the only number I still know by heart.

[embed]

https://pin.it/2v8GOxW2W

I haven’t owned a landline since 2006, but I can still dial yours. The eleven-digit number (including the city code) is burned into the part of my brain that stores things we refuse to let die, right next to song lyrics from commercials, the exact choreography of that one music video always played on Dream TV, and the knowledge that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday. I couldn’t pick my first kiss out of a lineup. But I can tell you the exact pattern of your note-taking and how you wrote ‘g’s in 2004. I can tell you that your eyes were amber. Not brown. Amber. Like honey held up to sunlight. Like the trapped-insect jewelry in that dinosaur movie. It resembled something ancient and preserved, too beautiful to belong to a nine-year-old boy wearing a too-big hoodie in a classroom that smelled of chalk and despair.

[embed]

2004. The best year I have ever lived, and I have lived years since then, supposedly better ones, ones with love affairs and graduations and professional accomplishments. I’ve had years with travel and awards and the kind of friendships where you talk about your trauma at dinner parties like it’s a competitive sport. From the outside, those years appeared to be a life well lived.

And yet.

2004. When I was small and loud and completely unmedicated, before anyone had diagnosed anything, before I learned words like “attention-deficit” only meant that your kid talks a little bit too much and “autism spectrum” was never heard before (because I was so successful everyone thought all of those were gifts, not curses) and “perhaps we should try a different approach.”

I was the kid who screamed in class—not crying, not tantrum, just screaming because my feelings were too enormous for the stupid meat prison of my child body, and nobody had taught me yet that you’re supposed to swallow all that fire until it turns into something polite and palatable, something that smiles when it doesn’t want to, something that says “I’m fine” instead of howling at the ceiling because existing is just SO MUCH sometimes.

You sat next to me and never flinched.

That should have been weird. Everyone else flinched. Teachers flinched. My own mother flinched, God love her, and she made me. But you, you with your amber eyes and your smile that took up your whole stupid face, that smile that was too big for you the way my feelings were too big for me, you just sat there. Like I was normal. Like, I was fine. Like me being like this is the best thing that ever happened to you. You enjoyed it. Like screaming was a perfectly reasonable response to the overwhelming experience of being alive on a Tuesday afternoon in a classroom where the fluorescent lights buzzed like dying insects and the clock moved so slowly I was convinced time itself was punishing me specifically.

You smiled at me like I made sense.

I have been chasing that feeling for twenty years. I have paid therapists hundreds of dollars an hour to try to manufacture a version of what you gave me for free at a shared desk with our initials carved into the corner. I have dated people who made me feel small so I could practice feeling big. I have loved people who required explanations, who needed the footnotes, and who looked at me like I was a puzzle they weren’t sure they wanted to solve. And maybe they did love me—the medicated, modulated, socially acceptable version of me. The one who learned to perform herself. This version laughs at appropriate volumes, cries only at movies, and never screams anymore, except sometimes into pillows when nobody is home.

But you loved the feral version. The original. The before picture.

I didn’t sleep that night.

This is not unusual. I am, at this point, more familiar with 3 AM than I am with most of my relatives. But last night was different. Last night was my mother’s voice through walls, that particular frequency that bypasses your ears entirely and goes straight into your chest cavity, vibrating against your ribs like a tuning fork. She was screaming at my father. Or not screaming—worse. That controlled, shaking almost-scream means she’s been holding it for months, years, or decades, and it’s finally clawing its way out.

I don’t matter to you. I have never mattered to you. You’re trying to save the whole world, and you can’t even see your own family. You’re destroying us. You’re destroying me.

At twenty-nine, I lay in bed like I was eight again, still, barely breathing, counting the seconds between words like you count lightning and thunder to measure the storm's distance. The storm was not far. The storm was in the kitchen. The storm was in the bones of this house, in the bones of this family, and in my bones.

My mother used to say love was poison.

Not in the poetic way. She didn't mean it in the Shakespearean, Romeo-and-Juliet, or "love is a beautiful tragedy" sense. In the flat, exhausted, matter-of-fact way of someone who has been drinking poison for thirty years and can now identify the exact notes of it, the terroir, and the vintage. Love was poison. Love was a trap. Love was the thing that made you stay in rooms you should leave, made you fold yourself into shapes that didn’t fit, and made you give and give and give until there was nothing left and then get blamed for being empty.

