Ephram's grandfather once asked that of him. "What do you
want?" he said. Ephram decided it then and he holds to it now. He wants Amy.
"I'm here for my dad," he had told her. And that is true; he
is. But his father's in surgery, and he looks now at her, sitting nervously,
close to him. He feels for her so deeply that he thinks he might throw up. The
tension in the air is displayed in her face.
She can't sit still. She laces her fingers together and apart
over and over again, glancing at the clock every thirty seconds. She doesn't
talk; doesn't want to. Maybe she can't.
Nobody talks, really. Once in a great while, someone will
stand up and ask if anyone would like a soda, while they take a trip to the
machines. Nobody ever requests one, and the person who left almost always comes
back empty-handed. They don't want a soda, either. They don't want anything,
except the boy on the operating table. The silence stretches on in a hellishly
taunting way, fear clinging to Ephram's body, dragging his heart down to the
floor.
He has faith in his father. But fate overrides even the best
of surgeons. You cannot save those who are not meant to be saved. They are taken
from you no matter what you do. No matter how much you need them in order to
survive yourself.
He cares for Colin; that much is true.
He pictures Amy being in Colin's place, her survival balancing
on the edge of a knife. And suddenly he can hardly breathe.
She's strong. She's a fighter. She keeps things well hidden.
But he looks at her, and somehow he sees. She's broken, the little girl within
her fighting to surface. Her loyalty is destroying her. Losing her boyfriend to
a car crash, then watching him spiral downwards and seeming to lose him again.
Tougher people have cried about lesser things.
In some ways, he and Colin are a lot alike. Ephram, tortured
by the death of Mom; Colin, tortured by the death of self. And what do they both
need to save them? Amy.
He knows what's obvious to everyone else. He'll never have
her. She tells him what he knows is true: that he should move on.
But, move on? Please. That's one of the most impossible things
anyone's ever asked of him. Move on from a girl who just possibly might be the
most amazing person he's ever met? Sure, yeah. He'll get right on that.
He's still a stranger to her, in some ways. He's different,
she says. Different.
That's something.
Sure, he could let go of her, watch her stray away. It's not
like it would crush him, slash him up, make him feel like he's been hit by a
semi. Because he doesn't need her so much it hurts inside. Because he doesn't
hum that Al Green song to himself whenever he misses her face. Because he
doesn't feel like he would die without her, and he doesn't wonder how he
survived alone this far.
---
He thinks of the hum of the piano in his head. Sleek black and
white keys under the pads of his fingers. Music leads entry to the soul. Music
cues a dancer's steps. Amy's dancing steps.
He watches her in his mind, watches her move and sway, her
feet dictating the beat; her arms writing the poem.
She dances alone, her solo heart singing, never to be caught.
Alone, dancing, alone.
But in his dreams, she dances for him. Only him. In his
dreams, her love for Colin doesn't exist. Because it's a boundary, impossible to
overcome. Colin's place beside her takes Ephram's place away.
He can remember so clearly that night he was drunk because of
the sting of how she pushed him away. The ceiling swirled, above his bed,
dangerously spinning at warp speed, like on that ride at Six Flags that scared
Delia so much. Gravity sucks you so viciously on that ride that you feel like
your skin might peel right off your body. That's what drunk feels like to him.
Yeah. A roller coaster ride in which one second you want to sing out that you
love the world, and in the next, you have to fight so hard not to cry. A force
that pulls at you from two opposite directions so hard that you can't wait to
split in two just so the painful sensation will stop.
Life, magnified.
The nausea that accompanied him that night, while he laid on
his bed and counted the small dots on the plaster of his ceiling, is what he
feels now. It wasn't this bad that night. Nausea could never be as bad as it is
now, in a hospital, as he sits on an impossibly uncomfortable chair.
But he still felt it. He felt so much that night; so much that
he can't even remember all of it. But he knows that all the feeling was there.
He remembers the outline, but can't color it in.
He saw her, though. When his eyelids fluttered down over his
vision, sealing away the world outside. He could still feel the spin within his
body, the energy in his veins. Everything was at high speed, charging through
his senses relentlessly. It felt like he was moving even as he lay still. He
felt out of control, and in that moment, when he swears he might have
spontaneously combusted, he saw her amid the darkness of his closed eyes.
Dancing, just for him.
--
Butterfly, oh butterfly
Fly away
You're trapped in this prison
This prison in your head
Grow wings and fly away
Or die slowly forever
--
She's so graceful, he imagines. Balancing up on her toes,
leaping this way and that, her skirt flying amid her, the soft material of her
shoes shimmering under a spotlight. On a stage, in an empty building. Her somber
music carries her through the story that she creates on her own. From the
beginning stages of morning, she dances with flowing choreography, through to
the cringing pain of dramatically falling in the moonlight.
