Doc Brown Could

I watched the feelings unfold like a flower in stop motion.  She walked into the room with a slump in her shoulder and a crease in her forehead, and it broke my heart.  She looked tired.  Not just didn't-get-enough-sleep-last-night, or had-a-long-day tired.  She looked worn.  Slowly threadbare. Then she looked up and there was this moment of honest relief, and when I felt her arms around me it was as though I was anchoring her to the moment, keeping her from remembering whatever it was she had been going through.

As we sat, her head on my lap, my fingers in her hair like always, I watched her face slip in and out of that same fatigue.  I asked because I had to ask, but never too deeply because that kind of tired only comes when talking about it on anyone else's terms has stopped doing any good, so mostly I sat and waited because silence stopped being an absence of communication between us a long time ago, and I couldn't say or do anything to make it better.  Make it fixed.  Doc Brown could.  I could only say the things like, "Give it time." But what good would that do? She can't very well actively make time pass.  "Things will get better." They might.  They might get better.  They don't get better for everyone.  Sometimes they get worse.  Sometimes people don't recover.  Probably, for her, they would get better, but who am I to tell her what things would happen? I didn't predict this.

So instead of empty words I gave full attention, and we sat –my fingers in her hair, her head on my lap – staring at the ceiling, waiting for the silence to become oppressive.

Not Just Because Holden Would Hate Her

Her lips rolled into a pointed smile, stuck onto her face like clay, and the tilt of her head was just a little too choreographed. Her voice echoed in my ribcage, bouncing off bones and organs like a fiery pinball, her words sharp even buried in small talk. No different from the last time I saw her, I had braced myself for tension but hoped for warmth, waiting for her eyes to register, to connect. I stood in front of her with an uncertain smile on my face, feeling her words pour into me unfiltered, trying to find the place in my head where it didn't hurt to hear her speak. Where is that head of yours? The words slide over your glossed lips with a sordid saccharinity, but there's something distinctly ... Jafar-like about the way you hold my attention. 

Sometimes she touched my shoulder as though she had invested something in me, as though we were family, and the way her fingers pressed the fabric of my shirt into my skin made me instinctively tense my neck in flight defense.

When she left, we paced. We exhaled. We gripped hands and locked arms and buried our heads in the throw pillows. Our unease pooled in the center of the room, growing as we cycled through thoughts, placing bets on how many weeks it would be until the other shoe dropped, until our instinctive-grimace-reaction to her re-established itself as justified, until her thoughts dribbled through the phone speakers to draw blood.