Talk To Me

02-I || Spare Me The Drama

There are two types of the scariest people in the world: one, the person who never forgets anything, and two, the person who starts to remember everything.

I listened to the voice of Collin Hughes—the man who still loved my mother even though she was six feet underground—warble out of my phone while I stood in the living room of my new apartment and thought about how I left this man because he was just starting to remember everything.

"Harper, it's me again, Collin...listen, I'm glad to know you're fine and doing okay...but please Harper, just tell me where you live. I promise I won't come over, I won't, I just—just don't cut me off completely like this, alright, I'm really sorry about how I acted...I just—just think about what Taylor would think, us like this after she's gone. I miss you...so much. Please, don't let me go. I love you, and I'm sorry."

His brain must have somehow lodged in his rectum if he ever thought there was even the slightest possibility of me coming back any time soon. What did he think I would feel when I listened to that message? Sorrow? Longing? Reminiscence? Sincerity? I wish I had a red buzzer to pound with my fist at each absurdly wrong guess: Blarp! Blarp! Blarp! Blarp! I felt satisfaction. I felt the satisfaction of having done the right thing because I did do the right thing moving away from Collin Hughes because Collin Hughes was starting to remember everything.

The hot shower relieved my tensed muscles, the knots in my back and the stiffness in my neck and the aching in my arms and legs. I was always tense these days and I knew why. I ran over my mental checklist to calm myself down, it was my own strange little mechanism: you moved away from Collin, you're living alone, you're financially stable, you have a new job lined up, you're safe and sound.

But. There was always a but. I didn't know what it was, yet, but it was still there. Lurking in the dark shadows. Waiting to spring out at me. Make me realize how I would be walking straight into the flames any day now.

This apartment looked spanking new, like it didn't have a previous owner, who was a single mum in her late thirties. The bathroom mirror didn't bear any old make-up smudges or saliva mixed toothpaste flecks or even a single fingerprint. It threw every feature of my face into sharp relief. My golden honey brown tan now looking like a bad sunburn; creased like a hastily made bed. My eyes were hollow, haunted, and gray. My eyebrows had always been a bit too thin, a bit too long; my mouth a bit too full, a bit too small. My nose was a nose not even a nose job could fix. While my face didn't make people puke, it didn't make people smile either.

My hair had started falling out a while ago, quite unsurprisingly. My mind was stone but my heart was not yet quite there. And my body was listening to my heart. The master that gave it blood, not thoughts. But I would soon make its master the dealer of thoughts. Soon. I couldn't afford to have my heart in control, not anymore.

Still, my hair was thick and wavy and bouncy enough to twist it up into a ponytail. Then I removed it and did it back in a tight braid, a braid so tight I felt the nerves popping out on my forehead. I looked at my face again in the hallway mirror—once again, spanking new and fresh—and observed my sharp, Lara Croft face. The braid threw attention to how high and sharp my cheekbones were and it didn't look like I had gotten those out of stress starvation but out of character and strong-will. I liked that. I liked this look. A loose braid signifies a loose character; that's what Angela snaps to Aunt Shirley when she was braiding her hair in that one episode. She was right. And I wasn't a loose character.

Maybe academic-wise, I was flawed to some people's eyes. I wasn't a hotshot in college; I had barely survived. It's one thing to think you can be a mechanical engineer someday, it's another thing to actually try it out. I tried, I honestly tried to keep up and surge through the increasingly difficult content, but in my last semester, I'd given up. It didn't matter. So I wasn't good at mechanical engineering. Who cares? I was excellent at a ton of other stuff.