A Year of Novembers

Chapter Nine

A curious man he was; he never ceased asking questions, never stopped asking me to delve into my past, though he was reluctant to look back on the misery in his. I figure it to be best that I don’t ask him to look back on his family or the tragedies therein. We speak of me, and my past, and I slowly open my soul to the man who managed to fall in love with his mind.

            “Why were you in that school for mad children?” He asks one day, breaking the comfortable science.

            “Excuse me?”

            “The Academy for mentally ill girls- why were you in it?”

            The words slam against my lips. “I thought differently,” I stammer. I pull a strand of my hair down, ignoring the biting feeling on my scalp.

            “How?” James cocks his head to the side- something I’ve noticed he does when confused.

            “I questioned things,” I say slowly. The words aren’t right, oh, the words aren’t right! How clumsy they feel, just falling dryly off of my tongue. Useless, useless, oh; if only I could tame these tumultuous words. “I questioned people and faiths and wasn’t normal.”

            “Normal,” James says, rolling the word over in his mouth. “Normal. Why would you ever want to be such a thing, Sophie- girl?”

            “I don’t know,” I mumble, gazing at my hands.

            “Was it even you that desired normality?”

            I recall my past, and everyone in it, and I find the answer as quickly as I can find my name. “No.” I lift my eyes to his, and I feel as if the answer is too simple. “No,” I repeat, my voice finding its strength. “No, others did.” I cringe. I can taste blood in my mouth, can feel the cool tile beneath me and the horsewhip shredding away at the flesh on my back, and I swallow down the rest of my words.

            “Why would you ever give something like that up, then?” He smiles at me, placing a hand on the coffee table. “Why would you ever give that away?”

            “I don’t know,” I manage, and I run my hands over my face. Normalcy, normalcy- the word tastes sweet, but I can taste the arsenic it contains.

            He talks of what I am, what I could be, what I was born to be: People like us, he says, were born to disrupt the nothingness. People like us were born to be art.

            Art.

            For the first time, I am not battered down. I am not broken or beaten or hated for that stray mark of permanence that flows through my veins, and I can taste the sunshine that filters through the grimy window of my office.

            Beauty, beauty: a word to describe James Augustus Rush and all he stands for.

            This man, old enough to be my superior and mold me into any shape he pleases, decides to treat me as his equal, and that is the first time since my childhood that I fall in love with the humanity in others.

            I silently regard him as a surrogate father, too afraid to share the admiration I have for him after only four or five counselling sessions. I have always been the type to love before love is due, and I figure this is only another non-reciprocated attachment to someone’s kindness.

            His kindness fills my head with dreams, and I desperately attempt to sketch them, littering my apartment with poorly- drawn whisps of an evanescent vision. Too fast does it leave, just gliding away on the wind, and though I rush after it every time, my efforts to capture it always fail.