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Itona's asleep. Whether that’s a curse or a blessing I don’t know yet – even after all this time, I still can’t pick the nightmares until they get bad. But he looks peaceful, for now at least.
I can’t sleep.
I’m worried about him. I never really got the phrase “worried sick”, but it makes sense now: being so damned scared for someone that your guts clench, your head aches, your lungs twist up in your chest. I’ve never been this scared, never.
I suppose there must have been signs, but I . . . well, I guess I didn’t miss them, exactly. Things just crept up. He’s always had the nightmares, the panic attacks, always had the bad days along with the good. It’s . . . normal, fucked-up as that is. But now the bad days are so much worse; now I have to wake him every other night when the dreams get their claws in too deep. Now the panic attacks end with torn fingernails and blood in his hair.
It’s like there’s a wall going up, brick by brick, between him and the rest of the world. Between him and me. I can’t break it down (though I would if I could, barehanded in a heartbeat) and I’m not good enough with words to get around it. Not smart enough.
And Itona's trapped behind that wall, alone with his own mind and all the shit that’s buried in there. And I know he’s strong, so strong, but no-one can keep fighting that forever.
I’ve stopped using my old cut-throat razor. Binned it weeks ago, bought a safety instead. And I’ve taken the bottle of painkillers out of the kitchen cabinet, and once when he was out I went down to the basement where there’s a door like the bathroom’s and I made sure I could knock the damn thing clean off its hinges if I had to. It’s a good thing neither of us use sleeping pills, I guess.
All these fucking precautions. I don’t know if he’s noticed.
It was so much easier, when we were kids. Wasn’t it? When the enemies were things I could punch, when anyone who laid a finger on my shrimp was due a kicking. Even if he could protect himself, for the most part.
But now the enemy’s there in Itona's head, and I can’t fight an idea, can’t punch a though.
I can’t do anything.
He’s lying there with his face all still and white, moonlight tangled up in his hair. Poetic, huh? Like someone frozen in ice, like Sleeping Beauty dead in the glass coffin. Like a statue. Like he’s already gone.
It’s getting harder to see him any other way, these days. And that hurts like hell, because that’s how people have always seen Itona. Blank-eyed, cold, unfeeling. A robot to be used, to be switched on or off.
I’m the one who’s meant to know him. The sarcasm and the laser focus, the sugar addiction and the superhero movies and the sheer genius of a mind like an electrical current. The boy who sticks his tongue out when he concentrates and built me a toaster that sang Disney tunes for my seventeenth birthday.
But every day, a little more of that boy vanishes behind the bricks, and every day the glass coffin looms a little closer. This fucking waiting game.
Why am I thinking like this?
The weather’s got me on edge. The last few days have been hot, too hot for autumn, and the air is full of damp, heavy pressure. There’s a storm coming, tension building, and it has to break soon.
And when it does, it’s going to wash everything away. We can’t all be strong enough to hold against the tide, against the thunder and the lightning. Something has to give.
The storm.
Itona.
Me.