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You’re not sure how long you’re sitting there, listening to nothing but the loud sound of Klunk’s motorboat purring on your lap and your own breaths as they inhale deeply and exhale deeply just like you were taught before the lock on the door clicks open.
The first thing you do is flinch, heart nauseatingly skipping a beat in your chest, even though you know who it is well before he calls out excitedly; “Mike! I’m home!”
You swallow roughly, trying to unstick your tongue from the roof of your mouth enough to call back, even if you know it’s never not been frozen during a flashback like this before. Still, you try, switching gears from counting in your head and humming to fighting the muscle from where it lies in your mouth, still and shaken as you even all these years later.
“Oh, Mike…” Woody coos softly, and even if it’s a phrase you’ve heard probably more than you’ve heard the words I love you it still splinters your heart. Is this all life is for you? It’s been twelve years and seven years of therapy, your graduation gown is standing ironed in the closet, but you’re still here, trembling hands clutching at anything it can grasp to tell itself that you’re not back there, still. That your entire life after it hasn’t been some vivid hallucination or brief coma dream, that you’re actually stood, perpetually, by her body.
Six years ago, the solution to this would’ve been easy – any drug you had on hand. But this isn’t six years ago, you don’t even know where to find drugs now, and as such the only answer to your terror is to sit here, doing every breathing technique you’ve ever been taught while forcing yourself to notice the feeling of the cat’s fur against your hands, the rumbling of her purr against your legs, the sight of her fur in the sunlight as it peaks through the blinds.
Woody kneels down in front of you, and despite the sorrow and worry in his eyes, smiles. “Are you happy to see me?”
You nod shakily, dragging air in and out of your lungs with forced calm. You’re here, with him, sat on your couch. There’s a cat on your lap – an emotional support animal. You bought her with money you acquired from your job and got her certified by a doctor that you see. Just like you bought the apartment with money you got from your job, so you’d be closer to the college you got into.
Fuck. The college.
You lean forwards, pressing your head into his chest. His arms wrap quickly around you, hands rubbing over your back as your breath hitches. “Hey, hey, it’s okay, amigo. You’re in our apartment in New York City. It is currently early afternoon. You are twenty-seven years old.”
Twenty-seven years old. What an age to be. She’ll always be fifteen, bright glow snuffed forever on somebody’s basement floor. You’ll never forget the way her bloodshot eyes went dark, the way her shallow breaths went still, the feeling of her warm body against your hands as you shook her with limbs that felt too long – “Renet. Renet, I’m hungry. Come on, Renet. Come up and get food with me.”
You didn’t realize she was dead until you woke up, until she was cold.
She didn’t have any family to be returned to, and you never felt up to returning to yours those days, so all you did was sit in silence beside her, struggling to wrap your brain around the fact that the closest thing you’d had to family since you’d begun shooting up and smoking to drown the agony of the past was dead because of your shared coping skill. That she would never carry you home again, would never laugh again, would never wake again.
The bruises from the needles were still visible on her pale arms as you buried her, bare hands ripping up a grave in a hidden area of your guys’ favourite park. You were the only mourner present, so you said no great speech about how much she’d meant to you.
You only laid your body against the repacked dirt, pressing your forehead into it and shutting your eyes, and said; “I love you.”
She didn’t reply. You wept until you felt like your heart was going to explode in your chest and take you with it, that your body was collapsing in on itself and she’s dead she’s dead she’s dead she’s dead she’s dead.
I’m too sober for this, you thought, and raided someplace of booze until you stopped thinking at all.
You woke up alone in an alleyway with a headache the size of Texas and nausea rolling your stomach. You rode it out there and didn’t go home again.
Nobody reported her missing. You spent as little time sober as possible after that, up until you couldn’t anymore.
You inhale as deep as you possibly can. Twenty-seven years old. Not fifteen. Fifteen was over ten years ago. Over a decade ago. Over a decade ago. It’s not happening again because it can’t happen again. You quit substances entirely years ago.
Klunk is purring in your lap. She is the softest thing in the world beneath your hands. The couch is comfortable under you, and Woody is warm overtop of you, babbling over your head – “And he asked me for pineapple. And I was like, I get it’s on the menu. But who gets pineapple? So that’s why I’m figuring there’s mutants in New York. That’s the only explanation. Pineapple pizza mutants. Because no human gets pineapple on pizza. It’s just not right! It’s sacrilegious, Mike! Sacrilegious to the Pizza Supreme in the sky! And probably some other gods too…”
You inhale the smell of pizza grease and New York City air clinging to his clothes, shifting your head so your face can brush against the texture of his work uniform. Twelve years ago, you buried your best friend with your bare hands in a park and figured with a soul-deep resolution that you would never have family again. Now, she’s cremated in your closet, just above the graduation gown you’re going to wear today when you receive your degree in psychology.
You put it there so she could know that you made it, that making it hasn’t made you forget her, so that you can take her to the auditorium and she can watch as you walk the stage. You’ll most definitely cry, but that’s alright, she most definitely is too.
You sit there for a few more minutes until the memory fades, until your nervous system has settled down into exhaustion. But you stay after that, too, just to bathe in the warmth of Woody’s arms, chatting back and forth with him, laughing weakly. You can’t tell how long you sit there, memory fading back into the recesses of your mind as you sit in your fiancé’s arms, arms that lived a whole life without you and yet curl around you in the way Leo’s do – like they were made for it.
Eventually, though, your phone chimes its fun little eight-bit alarm that you found and set yourself. But, unlike however-long-ago when you set your eyes upon your gown and suddenly remembered that she would never get this opportunity like you have, it doesn’t make your chest constrict and your mouth go dry when you untangle yourself from his arms and head back towards the gown.
Maybe it’s because he never truly lets you go, hand clasped in yours the entire way there, a never-ending stream of conversation pouring out of his lips. He sits on the bed as you change into your gown, laughing like a hyena when the sleeves fall over your hands. And, despite everything, you find yourself laughing too, a genuine noise that at one point shook you to make it.
But Woody’s always been special, in every sense but especially in this one. Not even Leo, in all of his seemingly endless strength and love, could have you laughing like this so shortly after remembering how it felt to bury her. When you pick up her urn from the shelf, metal so shiny and clean its almost a mirror back unto your face, it’s only love you see in your eyes.
And when you turn back around to face him, it’s only love you see in his.