I made an oath when I was nine years old. I told you. Do you remember? Probably not. You were also nine. Nine-year-olds make oaths all the time, about blood brotherhood and eternal friendship and never eating vegetables. But I meant mine. I meant mine with every furious atom of my small, loud, too-much body.

I will never love.

I said it like a curse. Like a protection spell. If I just promised hard enough, I believed I could escape the entire situation: the screaming at 2 AM, the silence that felt worse than screaming, the way my father looked through my mother as if she were furniture, and the way my mother’s voice diminished until she had to scream just to prove she still existed. I would not drink the poison. I would not become my mother, crying in kitchens at midnight. I would not become my father, saving the world while his wife drowned in the next room.

I would be safe. I would be alone. Same thing, I thought.

You just nodded, with your amber eyes, your too-big smile, and your absolute refusal to be normal about anything. You didn’t argue. You didn’t say “but love is beautiful” or “you’ll change your mind” or any of the things adults said when I told them I was never getting married, never having kids, never doing any of it. You just accepted it, the way you accepted my screaming, the way you accepted all of me without requiring an explanation or an apology.

You never pressured me.

I don’t think you understand how rare that is. How rare you were. Everyone else wanted something. Teachers wanted me to be quieter. My parents wanted me to be easier and much more successful. Other kids wanted me to be normal. But you just wanted me to be there, next to you, existing in whatever way I was going to exist that day. If I was loud, fine. If I was silent, fine. If I was furious at the world, if I was crying for no reason, if I was making elaborate plans to become pirates and sail away from everyone who’d ever hurt us—fine, fine, fine.

You were the only person I ever let into my house.

Do you understand what that means? My house was a crime scene. Not literally—no one was hitting anyone, no one was bleeding, it was all very civilized, and that was the worst part: the way trauma can be polite, the way you can grow up in a warzone where no one ever raises a hand, just voices, just silence, just the constant low-grade radiation of two people who should not be married trying desperately to survive each other. I did not bring people there. I did not let people see.

But I let you.

My birthday. The first and last party I ever had at home. I was turning ten, and you—you absolute menace, you beautiful stubborn creature—had somehow convinced me that it would be fine. That we’d just have cake. That your presence would be a buffer, a force field, a reason for my parents to behave like the parents in movies, the ones who smile and take pictures and don’t look at each other like strangers who’ve been sharing a prison cell for fifteen years.

I was terrified. I am not using that word lightly. I have since been terrified of many things (job interviews, medical diagnoses, the slow death of people I love), and I’m telling you that none of it compared to the terror of having you in my house, of letting you see where I came from, of risking the possibility that you would look at my family and finally understand that I was broken, that I came from broken, that the screaming in class was just the visible part of an iceberg made entirely of dysfunction and pain.

You sat next to me.

The whole party—which was barely a party, just you and me and a cake my mother had bought because she was performing normalcy for an audience for once—you sat right next to me. Not across the table. Next to me. Our elbows touching. Like you knew, somehow, that I needed to feel you there, solid and real and not running away.

You gave me a Harry Potter book.

Prisoner of Azkaban. Third one. You’d wrapped it yourself, badly, with too much tape and paper that didn’t quite fit, and the corners were all wrong, and it was the most beautiful thing anyone had ever given me. Not because of the book, though the book was perfect, though I’d been wanting it for months, though you’d somehow known that without me telling you because you always just knew, but because you’d chosen it. You’d thought about me when I wasn’t there. You had walked into a bookstore, chosen a gift, and wrapped it with your own hands specifically for me, simply because you wanted to.

That was the first time I thought maybe my oath was stupid. Maybe love wasn’t poison. Maybe love was just a boy with amber eyes sitting next to you at your terrible birthday party, giving you a book wrapped in too much tape, smiling at you like you were worth celebrating.

I still have the book.

