Chapter 17

I sometimes wonder if I mix my feelings up with alcohol.

I’m not much of a drinker, but when I do drink, it’s straight. Vodka gives me bad memories, and rum, while delicious, tasted like the breath of one of my foster dads. There was something about whiskey that tasted like a fire, like something was being set ablaze inside of me. It was my poison of choice.

So while I lay here alone in my room, Alexa playing music on the Echo, a glass of whiskey in hand, I wondered if I missed him so terribly because of the alcohol or ... something else.

Blue eyes you could drown in, but warm hands that will always pull you out of the water—that’s what he was, like he was both the sickness and the cure.

And sometimes it truly felt like I was dying, like I’d fucking suffocate if he didn’t call me and remind me that he still wanted me. If I changed, if I became this ugly thing with no teeth or hair, would he still love me for the hell of it? Did he just lie awake at night staring up, looking for meaning in the popcorn ceiling? Did his mind become infected with me; did I make him sick too? Did he know that I could be the cure, too?

Or was it just me?

I looked out the window, finding the moon in the distance, a sliver hung in the air, still bright enough to light up the whole night sky. I hugged a pillow, looking up into where the universe lay before me, up where suns and stars and galaxies waited to be discovered and explored, and I wondered were they better off not knowing what it meant to be loved? Weren’t things supposed to be simpler without feelings?

The relentless beat of my heart thudded in my ears, thumping to let itself be known, reminding me that I was still alive, and that I was still fighting. Twenty-nine years I’ve been kicking in the water, rising to the surface, refusing to let myself drown, and it’s funny, all I had to do was trust someone. Wes came into my life, and it was like a trust fall, one where you close your eyes and just fall, and he caught me just before the water drowned me. And it wasn’t just that—he taught me how to float.

He taught me how to live.