suffice - [cass]

There's a drumming in my head. Beat, beat, beat, beat. I tap my shoe-covered footsteps along the concrete path in time to the drumming, pacing the beat out and replacing them with numbers. Onetwothreefour onetwothreefour onetwothreefour onetwothreefour. When I can’t count anything else around me, when it blurs into nothing as I patter down the streets on the way home from school, I have nothing else to use except the numbers in my mind. And it breaks up – counting the beats and counting the footsteps and counting the cracks I skip over, all at once. It’s a kaleidoscope of numbers in my head, stretching and spreading and merging into a mosaic of stability. Numbers keep me calm. Counting keeps me calm.

I don’t know where I’m going. In all honesty, I have no set destination. No place I have to be or people I have to see. It’s just me and the drummer of a shadow that lingers faintly, a mere splurge of overcast light attached to my feet. I’m wandering, exploring. Taking what comes my way and counting everything I can. Cracks on the walls - two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen. People out wearing hats one... four... six... seven... nine... thirteen, streets I’ve come across that are familiar eleven and those that I do not recognise twenty seven. Perhaps I look mad, wandering up and down alleyways and jumping over cracks and tracing my gaze over windows and peeling paint and chipped corners of buildings. No-one really bothers to notice me. I’ve always been good at that, going unnoticed. It’s subconscious.

I like to dawdle through the unfamiliar of Three. There are always new things to see and do and find and count. You’d think that growing up here all my life and barely spending a moment at home that I’d get to know the place quite well. But it’s so big, full of people and places and things, that it’s so easy to get lost here. Perhaps I was lost from the very beginning. Maybe one-day-old me wasn’t meant to be dumped on a doorstep. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe they’re looking for me, right now, and maybe if I wander for miles and miles and miles I’ll find them, find Polli-

And I stop. Right there. Realisation hits me in the core and catches me off-guard and I’m stumbling in my shoes that are somehow far too big for me right now. Perhaps I even stopped breathing. Maybe my heart stopped too. I just stop. And my bottom lip is trembling because Polli has not crossed my mind in the longest of times. An overwhelming jumble of guilt and loss and questions and sadness and anger and betrayal and every other feeling under the sun tackles me, drags me under. For a moment, I’m sinking, clawing uselessly for the surface and don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t bloody cry.

I don’t realise that I’ve spoken those words until I hear a shaky breath leaving my opened mouth. Scrabbling up my composure, I take a deep breath and try to walk, try to shake off the rock of sentiment that’s created a pit in my stomach. ”One, two, three, four” I begin, counting my slow footsteps as they scrape against the ground below me and scratch at my ears. ”Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten...”

And it gets easier. Gradually. If nothing can ever stay with me, at least one part of my mindset can stay intact. Something I have to keep me grounded. Something to keep me at bay from everything that rests on my shoulders. Something to add an extra layer of protection, an extra shield on my wall. Counting, distraction. And yet, more often than ever lately I find myself wondering how long it will be before I need to rely on something else. Or rather, let myself rely on something else. Not someone, because everyone leaves, in the end – but something. For now, it will do. Suffice as everything I need. But a girl can’t rely on numbers forever.