I need you to understand this. I have moved six times since that birthday. I have thrown away clothes, furniture, journals, photographs. I have deleted entire relationships from my phone, my memory, my life. I am ruthless with possessions. I do not keep things. I learned early that everything can be taken from you, so it’s better not to have anything worth taking.

But I kept the book.

It’s on my shelf right now, spine cracked, pages soft from rereading. I open it sometimes, not to read, just to hold. One afternoon, in that house filled with poison, someone sat beside me and didn't ask me to be anything less. Someone gave me a world to escape into. Someone wrapped a gift badly because they were nine and hadn’t learned yet that presentation matters, that everything is performance, and that we’re all just trying to look like we have our shit together.

You didn't have your life together. I didn’t have mine. We were nine. We were disasters. We were perfect.

My mother is still screaming, somewhere in the background of my life. Not literally, not tonight; tonight is quiet; tonight my parents are sleeping in like the past never happened, and they seem to be happy. The echo of her voice is in my bones. The oath I made is still in there too, rattling around, reminding me that love is poison, that I should not drink it, that I should stay safe and alone forever because alone cannot hurt you.

But you’re in there too. You and your amber eyes and your too-big smile and your badly wrapped book.

You didn’t save me. I want to be clear about that. You were nine. You couldn’t have saved me any more than I could have saved you from your own house, your own father, and your own closets to hide in. We would talk. You would say my dad ignoring my mom was a gift because ypur dad would scream. And you hated that. We were just two kids drowning in different oceans, waving at each other across the water.

But you saw me. You saw me, and you didn’t flinch. You saw me, and you stayed.

Twenty years later, I am still trying to learn that trick. How to stay. How to let people in. How to believe that love might not be poison, that it might just be a boy sitting next to you, that it might be something worth keeping even when it’s wrapped badly and the corners are all wrong.

I don’t know where you are. I don’t know if you remember. I don’t know if that birthday mattered to you or if it was just another Tuesday, just another party, just another friend who was too much and too loud and made you sit through an awkward afternoon with her terrible parents.

I think about you sometimes when I can't sleep. I think about whether you survived your house. Whether you became someone who smiles big like you used to or someone who learned to fold themselves smaller permanently. Whether you remember me at all, or if I was just one of many kids who passed through your life while you were busy surviving.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about love: it doesn't require maintenance. It doesn't check in. It doesn't send Christmas cards or remember your birthday or show up when you need it. It just stays, calcified somewhere in your bones like those landline digits, like the smell of summer and sweet tea, like the exact feeling of sitting next to someone who made the world quieter just by being in it.

I don't know where you are. I don't know who you became. Social media suggests you exist somewhere, but I've never looked, because looking would make it real, and I prefer you like this: preserved in amber, nine years old forever, smiling at me like I'm the most normal person in the world.

Maybe you're fine. Maybe you're a mess. Maybe you're both, like everyone, like me.

I only remember your name (not even your surname) and your landline number.

But I kept the book. I kept the book, and that has to mean something.

Prisoner of Azkaban. The third one. The one where Harry finds out he has a godfather, someone who loves him, someone who’s been wrongly imprisoned and is finally, finally coming to save him.

You gave me a story about being saved.

And I still love you. In that weird, ancient, unearned way. The kind of love that doesn’t ask for anything because it doesn’t need anything. It was complete already. It was done. It just exists now, passed down like folk songs, humming in the background of a life you didn’t even know I was still living.

If you ever need to escape, the pirate plan still stands. I’m better at planning now. I have credit cards and a car and the kind of reckless devotion that only gets stronger with time because I’ve had twenty years to romanticize you into something half-real, and that’s fine. That’s what memory is for.

You were the best thing about the best year of my life.

That has to count for something. That has to last.

You were the first person who made me think maybe I wasn’t too much. Maybe I was just enough for the wrong rooms, and you were the right room. At nine years old, you had amber eyes and a smile too big for your face, sitting next to me as if it were easy, as if I were easy, as if loving difficult things was just something you did without thinking. I made an oath never to love, and you made me a liar before I even finished making it. I still have the book. I will always have the book. Some people find God; I found a boy who wrapped presents badly and never flinched when I screamed, and that’s close enough. That’s the whole religion. That’s the entire faith.

I’m still waiting to see if it’s true.