Shadowed

IV. Little Rebellion

I remember it so clearly. They'd been looking at me strangely for years already. Me, a twenty-eight year old man, still as short and moody and round-cheeked as I'd been when I was fifteen. My mother, with her shiny rosaries and her prayers full of lies, had long since decided I was a disgrace to the family. No boy who loved boys was welcome into eternal life with Christ, she'd screamed at me several times on end. You're no son of mine. It didn't matter to her that I'd loved girls too.

He'll grow eventually, they kept saying. They repeated it over and over, trying to convince themselves that I was just a late bloomer, just an outlier, just a strange occurrence. I think I knew that I wouldn't, though. I knew it just as surely as I knew my mother stopped loving me the day I brought Jeremy home. I wouldn't admit it to myself, but it was true just the same.

Somewhere along the line, she decided that I was cursed. This is God's punishment to you, she spat at me. You sinned, and so now he's freezing you. He's freezing you. Those were her exact words, again and again.

But I wasn't frozen. I could still walk, and talk, and feel. And her words cut me so deeply that some days, I couldn't breathe. She was suffocating me, with all her hate and venom. Jeremy tried, but he couldn't give me what I needed, which was to escape. He was a broke college dropout living with his parents, same as me. The only way out was to die, I knew.

One night, after everyone was asleep, I grabbed my father's razor blade and slit my wrists. I lay there for hours and hours, waiting for the life to drain out of me, waiting to be free. 

It never came. The pain was almost unbearable, and there was blood everywhere, but I didn't die. 

Realizing that I couldn't die, couldn't flee the terrors of this world even if I wanted to, was more terrifying than anything that might have awaited me on the other side.

I ran right before the sun came up, thick tears streaming out of my eyes and blocking my vision. The earliest wisps of dawn obscured me enough to get far, far away undetected, and I was out of that hellhole for good by midmorning. I never bothered to clean up all the blood. Let them wonder what happened to me. I knew they didn't care enough to search.

I wish I could say I never looked back, that it was a clean break, but I'm not strong enough for that. I tried to put everything that happened in that wicked town out of my mind and move on, but something was tormenting me. The image of Lily Grace, my closest confidante, and Jeremy, my love, pulling their hair out searching for me, was a constant source of torture. I couldn't bear for them to feel that kind of anguish, so one quiet night in the dead of winter, I stole my way back in. 

It was a quick trip, painless, and I left nothing behind but two folded slips of paper. One, behind the hanging plants on Lily Grace's front porch, because I knew she was the only one who ever tended to them. The other, on Jeremy's windowsill, a cracked, ruined old thing that I'd slipped through more times than I can count. Both read the same thing:

I'm safe. Don't look for me. Love, R

I confessed to them once, about my growing suspicion that I wasn't aging. I never did figure out if they believed me or thought I was crazy. I didn't return again. Lily Grace and Jeremy are the only ones who know I didn't die that night, and sometimes when I fall back into that same dark abyss, I wish that I had. Life is a horrible thing, full of so much pain, but most of us bear it until we wither away. For those who can't, at least there's a way out. But I'm trapped.

-

It's all I'm thinking about, as I watch the blood pooled on the ground under Maya's leg. That night was the closest I'll ever get to dying, so it's become less real to me. For her, though, it's still a legitimate possibility right now, tough as she is, and I can only wonder why. Why would these people jeopardize her life, just to find me?