Chapter 2: The Thoughts

It was the day after, when I found you packing in your room again. Unnoticed I stood in the doorway and watched you cramming stuff and things in your bag. Almost hurried, almost too fast to be true. Again I was scared. Again I didn't want you to go. But it was a completely different, fully new kind of fear. I didn't fear for your safety, I feared for the safety of our thing. I feared movement could change something. Like the fly on the surface of the water and a mild breeze that gets the water into motion just a little bit and threatens the tension and forces the fly to flee, so it wouldn't drown. So fragile were we, so new and threatened. The breeze was here and I was so scared of the movement, I really was.

I knocked on the doorframe and entered. Your gaze went up and you smiled. You held tight to the red-brown plaid shirt you had just rolled and twisted it around with both your hands, as if your fingers needed occupation. With a strange face you looked at me and seemed to wait for me to say something. But I didn't even actually know what I wanted here. I had lost the words I had just concocted, as if they had fallen from the tip of my tongue and disappeared from my head. Somewhat awkward maybe I was standing there now and was lost. Minutes, they almost felt like hours and days, we looked into each other's eyes silently and it was almost amusing.

"Hello," I interrupted the silence raspy and weird.

"Hey," you gave back and it was as if your head was just as empty as mine.

"Uhm…," I began after further minutes, "… you're packing?"

"Yup"

"When do you leave?" I asked, hoping your answer would be further in the future than feared.

"Tomorrow"

It hit me like the proverbial beat on the head. Tomorrow already. I couldn't help myself, I was so obvious. So readable and palpable, so bad at subtle. My expression seemed to show how utterly unpleased I was to hear that, of course they did, because suddenly you made a step towards me, determined and still unsure.

"You okay?" you asked unobviously and so simple that it somehow failed the complex situation. I found soft worry in your eyes. Soft and easy, definite, much easier and more definite than the storm and wind inside my head.

"Yes, I…," I stammered, but didn't finish my sentence. I wanted to say that I don't want you to leave, but something kept me from it. I didn't know what I want, not really. I only knew that I didn't want this. That you would go somewhere, to someone, and do something. I was aware that you needed a win, because after all you always need that. As if our thing wasn't enough of a win. But that's not what it was about. It wasn't even about the hunting itself, about the vampires or your madness around them. It wasn't about seeing your glow and your satisfaction, and god, god knows how much I love that glow. I didn't want you to go and leave me here, alone with myself, in this big bunker, our home. And even when I could come with you, I still didn't want it. I didn't know this Rick and I didn't know the situations we could get ourselves into. It was like chaos and disaster and a bad feeling in my stomach and in my heart and it stung and almost even hurt and I felt like I would do something for the first time and yet already know that I didn't like it, and my surroundings would spin around me like earth around sun and the moon around earth, and yet it would nevertheless be too much movement inside our silence, and everything seemed to waver around me and I didn't want anything more than to hold it tightly and protect it, because so fragile and breakable were we and so much fear had I for us.

"My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations."

(John Green, "The Fault in Our Stars")

"Just come with us," you suggested, as if you had read my mind and as if it was the solution for all my problems. When really, it only solved a single one of them.

"Uhm… yes. Okay." I gave with a surprised face and wasn't sure, if I was happy about it. You looked at me like you tried to find out, what was going on in my head, but even when you would have asked me, I couldn't have told you. It was as if I knew it all and at the same time nothing at all. Like complete emptiness and bone-crushing overfill. And I almost wondered if it, this here, was jealousy. Not that I knew how that feels.

The brain-clouding, all-possessing jealousy, of which I had heard so much already, but had never understood it. Because some things can only be comprehended, when one feels them, when one has them inside and has seen every of its facets. And I didn't even try to fight it, because as illogical and complicated it was, it yet had one truth always in it: it appears, when something is important. And we were. Important. And I still didn't fight it, when I asked myself, what kept me from just locking you up, maybe tied to a chair, so I would be the only one to set eyes on you and the only one you set eyes on. Half unconscious, half determined, I suppressed my tumultuous pictures of thoughts about driving cars, which would get us somewhere, where only we exist, and about signs, which I would have to see, if we and our We were in danger.

And I didn't care how long it would take, until we would get closer again, until we would finally be close to each other, in whatever kind of way, because I would give all the time in the world to you and wait for the day to come. And I also didn't care how far I would have to go to sustain our thing. I would do it for you. I thought, the only thing I understood and knew better than you were the things that had to be done to keep you on the right way. And would there be a barrier in the way, I would get rid of it. I was unaware and even unsure what was there and would come, but yet as determined as never.

"Once you think a thought, it is extremely difficult to unthink it."

(John Green, "The Fault in Our Stars")