V. H. King's Ink

My body feels the lateness of the hour, but I cannot sleep.  How many of my nights begin like or become this?  Too many of them lately, it seems.  I close my eyes.  I open them.  I try to breathe but there is no depth to me.  Just a hollow heat I cannot escape.  I push myself up, shoving pillows behind my back. 

The light is on.  He sits next to me.  Bumps shoulders.  I glance up, but not at him.  I stare at the wall a moment.  I want to look at the shadow in the corner—but I don’t want to look, because looking makes me feel weak.  I should be able to do this.  I should be strong enough to do it on my own.  But of course, that gets me no further than where I am now.  And I wouldn’t have gotten this far by myself.  I sigh and lean back, letting my eyes drift to the ceiling.

“They’re all ghost stories.” 

I’m tempted to smile.  I’m tempted to look at him.  Instead I do neither, because I’m afraid it will be the opposite of strength.  I think it will be something dishonest.  I breathe slowly.  I try to push away the heat and clear my mind.  I try not to think about how I want to slide out of bed and curl up on the floor and cry. 

“It’s easy to say I write about death and dying, but it never occurred to me that I write ghost stories.  Isn’t that something?”

“Practicing again?” he asks.  “Rehearsing?”

He knows me well.  He always has. 

“I hate interviews for real jobs.”  This time I do smile.  “But I always daydream what it would be like if someone interviewed me about my writing.  I’ve even written short stories about it.  If that isn’t silly self-indulgence…”

Self-deprecation is easy to reach for, but it never leaves a good taste in my mouth.  That’s what you get, when you know better.  Still, I don’t know how to justify who I am or how I see the world.  Black-skinned as I am, I should be used to it by now. 

Defend yourself.  Prove why your existence should matter to me. 

Minds like that can’t be convinced.  My father taught me that the hard way.  You can’t change anyone’s mind.  That’s something they have to do on their own—that part is up to them. 

Your job is to be honest.  Find your freedom in honesty, dear girl, and you’ll realize there’s far more love for you than you think. 

Enough love to overflow these walls of difference.  Mountains can’t be moved, but rivers can flow through them. 

I’ve been defending myself as long as I’ve been alive, but I’ve been deflecting too.  Bracing myself.  Ignoring truths that shudder through my restless soul.  How loudly it screams… 

“Writing is your real job.”

Of course he says that.  I don’t fault him for it, though.  I needed to hear it.  It’s just that he’s so terribly gentle when he tells the truth.  He always has been.   The warmth of his arm around me brings me back to the room.

“Writing is your being.”  He squeezes my shoulder.  “You really are a Scroll.  That’s not just something you made up, that’s an undeniable truth.  And who better to describe your power than the one who holds it?”

“The one who gave it.” 

“It is.  It’s both, you know that.”

I shake my head.  I pull my lips between my teeth, not trusting myself to speak.  I never have.  My mouth trembles anyway, my throat thick.   

“Do you realize how terrifying that is?  To have that kind of power?”

I ask it in a small voice and he does not reply.  He has no way of knowing.  But he has a way of seeing, because he has always seen.  He serves as a witness for who I am, what I will become.  I close my eyes but the room is still full of light and I can see it. 

In the corner, the shadow of a chair that isn’t there.  Tobias shifts and is steadfast as ever. 

I cover my face with my hands and tell myself to breathe.  As if that worked at the beginning of this story.  As if it could carry me further than the middle.  No number of deep breaths will dispel the truth begging to be screamed from me. 

In the shadows of the cave, I see Tobias as fully as he allows.  A fingernail-thin gleam of silver streaked across a dark hood.  He is standing, looking down at me from a face that isn’t there.  I see him but I can’t look at him.  I feel guilty as the words rise unbidden, tumbling out in a silent sob.

I don’t know what to do.

Am I allowed this?

Are these just silly ideas that will never come true? 

Do I mean anything?  Is it selfish to want to mean something?  Is it prideful of me, to want something other than suffering?  Something other than sorrow for sustenance and tears to drink?

I can’t do this. 

I don’t know how to do this. 

The panic spills from me.  Spirals through the crown of my head.  Shivers in the breath of my lungs. Stutters the beating of my heart and shudders the levy-walls against my hope.  I hiccup, a gasp of a sob that won’t cry surrender.  My stubbornness does not discriminate—not when it comes to playing into my pride, and not when it comes to working against my self-hatred.

I’m here with you.

They both say it.  I hear it in the cave and in the cove of my bedroom.  Tobias, of great patience, has always been here.  He will let me take my time, but is equally quick to remind me of the work I am to do—even if done slowly. 

Eddison is still beside me, too.  Countries apart or in the corner of the cafeteria, he has been there for me since we first met.  I still cannot look at them—at either of them.  I take another breath, shakier this time, and ask again. 

Am I allowed?

May I—?

Please—help me accept this…

Comfort has always come across caustic.  Proof that I am not as strong as I seem.  No, I am quite sensitive underneath all these illusions of mine.  There is nothing so dangerous as whatever destroys all your defenses.  The face that is not there nods.  Hood and scythe tilt forward. 

Tobias.

It is only one of his names, but it is one I am allowed.  I speak it to myself and somehow the cave floor lifts me up again.  Smooth dirt pushing me back into my body, fashioning the strength that I am made of—sculpting the sinew of my Scroll-body.  I breathe again—this time, with my bones.

“Today was hard.”

The words come quietly.  I take my hands from my face, but I can’t quite look at Eddison.  Too shy to take his hand in mine, my ever-restless fingers twist into the soft material of the blanket.  He scratches across my shoulders, slowly from one to the other.  I realize I have gone tense again.

“It shouldn’t have been hard.”  I shake my head.  “Everything was fine.  Nothing bad happened, I just…”

He doesn’t say anything.  He kisses the side of my head and lets me confess my sins into his silence.  Silver flashes—headlights reaching through the blinds, reflecting in the mirror on the opposite wall.  In the cave, cold metal on my shoulder.  Under my chin. 

“I have a bad habit of bracing myself—even against the people and things I know will help.”

He knows this, of course.  They both do. 

“Thank you.”  It is a whisper, and it is the truth.  “For being here.”

“I’m always here for you.”

Even if it’s just as another soul bumping into the shoulder of my own.  A laughing dance at all the absurdities of life.  A quiet comfort—that there is someone who gets it.  What that means—how much that means—words cannot say. 

“The ghosts are all me.”

I’m afraid it comes out defensive, with the same self-deprecation I always damn myself with.  It’s easier to tell myself that I am warning him off my hurts rather than admit I am beginning to heal.  It is harder to believe truths I am barely brave enough to speak.  But I try anyway, because my soul is always screaming, straining, for something. 

“The ghosts are all the people I expected myself to be.  All the lives I dreamed for myself and then decided I didn’t deserve.  All the expectations I couldn’t meet, all the things I didn’t need to be…  Each of them, they’re who I had to be at one time or another so I could be here.  So I could be me.”

He knows.  He knows me and he knows how scared I am of letting myself be known. 

“You’re needed.”

Every version of you.  Each iteration, every in-between, all that was and is and will be of you—necessary.  For the work you do, for the person you are, for the worlds you hold. 

I close my eyes again.  Remembering raked dirt and the depth of the dark.  An entire ocean surrounds me.  I am no stranger to drowning in order to breathe.  Lift your head and the scythe won’t cut your neck. 

Rise.  Tobias speaks my charge.  Rise to this.

Even with small steps.

I turn to look at Eddison and take his hand at the same time.  I tell the truth as best I can.

“So are you.”

His waiting fingers close around mine.