Nobody was supposed to get hurt.

Nobody was supposed to get hurt.

Nobody was supposed to get hurt.

The words pulsed and throbbed in my head, making a hard task now impossible. I licked my lips and avoided the expectant stares of those in the room.

“We were pretty stupid,” I finally got out, fidgeting and inhaling sharply. “I … we met when I was seven. I was crying.”

I closed my eyes and allowed the memory to envelop me. The common chaos of slurred profanities being screeched. The lake’s liquid dazzle from the grass in the yard.

“And he picked a daisy for me from my neighbor’s garden and sat down next to me and said, ‘My favorite color is red. What’s yours?’ And I smiled gently and cautiously took the stolen gift and we both pretended not to hear the constant curses through the open window. And then he just kept coming back. Every day. Once we went swimming in the lake. It was gross.” I laughed.

“But I loved it. We swam all day. Underwater you can’t hear any yelling, so it was just him and me and the lake’s blue reflection, like our safe place. When he was sixteen he bought this beat-up convertible and he’d drive me anywhere.”

I choked, invoking memories of ribbons of wind whipping through my hair, his sun-kissed face smiling down at mine, feigning freedom for a few hours and staying drunk on those moments to breathe through the pain. His eyes filling with warm concern whenever he picked me up. His careless but candid “I love you” whenever he dropped me off. I never returned it. I was far too flighty for such a commitment.

“I don’t even know why he kept coming back. I just pushed him away.”

They needed to know about how he only drank his coffee laced with French vanilla, because he knew that’s how I liked it. They needed to know about how he always left his job early to pick me up during the pastel midday when he knew Daddy got home. They needed to know how he came back even after I fought him.

“He was so much better than me,” I said. The silhouettes of my grief were folding in on themselves, closing up my throat. I desperately grasped for composure, but the world was already growing hazy, sorrow encasing me.

And then I could see it all: the bronzed planes of his face as we looked up at the stars, smiling sleepily at me as we warded off the cold in the back seat of his convertible, me with more than my fair share of the blankets, and him happy to be chilled as long as it meant I was warm.

I took a quick reach from my cocoon to gesture up at the sky. “The big dipper,” I whispered, snuggling back in. He hummed in response and I shifted my vision to the next constellation. “Little dipper.” I continued until I had exhausted my limited knowledge. “Don’t you know any?” I asked when I’d finished.

His voice rasped with disuse and fatigue. “No. I never called them any name. My momma just called them pockets of light before she died. Guess that’s where she is now. Pocket of light somewhere.”

I considered this theory with a slight smirk, then accepted when he offered his arm for me to rest my head on. Both of us were momentarily indifferent to reality, him so convinced that he was in love with me, and me selfishly allowing his delusion. I had never found someone who cared so wholly.

I could hear the yelling from the time I had last spoken to him – my own obtrusive cries that he couldn’t fix all the problems, that I didn’t love him. He had stood, lip pressed between his teeth, hands grazing through his hair, internally battling himself but never retaliating at me. It ended in an unwavering embrace, the remnants of tears trailing down my cheeks and pooling onto his shirt, his tenacious vow to try to paste my pieces back together.

But my shards were sharp, and somewhere in trying to tend me, he got cut on my edge.

He had thought I was still somewhere inside when he saw it, heroically blinded from all logic that there were professionals and they would take care of me. He had a promise to keep, and he rushed into the burning house, frantically searching for me.

I had sat in the backyard, clutching a daisy from my neighbor’s garden, staring at the lake and inhaling the smoke from the unrelenting flames. I had come home to the orange inferno. A fireman pushed me toward the water, claiming it to be safest.

I know. The water has always been my safe place.

And in my overwhelming sense of loss, I had consoled myself that I still had him.

Now I know I have nothing.

When they recovered his body and I was left trying to pick up the pieces in his apartment, I found he had sentenced his sentiments in crippled cursive in a thousand letters I was never supposed to see. He’d scattered them around his room.

“I always thought that you loved me too, but I guess not. Maybe your eyes were like the lake that we used to look at from your yard when we were younger, always reflecting the stars, and I foolishly thought that maybe you were my pocket of light. Maybe I can at least be yours. I promise to try.”

I sobbed, trying to regain control, as I saw the world with new clarity through my tears. I wanted to tell him I did love him, that all of my furious vociferations were never meant for him.

“I couldn’t stay away, even if you hated me. You’d just waltz into the room again with your mellifluous voice and there was nothing but white noise. Your smile sanded all the stresses away.”

I was aware of the long silence the congregation had endured while I reminisced, and I fought to force something intelligible out.

“And then he died.”

“I mean, you never even told me your favorite color. I guess it’s just one of the mysteries that made you so simply complex. I was never good enough for you anyway. So I guess, if I can’t be your stars, I can be the daisies that grow by your neighbor’s house.”

When I had first found out, when I’d gotten the call, I’d been driving in my mom’s van under the steady knocking of precipitation. The past twenty-four hours had been awful; I’d been scrambling to reassemble my remaining belongings, driving to stores to purchase what was lost. I had been so selfishly enraged. He’d left me alone when he knew I needed him. I glared out the window at the rain, far too mad to cry, grateful to the sky for doing so for me.

I’ve misplaced my anger now. I’m left with ringing, bitter lamentations instead.

Stupid, stupid boy. Why would you do that?

I felt so heavy and empty all at once, struggling to set the bouquet of daisies down on the cold stone. It was as if their emotional weight was physical too. Curling my hand into a fist and sliding it slowly to support my head, I intentionally met all the fixed eyes I had tried to avoid. Their intense regard held calculated condolences, trying in vain to soothe my messy state.

I strained to see his complexion in the summer, to hear his pronounced laugh, to fix his ruffled, unkempt hair. But I couldn’t, because all of that had been sealed six feet beneath the earth, and I was left imagining his death, overwrought with terror not for himself but for me, sweaty from the intense heat, inhaling a cloud of gray, allowing embers to viciously bite into his skin until the conflagration consumed him, while I obliviously drowned in the ripples of the water.

“It’s all I can think about when I look at his grave.”

Nobody was supposed to get hurt.