complacency.
And Dylan stops.
‘It was me.’
He crouches in front of me.
And I ask ‘Do you think you can just beat me into submission?’
He pauses with a thoughtful look. I feel tired as I watch him contemplate and eventually open his mouth.
‘I’m not trying to beat you into submission, I’m trying to beat you out of it’ and he looks at my broken face. ‘There is no sense of loss or fear in this world.’
And I’m listening to the words, but they’re not making any sense.
‘Loss and fear?’
‘Why do you think I’m hitting you?’
Things have suddenly calmed down.
‘Because you’re an asshole.’
I feel like I’m choking.
‘Because you don’t know how to feel scared.’ He pauses. ‘You aren’t scared and you don’t truly know what it means to feel anything other than complacency.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘How so?’
‘I feel sad because I’ve lost Evaline. I know what I feel.’
‘Do you?’ He stands up. ‘I don’t think you do.’ He paces. ‘You’ve felt approximations… variations. You’ve probably even felt a dull ache that feels similar to the emotions that you’re truly capable of. But I don’t know that you’ve felt loss or fear since you were a child.’
He walks across the room and his voice goes soft and gentle. ‘Human beings have an incredible capacity to adapt. We have an incredible ability to quickly feel complacent and forget what everything else might feel like. You may think that you’ve felt loss. You may think that you’ve felt fear. But even if you have, you’ve forgotten. You’ve realized, possibly consciously, possibly subconsciously, that you are going to live forever. You’ve realized that, in the end, nothing really matters. You’ve adapted to the sharp pain that love entails and you’ve lost the fear of loss, because when life is infinite, nothing is lost forever.’
And Dylan paces around some more. He looks at me. He smiles and then frowns.
‘When I was younger I felt things in the slightest of ways. I didn’t know death and therefore never knew consequence. Without consequence, I never felt fear or loss. Without fear or loss you can never know what love and happiness are. Because love and happiness, they are predicated on the notion of fear and loss. There is a give and take to our emotional spectrum, and once you take one simple thing like death out of the formula, everything else leaves.’
A dull ache crawls along my skin.
‘You have approximations of emotions, but you do not know how intense they can become.’
And I start to open my mouth to ask a question. I start, but I don’t manage. My words fail and fall and falter and I’m left without so much as a sound.
‘She just wants you to understand.’
And with that, Dylan leaves the room.
Evaline watches me with a blank stare.
I’m feeling something, I just don’t know what it is.
And I’m aching.
And the pain is starting to make me dizzy.
And my eyes fall shut.
And I dream.
I’m nothing without passion. I haven’t been passionate in a millennia.
I dream of passion with Evaline.
It’s a sensation that feels foreign.
It’s a sensation that I cannot articulate nor truly comprehend.
I thought I knew what it was.
Turns out the entirety of my life has been the equivalent of the sun cresting the horizon but never truly rising.
I wake up and I can’t see straight. I ache but I’m not aching like I should be. I’m feeling somewhat comfortable.
And then I realize that my head is on a pillow.
And I realize that I’m in my parent’s house.
On my bed.
And Evaline is laying next to me.
I press myself against her fake body and I smell her fake hair and I kiss her fake neck.
My lips are sore.
They sting. They’re swollen.
I should go see a doctor.
But I won’t.
The pain will linger.
The pain will last.
The pain will remind me that things can be more than what I let them be.
And I am a creature of limits. Limits that I impose on myself. Limits that I have created and held onto without truly knowing or understanding
And I kiss Evaline’s neck and she moans and twists and turns like I always remember her doing. She turns to me and smiles and buries her face into mine and we embrace, for a moment I think that maybe it’s something that I can hold onto.
I can’t.
I’m beginning to realize that what I know, it’s not real.
I get up.
Brush my teeth.
Look in the mirror.
My face is swollen and my eyes are black and blue and my nose is crooked.
I need to change.
I keep pulling my hair as if that will change the world.
And it doesn’t help that I see her all the time. She’s right there but I know that she’s not. And no matter how hard I try to lie to myself, I can’t seem to make the situation something that works for me.
I’m sick to my stomach with a guilty burn that reminds me of an emotion that I thought I forgot.
I wish I could find her.
And I look at her.
I want to yell.
I do yell.
‘I want you back!’
And she looks at me and I know she’s not real but she’s all I have.
‘Then find me.’
And I stand there for a second. There’s chatter in the background from a television that’s on too loud.
I can’t find much to say. My heart is racing and my forehead shines with a sweat that comes from nerves that burn.
Because I don’t know if I can love her like she deserves to be loved.
Because I don’t know if I can change who I am.