She is such a vision; an angel in a white leotard, satin
slippers laced up her ankle. A lost girl, finding herself among the soft notes
of the song in her memory. Her movements precise, and practiced. Her face a
doorway to her emotions. A lonely, dancing ballerina. Tragically beautiful.
Dying inside.
The dancing girl, the wilting flower, the suffocating heart
that fades away.
---
He thinks he may be in love with her. He doesn't know for
sure. Anyway, it doesn't matter. She's entrusted her soul to someone else. And
he suspects her loyalty will sustain forever. It's the kind of girl she is. Her
strength, her persistence, is everlasting.
He watches her as she watches Colin, day after day after day.
We should all be so lucky as to be loved unselfishly, he
thinks; so much, when we're not even conscious; when our eyes aren't even open
to what we have. We should all be so lucky as to be loved by her. Sunshine,
rainbows, smiles that extend to the eyes with a sparkle that is a window to what
happiness lives inside, all things that feel good and are beautiful... all of it
is her. She's... she's Ephram's dream girl. She is so beautiful, so very many
things, all of which compel him to entertain such thoughts, mushy gooey inner
love prose.
It's so stupid. She has no idea how in over his head he is for
her. He thinks she purposefully ignores it because she doesn't want to know. She
doesn't want to deal with the complications of letting her guard down when she
needs those walls of protection the most.
She is illusive; forbidden. She's Amy. She'll leave a satin
ribbon tied around his memory, whether he gets her love and closeness or not.
But oh, how he wants it. The constant longing is tiresome. It
hurts; it echoes through his soul with her every brush-off, every time she walks
away. Every time she averts her eyes to look at anything else but him.
She avoids him, but he can't hate her. If he were in her
position, wouldn't he do the same?
She can be so cruel, but still... she is his everything. The
only girl he wants to love always. It could never be simple with her. And the
fact that a relationship with her would be a lot of work - - the fact that he's
ready to tackle that, makes his want for her all the more real. For all that
he'll have to be willing to do, he can't wait to give it a shot. He wants the
package, everything, both good and bad, that comes with the privilege of being
with her.
Of knowing her. Eternally.
It's worth it; he knows that... it's worth it. He wants it. He
really, truly does.
She's not ready yet. But it's so important... he'll wait.
He'll wait, just as he's waiting now, right by her side. The
hours tick on forever. The clocks drum their silent beat, cruel enough to stay
so slow that he feels like screaming for her, for Amy. Because he knows she
needs to but never will. She stays so composed on the outside, but there are
give-aways.
Her hands no longer touch one another, but her foot taps
rhythmically on the waiting room floor, her leg bouncing, the small amount of
noise booming through Ephram's head as if it were a countdown to a bomb
explosion. But then, maybe that is what's coming, after all.
There is half a Twix bar in its wrapper, on the floor next to
his feet. He stares down at it, and begins to lightly kick it to-and-fro between
his two feet that are coming close to falling asleep. A part of him craves that
pain, that pricking needle sensation, that would occupy his thoughts in some
way. He wants anything, anything, to take him away from this constant worrying
and fretting, this wait that gets more and more impossible to bear the longer
they are all forced to bear it.
The Twix wrapper makes a slight noise, the plastic-like
material tearing just slightly. It jars Amy from her foot-pounding crescendo,
and she turns her head. Feeling her eyes on him, Ephram slowly raises his head
to peek at her out of the corner of his eye.
He doesn't have the nerve to look at her and let her see that
he does have some shadow of a doubt brewing in his pessimistic mind. Maybe his
father can't do this. Maybe no one ever can.
He wants to say something to her. He wants to tell her he
loves her, right here and now. She needs someone to do something to save her
from this long-stretched torture, from these never-ending minutes on a clock. He
turns to her, and she turns away.
He opens his mouth to speak, and is interrupted as his dad
enters the room.
Amy sucks in her breath, and stands, as does everyone else in
the room.
At first, Ephram thought he might die from the waiting that
lasted forever. But as he swallows hard, and seems to sway on his feet, he's
suddenly not ready for the waiting to be over. No matter the answer, he doesn't
know if he's ready to know.
He doesn't know if he's ready, inside, to face the news that
is coming. To face the death his father might bring. He doesn't know how he'll
help Amy, if Colin has died.
Doesn't know if he's ready to watch as the news leaves her
broken, taking away all her strength, rendering everything she's held onto
useless. He doesn't want to have to see her wishing that she had died, too.
His father opens his mouth to speak, and Ephram closes his
eyes. Sometimes he doesn't know what he believes in, but in that moment he says
a prayer to God, to save her, because Ephram, himself, cannot; save her from
what is to come.
--
Dancing angel of my dreams... you still my heart,
and... you take my breath away.
- -
end
