***This chapter is dedicated to St. Ciel, my beautiful wife and muse who is adept at kicking me in the ass to make sure that I keep writing.***
At some point, I must have been a different person. I can't see it now, can't even imagine it as I look back at the last year of my life. At some point, I looked at someone with soft blond hair and sky blue eyes and fell into his spell. My heart was younger and more resilient. It beat with furious determination even as it was being pierced. It pumped away and I kept crawling back.
Even now I look back and feel a twinge of affection for him, a strange little pool of warmth that makes my chest tight and my stomach a little sick. I swat it away like the distasteful thing it is.
He infected me. Somehow he got inside of me and despite everything he had done, every hurtful word, every malicious glance and every cut and bruise on my skin, I still felt a warmth for him. In my mind it felt a lot like the warmth of my own blood spilling onto my cold hands on the night he finally went too far.
But when he was sweet, he was so very sweet. All warm arms and soft hair and smelling like home. He purred in my ear that he wanted me. Never love, always desire. And only when there was nothing else to distract him. It was enough to keep me feeling important, to keep me wanting to strive for more. How much contact will you give me, how much affection can I have if I do everything you want?
I know I never loved him. Not like I wanted to anyway. Even when I left there was no sense of loss, only a strange feeling of displacement. Surreal and completely painless, but through it all, my heart kept its steady pace and my body survived.
Is it the first day that's always hardest? I woke up wondering what I was doing in this unfamiliar place. It was my home now. These four walls were my security and sanctuary. Nothing about it felt very comfortable despite the high thread count and the excessive number of throw pillows.
"Now that you live here, my darling, we'll have to look into colleges. You could apply to medical school and even work at the hospital with me if you wanted to."
"I don't really want to be a gynecologist, Aunt Anne," I said from behind my mug of tea. Even sitting at the breakfast table in her dressing gown my aunt was wearing red. Her makeup was flawless and it wasn't even 7 am.
"Well, you'll have the opportunity to work across a variety of specialties when you do your residency. It doesn't have to be OBGYN, though it's a very rewarding field."
"I'm not sure I have the stamina for medical school."
"Of course. You need time to recover and then there's your surgery. I'm sorry, I'm trying to rush you when what you really need is rest."
"I probably won't be here long enough to enroll in school anyway."
"What? But where else would you go? You're not thinking about going back to Montreal?"
"No. But I can't stay here forever."
"Of course you can, this is your home."
I smiled, tried to, but I don't know what my face actually looked like. I turned back to my tea because it seemed safer. They were used to my silence anyway, though I could feel Aunt Anne and Grell exchanging looks over my head.
I spent the majority of the following two days drifting in and out of sleep. I would wake up forgetting where I was, and then the realization would hit me again, making my brain work, thinking, worrying and vainly trying to logic its way through this situation until I was exhausted and fell back to sleep.
On Monday, I saw the plastic surgeon and she was the first to look at the mess under my bandages since the emergency room doctor wrapped me up. The blood was dried and the skin had begun to heal and the pain was intense though the doctor was being exceedingly careful as she peeled back the layers of gauze. It took a bit of coaxing for me to take a look in the mirror after she did her examination.
"It's not as bad as you think. You should wear an eyepatch while it heals, but after that, I think you'll be just fine," she said.
The lid was difficult to open, but once I did I could see the discolored orb. It was still there even though I couldn't see through it anymore. Very slowly and very painfully, I could blink. While it was still very red and there was a scar running across the skin, the iris itself was oddly purple in color, a noticeable contrast to my other dark blue eye.
"I don't need surgery to have it removed?" I asked.
"No. No, I think it'll be just fine. Do you want me to bring Angela in?"
I didn't get the opportunity to consent before the door opened and my aunt came in to take a look.
"So, what's the diagnosis, Dr. Chapman? Is my nephew going to live?"
"He's just fine. We were just discussing a treatment plan," the doctor said.
"Surgery?"
"No surgery," Dr. Chapman said.
"That's great news!"
It was great news, I suppose. I couldn't really process what it all meant, but I realized that what I was at that moment was what I was always going to be. There was no magical procedure that would make me any different. I wouldn't get the vision back in my eye. And while I wasn't going to lose the eye itself, it was still gone.
In the car on the drive home, my aunt was positively beaming.
"You must be thrilled. No surgery! You're going to be just fine. Dr. Chapman wasn't even worried about the scarring. You're going to heal up good as new."
"Except for my vision," I said flatly.
"Well, yes. But your face is just as handsome as ever, my darling."
I looked out the window, seeing my reflection against the grim suburban landscape. The black eyepatch was more comfortable than the gauze bandages. Certainly less noticeable, but still horrible. I never thought of myself as a vain individual, but I wasn't convinced Aunt Anne was right.
"What did you think of the facility?"
"What?"
"Dr. Chapman's office. It's a state of the art facility. She does amazing work."
"It seemed fine, I guess."
"Ciel, that's just the sort of place you could be if you started med school now. She's a great teacher too. You would love working with her and you'd learn so much."
"I don't think so."
"I know it's a lot to think about, but now that you don't need surgery, you can start thinking about your future. It's the perfect time for a new beginning."
I let myself lapse into silence. The air in the car was charged with all of the things that Aunt Anne wanted to say but that I wouldn't humor. I realized that this wasn't going to stop as long as I stayed with her. She had the best intentions, but what she wanted was a son, a child of her own to carry on her legacy. I was not that child.
Since I was already being quiet, I pulled out my phone and started flipping through my emails. I hadn't opened anything in the last three days and there was an excess of garbage waiting for me. One message in my inbox advertised apartment listings. I must have signed up for a mailing list the last time I was apartment hunting in Montreal after I finished school. I clicked on the link and looked at the search bar: "Where will you go?" it said. I looked out the window and watched as a few street signs flew by at high speed. We had gotten onto the highway now and the green signs were pointing North, one in particular, was "New Hampshire, Maine, and all points North".
North. After I had just come south.
It works for Stephen King, I thought.