what she would be wearing that day. I saw it when Bright Night was going to happen and we were going to be there for the first time. It was why I was so insistent that day with Damian. Just a feeling that I got, except it wasn't, not really. So, Luce knew what I meant, she must have understood, if not believed me.

My visions always happen. Not once they didn't. They were as well being called as a fact. Unaltered. Real. Inevitable.

I said to her, “I was supposed to go first.”

She pulled me into her arms, clutching onto me tightly. She'd become small and fragile as we grew older. Her sobs were violent and painful to hear as she stroked my hair, like I was the one who needed to be comforted. “Roo,” she sobbed, “don't say that.” So I don't say it anymore after that even though I know it's true.

I didn't lie to you when I'd told you that death was easy, Sam. It really was. I was standing right before my own the whole time and I could never bring myself to tell you, at least not until the chance was taken from my grasp and here I am, writing it down to you.

When you asked me what my gift was, I didn't tell you of my visions, only my nightmares, because this one felt more like a curse anyway.