BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 35

SUNDAY
17.11.1996
ISAIAH

               My hand itches to grab my cell phone from the compartment below the radio. It's Sunday and I haven't seen Dorian since I left him at his bus stop. Every other minute since then has been spent fighting the urge to phone him.

A scalpel digs at the nerves between my spinal disks at the thought; he must be torn after seeing his parents and after everything he did for me this week, I hate not being there for him.

But I don't call. He told me to make a decision and I haven't yet. It wouldn't be fair.

In the minutes between dialling and deleting his number, I replay everything he said to me, an audio tape that regularly gets stuck on I want to go forward. How those five words flipped my world on its axis — now north is south and you're me. The thread is torn from my hold and my tapestry of us comes undone.

I've spent all this time pickling us, preserving our memories to make sure I don't forget the love we had, sealing every detail in the wax of poetry to read during whims of nostalgia only to burn them when the spell passes. Every holy moment has been marked by a dot of ink on our timeline. Even when I pretend I'm forgetting, I remember everything.

Dorian doesn't need to remember; he never viewed our love as a relic of the past to bury in a time capsule. He kept it alive and well in his heart this whole time, allowed it to wilt in autumn and blossom in spring without worrying if it looked different than the summer before.

Along with the terrifying promise of resurrection, a second wind of grief arrives. Knowing that our friendship didn't have to end, I have to grieve all the memories we could've made, the person I could've become, the person he could've become if he had chosen differently.

My hatred has crumbled to dust that can't be reconstructed. Even so, I'm not sure I'm ready to welcome him back into my life. I love him with every fibre of my being, no point in denying that, but trust remains a frail twine.

The only way to test it is to jump and I'm not brave enough.

My lips twitch with a smile. I used to be the brave one.

Maybe on the day he broke up with me, my method of preserving his memory was to become him whilst he took everything I was. Maybe everything about me is actually about him — the person I was with him and the person I was without wouldn't recognise each other, and therefore it's Dorian who should be credited for everyone I've been.

Or maybe I was always the coward and I just managed to guise my own fears as selflessness.

I wouldn't let him see my house because I didn't want my mother to hurt him and not because I was terrified that if he saw the way I lived, he'd agree with everyone who thought me a rat. I never let him buy me a gift because, on principle, it wasn't fair when I wouldn't be able to get him anything back and not because I was terrified he viewed me as his poor friend who needed charity.

I didn't put up a fight when he left because I chose the high road and not because it confirmed all the fears I had resigned to years before the split: that I wasn't good enough, that he'd eventually outgrow me, that love isn't sufficient.

With a sigh, I brush the rumination to the back of my mind.

I pick up the yellow roses from my passenger seat before I climb out of the car. I've never been to Elmshoal, the town east of Halsett, and the scent of the sea takes me by surprise. Though the coast is still several kilometres away, the shrieks of seagulls liven the afternoon.