"When I fell in love with Cordelia Foxx I knew that our relationship wasn't going to be a normal one. I knew she had suffered a lot and had been clinically depressed for years –that didn't surprise me, Fiona had always treated her like crap and when I got to the academy everyone seemed to do the same– to the point that she had tried to kill herself twice before I finally gathered courage to ask her out. The first time, two days after being blinded, she had tried to overdose herself with the pills her mother used to sleep, but thankfully the door of her bathroom hadn't been hard to kick down. The second time she had gone for something quicker and we had found her hanging on one of the beams of her bedroom's ceiling, barely breathing. When she woke up the next day, a damp towel in her neck and an oxygen mask to help her breathe, the only thing she was able to say coherently was my name. That was when I knew that she loved me too.
I was sitting on the armchair next to her hospital bed when she opened her beautiful grey eyes. The first thing she did was screaming on the top of her lungs, her hands moving as she tried to find something familiar around her. I reached for her hand, taking it on my own as I whispered that it was okay, that she was safe. When I felt the delicate skin of her hands touching my own I realized my mistake. She had never taken my hand unless she was wearing her black gloves, knowing that it would only make her have another vision about how I was burned at the stake. But that day, instead of crying, she smiled at my touch. I felt how she travelled through my mind and saw all the times I had helped her walk through the house or help her craft her potions, how she saw that I had stayed all the time next to her while she had been asleep in the hospital bed. She took her oxygen mask off and whispered a soft 'Thank you', and that was the sign I needed to ask if she would like to be my girlfriend. She nodded and put her mask on again. We didn't say anything else until the doctor told us that she could go home, two days later.
The next days had been difficult for her. She couldn't sleep, and when she did she just had nightmares. I knew that, I had been sleeping next to her, taking her between my arms. The first time she woke up in her bedroom she couldn't stop screaming, unable to calm down. I understood why when I saw her palpating everything around her, the sheets, the bedside table, her nightgown, her face. She didn't know where she was. Her panic attacks had been repeating every morning, and though I was always there to calm her down, telling her that I was there and hugging her tightly as I told her that I loved her, the situation didn't get better. But one day, thanks to Myrtle, she got her sight back and her visions were gone. And though I hated to see how she started to despise herself again because of her lack of powers, I felt happy, because I knew that at least some of her troubles would disappear. She didn't have any other panic attack, although she still felt nervous. The first thing she did when she saw me was staring at me for an hour and kissing me, stating that she had been wanting to do so since the day we had met.
We had been together for a month now, although it felt like a year to me. The first week we went to dates almost every night, although we only went to an actual restaurant once, the day before she got her vision back. Our next dates consisted on staying at the house, crafting potions and dancing to Stevie's songs. Sometimes she would approach me and hug me tightly, and I'd take her between my arms before looking at her mismatched eyes and gently kissing her. Other times she shivered, the cold air that leaked through the greenhouse door penetrating through her fragile skin, and I would take off my shawl and put it on her shoulders before turning off the music and walking upstairs with our fingers intertwined.
But the dates that I loved the most were the ones where we would sit on the bed and watch cheesy movies that I hated with all my soul. It was always the same, a good looking guy with a troubled life falling in love with a beautiful, delicate girl that had a wonderful life, although sometimes she was the troubled one instead of him. It was when I saw Cordelia smile during one of those movies when I started to like them. She loved happy endings; I guess they made her forget about her illness. Because though she was strong for the girls –who were performing the Seven Wonders in less than two days– she was considerably ill. She had stopped eating. I had always known that she didn't eat much due to her depression, and she usually left food in her plate when we all had dinner together. But now she just didn't eat. It had been five hours since I brought her dinner to our room, and though she seemed to smile when something funny happened in the movie we were watching, she hadn't touched her plate. She hadn't even looked at it.
Then I would tighten the embrace, taking her hands between my own and caressing her knuckles. The only thing that mattered to me was that she kept taking her medicine. Every night I would put a glass of water in her bedside table and she would smile at me, whispering a soft 'thank you' before opening the drawer and taking the small, white pills. She swallowed them with a sip of water and then smiled at me again. In that moment I would forget her constant sadness and how hurt she looked when one of the girls mocked her or how she cried in her sleep, because that smile was her unspoken way of telling me that she kept fighting, that she wanted to live.
I'm going to miss her. Because though she knew she wasn't going to make it, she was always there to me, telling me that everything was going to be okay even if we both knew that it wasn't. I owe her a lot. When I first arrived to the academy, not only my magic was limited, but my emotions were too. I found a friend in her, and though she didn't have more powers than the curse of the Second Sight and the gift of the potion making, I felt that she could do all I couldn't do. People always say that everything happens for a reason; that people come into our lives to teach us a lesson. I guess they're true. Cordelia Foxx didn't just teach me magic, she taught me how to love, and that changed me for good. I came to the academy searching for my tribe, and I can't help but smile when I realize that I actually found it. Not in the girls or in the lyrics of Stevie's songs, but in her. She will live in me like a handprint on my heart.
Because Cordelia was my tribe. And I will always love her."
