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The terror, it comes in waves. Those waves can sometimes look imposing at the height of their swell and then crash to the shore in foamy reverence. Then there are waves no bigger than ripples, a cluster of maritime disturbances dissipating before they even reach the shore.
This current onslaught seemed to be in the category of the former. Maya lay helplessly rigid in the bed, with bulging eyes and a desperate gasping for air that wouldn’t come, dead-weight limbs that wouldn’t jerk to life. This stupor, this lapse in motion seemed more insidious than the last.
There’s a part of her that knows she’s teetering between lucidity and the realm of dreams. Her eyes haven’t quite adjusted to a blackness that shrouds the room like an opaque cloak, swirls and little vibrant blots dot her vision and this is the world she knows to be real because she can feel the sweat drenched sheets beneath her, but her mind still lingers, always lingers in the torrid sand dunes of Rashon.
The rhythmic, punctuated rise and fall of her chest frightens her. The air won’t come, the sand buries her lungs…that glowering pink typhoon…
“Sit up.”
The voice is distorted but the hand she feels on her shoulder is warm and real and it almost manages to fracture the intricate mirage. “Maya, sit up. You’re okay.”
The hands fall from her shoulders but only momentarily. By the time Maya feels slim fingers threading her hair the bedside lamp emits a dull, burnt orange hue and she can see her now, blonde tresses pulled back into a messy up-do, wire-rimmed spectacles an afterthought in the urgency.
“Kendrix…” In her name she found her breath, in her eyes the terror that numbed her veins evaporated, “Kendrix…”
Her eyes were searching for something that Maya was too afraid to give, too ashamed to admit what still lurked in the deepest crevice of her mind.
I was back on Rashon, she wanted to say.
I’m scared to sleep because I see your ghost, she almost said.
Every time I close my eyes, I lose you all over again…
Of course, what she wanted to say and what she actually said were as obverse as dusk and dawn. “These sheets. You know I overheat.”
She tried to smile at Kendrix, swift and easy and reassuringly but she knows how a genuine smile looks and feels, it was more like a pained rictus had peeled her lips from her teeth.
“Honestly babe, I’m okay.” A blatant lie but Kendrix doesn’t probe, not at this hour, the bleary rheum of sleep still heavy and thick, but stores this as a discussion for later.
“I’ll get you some water.” Kendrix pressed a feather light kiss to Maya’s temple, padding out of the dimly lit room bare-foot.
With a weighted exhale Maya sprawled back out on the partially sweat-dampened bed with a dull buzzing thrum reverberating through her bones. She tried desperately to focus on something, anything that would stimulate the senses, she turned at an angle that would have been painful had she endured it any longer and nestled her face in Kendrix’s pillow to smell her perfume. The lamp, casting a grimy yellow bulge of concentrated color that illuminates Kendrix’s side but doesn’t quite reach over to her.
The water Kendrix gives her is ice cold. Maya gulps it gratefully and with fervour but she’s always so thirsty now, nothing quenches her. Nothing sates the ache in her. Nothing but the woman next to her.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Kendrix asks after a beat or two of silence her voice is soft and tentative and gentle and barely above a whisper but Maya fixes her with the most utterly inscrutable gaze.
Maya ponders carefully on what she’ll say, what she should say and if any good will come from saying it. In the end it’s futile, Kendrix knows the ins and outs and the labyrinthine complexities of her partner, she knows better than anyone in the galaxy how to distinguish between Maya’s truths and falsehoods.
The incessant thrumming, that sickening sensation that makes her feel like her veins are boiling, reaches her throat. All prospects of any candor seared away like meat spitting flecks of grease in a frying pan.
“I don’t want to talk.” She finally says, swallowing down the bile that clogged and bubbled away in her larynx, and that’s true at least. “I don’t think I have the words right now.”
“Then don’t force it.” Kendrix looks hurt, dreadfully so, and switches the lamp off with a short, forceful yank of the little chain dangling from the spine and turns so that Maya is now staring at the outline of her back.
Don’t go to sleep on an argument…
Blinking back a rogue tear, she finds the courage to relent, to open up.
“I missed you.” Maya uttered into the darkness, quiet, like the air might carry it away.
“Miss me?” Kendrix switched the lamp back on, “You miss me?” Maya blanched at the incredulous tone in her voice, is she confused or furious? Or both?!
“I said I missed you, Kendrix. You didn’t let me finish.” Maya cut in.
“Maya, I’m not the one who’s been completely vacant in this relationship for the last few months. You just look right through me like a ghost, hell, you even fuck me like you’re just going through the motions.”
There it was, those wisps, strands of memory that threaded through her brain and poisoned any happy memory she had ever made and in her mind’s eye, she was fleetingly transported to that arid wasteland and on the periphery of that lurid, feral cyclonic…tomb.
“Tomb.” Maya croaks.
“What?”
“I’m still there. I never left.” Her voice is clearer but there’s an unmistakable tremor that Kendrix swears she can feel too.
“Maya, you’re scaring me, what are you–”
“Rashon.” Came Maya’s unintentionally clipped response, like she couldn’t bear to balance that defilement on her tongue any longer than she had to, “Have you ever seen a soul leave a body before, Kendrix?” Kendrix reaches over for the water she brought Maya but is cut off when Maya gently claims the outreached hand and sets her hand on her hip, she holds it there for a while and sweeps minutely, absentmindedly over the back with her thumb, tracing over bone and tendon.
“We couldn’t even give you a burial, that vortex became your tomb and I’m always there.”
“Maya–” Her name comes out as a breathless plea as Kendrix reaches up to cup her face. Maya knows she has to say this. She knows she has no power to stymie the torrent of the sea, she knows she has no power to impede the rhythmic, pulsating beat in the crust of this brave new world they now inhabit but she does have this moment, “Let me finish, please.” She steels herself and continues, “I thought you were never coming back. We both died there, I think. I lost you. And it’s like I’m always waiting for the rug to be pulled out from under me, like you’re not really here, just some cruel figment of my imagination and when I close my eyes…”
She trails off, slumping into Kendrix’s shoulders, her body jerks and stutters as sobs violently wrack her body. Her beloved trembles as she holds her and when the sobs subside, Kendrix tilts Maya’s chin up so they’re looking directly into each other’s eyes, sometimes the eyes can say what evades the known lexicon, but Kendrix tries all the same, “I’m right here, I love you and I’ll always be with you. I fought so hard to get back to you, Maya.”
Maya closed the gap between them and kissed her hard, the bygone days of honeyed words and chaste delicate lips slotting together had no sway in this moment. It was raw, without restraint and Dionysian. She wished she could bottle this kiss and the unfettered mist it seemed to emit, distill it and concoct from its elements a tincture that she could consume when the sandstorms and the punishing rays of the Rashonian sun invaded her dreams.
They broke apart, reluctantly but Maya was more invested in the hand trailing south while Kendrix began nipping and sucking at the pulse point on Maya’s neck.
“I love you, Kendrix. With everything I am.”
There is power in words, Maya had found, power in freeing yourself from a prison constructed by your own mind. She hadn’t even realised the key was in her sight this whole time.