The Gift i never asked for...

There is a moment, just before the body realizes it is hurt, in which everything seems still. I was in that moment when I saw him again.

The truck had stopped in the middle of nowhere, with its headlights still shining on the churned-up dirt of the road, and I felt no cold, no fear, not even shame. Above all, I felt an enormous exhaustion, as if I had been awake my entire life and was only just now realizing it.

Kyle didn't run toward me. He walked. He always walked like that, as if time belonged to him, as if the world could wait for him to decide to arrive. I just stared at that calm, wondering how it was possible that still, even there, with warm blood running down my legs, a part of me was glad to see him.

"I told you I wasn't going to let you go," he said, and there was no triumph in his voice. There was something worse: relief. The relief of someone recovering the only thing that truly matters to him.

I didn't answer him. I had no strength to argue, and anyway, what was I going to say? That he was right. That no matter how many pharmacies, how many trucks, how many desperate hands held out a pill kit or a promise of escape, it was always going to end like this: him finding me, me letting myself be found.

I want to say that I hated him. I want to say that in that moment, lying on the dirt, I wished with all my might never to see him again. But that would be a lie, and if I'm going to tell this story, I prefer to tell it without lying to myself: what I felt was something else. Something akin to desire, something akin to relief. The exact sensation of someone waking up from a dream they don't want to wake up from, even if that dream is hurting them.

To understand how I got there, we have to go back much further. We have to go back to a café, to an ordinary morning, to the day I saw him for the first time and had no reason to be suspicious.