Falling Falling Stars

70 - Selfish

Arden was still subdued when he drove Efnisien home on Monday morning. He hadn't slept off his mood at all, if anything he was quiet and glum all over again. He didn't suggest that Efnisien eat breakfast like he had in the past, and he didn't eat anything himself. Arden's house was quiet without Isabelle in it, even though she didn't really bark much.

Arden's car was quiet too because he still wasn't playing music. When Efnisien got out of the car outside his apartment building, Arden leaned over and tapped his wrist. Efnisien turned and hoped that he'd clear his schedule or get some rest or do whatever he needed to do in order to not look so beaten down by the world.

'Hey,' Arden said. 'Thank you.'

'Oh, I didn't- I didn't do anything.' He'd said the same thing the night before, but he couldn't think how anything he'd done had been...anything at all, to Arden.

'You did,' Arden said. 'You really did.'

With that, he pulled Efnisien's car door shut and drove away, and Efnisien stood there staring after Arden's red car with a heavy feeling in his chest.

*

Late Monday night, after his stomach had played up for about twenty minutes, he realised it was giving him less grief than usual and frowned as he walked back into the kitchen. About the only thing he'd changed in his life was that he was eating a bit more than normal. But eating too much had made things bad in the past.

Efnisien didn't think he'd ever figure out the strange inner workings of his gut, but he wasn't going to complain when things improved a little.

He spent the evening losing himself in work, Professor Adayemi's voice rolling through his mind, her stops and starts as she talked into the recorder on her phone, followed by incredibly cogent paragraphs complete with the references she wanted to use. Sometimes she paused for thirty or sixty seconds, thinking about what she wanted to say next, and in those moments Efnisien thought about sitting under the gazebo with Arden, cold and confused and concerned.

Arden didn't message throughout the evening, and Efnisien spent some time reading about poetry, then trying out different phrases. It was slightly less mortifying now, but he kept thinking about how he'd wanted to badly hurt Nate, and wondered if his evil, inner monster was always a paper-thin barrier away, waiting to come out and smash anyone who annoyed him into pieces.

Because if that was the case, then that wasn't change, and he was just a monster with a papier mache mask that other people believed in.

*

The next day, Dr Gary's office, and Efnisien had remembered the fidget dice and was turning it over and over instead of pressing any of the buttons down. His fingers were long, and he always felt like his knuckles were too big. His fingernails were ragged at the ends because he bit them. The corner of his thumb had a small wound on it, because he'd bitten the skin open the night before while staring down at a page of half-formed lines and thoughts.

'I can't believe I nearly hurt Nate like that,' Efnisien said, talking about the poetry group meet up. 'Literally, it was a split-second decision not to. I felt like I had barely any control over myself. I just wanted to get away. But like- How can I be improving at all, right, if that's the kind of thing that's under the surface?'

'The fact that it is under the surface, and you stopped yourself from acting on your thoughts is the definition of improvement,' Dr Gary said, but then he pursed his lips and thought something over for a while. 'From what you're describing... Tell me, when you were walking away from him, and he was coming towards you, how did you feel in your body? Calm?'