𝑰𝑵𝑲 • 𝑻𝒆𝒘𝒌𝒆𝒔𝒃𝒖𝒓𝒚 / 𝑳𝒐𝒖𝒊𝒔 𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒅𝒈𝒆

To Rush Is To Ruin

I used to wonder what it would be like to only have four of my five senses.

A childish activity. To wake up, look around, and before my eyes could adjust to the day, shut them again. I might've tried to walk around for a little while, feel my way out of bed and around my room, dragging my fingertips along the walls. I'd open my eyes again to see my surroundings, and feel guilty for having the ability to do so.

If not sight, maybe my hearing, or taste. I'd clasp my hands on either side of my head, covering my ears, pressing hard, tight. Everything and everyone would muffle, blend together into a hum of nonsense. Then I'd let go, and smile; grateful to be able to hear the things people have to say to me. Their voices, their words.

I was lucky enough to be born with all five. Although sometimes I felt like I had no sense at all.

I looked down at the water, watching the way my feet seemed to bend every which, without rhyme or reason under its surface. A familiar willow tree shielded me from the sun. Summer had hit in full force, but I'd never spent it this far south. I'd never experienced heat this strong.

'Why do I never know what to do?', I thought, not spoke. I wouldn't consider myself a skeptic, I didn't believe in people living beyond their deaths. I didn't believe that my father was floating around somewhere, waiting for me to speak to him. I knew I was there alone.

But I was alone with my thoughts, and my thoughts were plenty company. I couldn't get it out of my mind, any of it. The thing's he'd said, the way he looked, the way he sort of crumbled a little bit more after each thing I said. I didn't regret what I'd told him, the answer I'd given him. I think I would have regretted saying the other thing, giving him the answer he'd wanted.

And I regret ever having allowed it to get to that point. Maybe, if I had made things clearer, told him early on what I had been thinking the whole time, that whatever we were doing would never become something more, something proper, then maybe I wouldn't be here. And maybe I would still be at home, with him.

'How am I supposed to know what I should do?', I rubbed my bare hands in the cool grass. 'How am I supposed to know whether or not it's the right thing to do?', I rubbed harder, my hands pressing into the ground, shifting dirt, flattening green. 'How?'.

Blood stains the earth, a sting shoots up my arm. I've cut myself on a blade of grass, and all I can do is sigh. I think a part of me still feels like my father can hear me, as if I weren't just shouting into nothingness. There are things I want to ask him, about the letter, why he wrote it, why he never told me those things himself. When he still could.

I want to ask him why he gave the letter to Tewkesbury instead, what he had seen in him. My father had always spoken highly of him. A certain sense of respect seemed to flow between them, one I never understood the cause for. And although I can't ask my father these things, I'm aware that Tewkesbury's still alive, and capable of providing me with the answers to some of these questions.

If I'd had these questions a few days ago, then I would have asked him, I could have asked him. But I couldn't anymore, because he wasn't here. And ever train of thought I followed seemed to conclude with that same ending. That I was away from him.

I pulled my legs from the lake, felt the water droplets that clung to my skin run down them like rainfall. I kicked them up to my side so that they lay in the sun, out of the willow tree's shadow. Lying back, being this way, half in one place, half in the other, my lower half in the light, the other in the dark, my body by the church, my head still at the manor, my heart, somewhere; I felt divided.

But not in the regular sense, where I'm stuck at a crossroads, faced with a dilemma, no. I just felt, torn. Like I was just half of myself, less than what I had been before. And I don't know how to get to a point where I'm whole again.