so near, yet so far // frumtum

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Tugger

I never tell her that I’m afraid she’ll never come back. Whenever she wanders just a little bit too far, I do have my doubts. I think about how we lost one another. She could have been gone forever, and our lives would have gone on without so much as knowing what might have been. And I think that there’s some pain and sadness in all that we’ve had—I bob in the waves, watching her form tussle up and under the water. Life has been so many threads come together, and unraveled again. I don’t know if I deserve all the luck that I’ve had to find someone that so much as tolerates but understands me. Why me? There’s a million people in this world. She sacrificed a big house, with all she could’ve wanted, to disappear out in the waves with me. The unknown that we should be afraid of, she faces head on now, and I wonder if I can protect her from what’s coming. There could be that moment when they come for us, guns pointed, fists curled, and tell us that it’s enough.

There I go worrying about what other people might do to us. Hasn’t that always been the way? They’ve taken our families, our friends, they’ve molded our lives so that we’ve had all the pain and suffering but still, here we are. I don’t know if I’m ever supposed to have my heart ache as much as hers does. I guess I’ve wanted to be angry for the life that I’ve had, for losing my brothers and mother, for never knowing what could’ve been. But that’s like being angry over what’s on the horizon of the ocean. I’ll never swim hard enough or far enough to know, and nothing’s going to change that. Being mad might feel good for a little while, but slamming my fist in the water won’t change the tides. It doesn’t mean I’m not angry, or that the world doesn’t feel like it’s been stacked against us. But then I think of how lucky we still are, to just be kicking here, bobbing up, like a thorn in the side of this great big world. Still here, even when we’ve swam through so much.

She comes back towards me and I smile. Her hair’s all soaked, dripping down past her shoulders. My teeth chatter. Sun’s going down soon, and we’ll make a fire by the beach tonight. Maybe I’ll sing a song or we’ll catch fireflies—because the air is magic, us together is. She swims past and I dip my mouth below the water to blow some bubbles. One, two, three. How long until the world rights itself, and there are people along these beaches? I give it forty, fifty, a hundred years. There’s two of us out here now, and that’s two more than there’s ever been—and if Freya and I can swim against the current, there will be more, too. Her hands find my back then, and I take a breath. Her fingers trace the marks on my back, and I open my mouth to hiss. “Don’t…”

But she’s already drudging up old memories, something that I buried down because I don’t ever want to think of it again. I’m so sorry… I take another breath. There’s nothing to think about, nothing to imagine. Not the memories back in those cells, where the men locked me up and screamed at me until I could barely stand. They wouldn’t give me water, and there was another boy in the cell next to me, but he was gone just as soon as I met them, screaming all the while I got to stay in my cage because I looked like some boy that died in the hunger games. And they made me see again because they wanted me to know what kind of things they were going to do to me. They wanted me to know what metal against skin felt like, they wanted to tell me how much of a liar I was—that I was the boy that died, that I had escaped somehow, and that they would sooner kill me than let me be free. You’ll never be free, they kept saying, You’ll never be free. Not even if I made it out of those cells, I’d always be theirs. They could find me just as sure as the scars on my back had marked me as theirs.

I hate them. She says. And I can think of how much I hated them too—first, that I didn’t understand why they hated me so much. Then because I did nothing to them but exist. And I thought that I could be with them, and tell them whatever they wanted to know. But there was nothing that I could say that would ever make me like them. They would not set me free because they didn’t have that power—that’s what no one in those cells ever knew. Except I knew, after begging and pleading, that they never had the power to set me free. They would always keep me there, because that was what they were sent to do. They hurt so many, many men and boys, so many people that could have been innocent. And I say they are all innocent because I had done nothing, nothing but break laws that I had always broken, because they didn’t make sense. I was angry, but then I was tired. Knowing that there wasn’t freedom through them was exhausting, because I could have rather died than let them get the better of me.

You’re allowed to be sad too, you know?

I’m the only one that can free myself. In chains, cut up and bleeding, without anyone knowing that I existed, I knew—when I wanted to die—that I could still be free. Was it stupid? I could have died just like the other boys, or the men whose names I’ll never know. They burned the bodies outside, tossed them into graves, and I could have been one of them. It would have been easier to die, and I could have been away from them then. But I couldn’t set myself free that way, not when I was determined to have a purpose. I hadn’t traveled all those miles, I hadn’t been on top of mountains and danced by the ocean to disappear into the universe like so much as air. My freedom comes from walking these steps, treading this water, being in the present. Don’t tell me that I can’t exist because I will until I don’t—

“I know.” I whisper. I turn to face her. I swallow and feel the lump in my throat. I won’t think of the sting of a whip on my back. I won’t think about all those bodies piled up under the dirt. I won’t give them what they want, to bring me back down in chains because that’s not what I lived for. I didn’t come back to relive pain, to hate and crack up under all the bad. I came back because I could see her—I could be free. “I know I—I know…” I say again, words tripping over my tongue. “I can’t… I don’t want to think about…” I take another breath. “Don’t let them take your energy. They don’t deserve it. Not from you.”

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