It’s a beautiful blue-sky day in June and I’m the unhappiest person on earth.
I’m sitting at the top of Cemetery Hill overlooking Mossgrove village. I can see the squarish bell tower of the church below. People are walking their dogs and their children. The park is full of lovers and the sky is full of birds.
Fuck them, I think.
I hate everything.
I can’t feel anything, and I hate myself for it.
There’s nothing worse than sunshine when you’re always cold. There’s nothing worse than summer when you’re dead inside.
I pull my coat tighter. It’s too small to do up now, I’ve had it since I was a kid, but it has a quilted lining inside. Some of my hair breaks free from beneath my hood, stretching out in front of me like an arm. It looks like it’s waving for help. Maybe it is. Maybe every part of me that is still living is trying to get away from the rotten, stinking carcass part.
I tuck it back in. Forget it, hair, I think, you’re going down with this ship.
I close my eyes, listening to the roaring inside.
It’s been two years. Two years since I felt anything at all.
I feel so empty.
I wish I could cry. It would feel so good to sob and bawl. I’ve always been jealous of those who can: babies, women on TV, boys when you break up with them…
Everyone loves a cold stone in a warm hand, I guess.
Someone is walking through the tall grass and the tombstones behind me.
‘Catching some rays?’ comes a familiar Celtic lilt.
It’s Noel, a.k.a. Nook.
My foster brother.
My best friend.
My… I don’t think there’s a word for it.
We glance at each other, both dressed for midwinter on a 25°C day, me in a padded jacket, a hooded sweatshirt and jeans; him in a long black trench coat and lace-up boots.
‘You know me,’ I say. ‘I’m a sun bunny.’
‘You look like shit,’ he says, sitting down cross-legged.
‘I know,’ I say, staring ahead.
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Fresh air?’
‘Thought you were allergic?’ he says impishly, pulling out a packet of tobacco.
‘I am. Didn’t you just say how terrible I look?’
‘Haven’t seen you around the house in a while.’
Nook and I live together, but I’m like the ghost that haunts the place. I’m only ever seen at night, raiding the fridge. Mostly I just avoid him, and the world. Me being here, outside, right now: it’s practically a miracle.
‘I’ve been hiding,’ I say.
‘Why? We should be out there, looking,’ he says.
‘What’s the point?’ I grunt. ‘I’m tired of looking. Maybe I’ve given up. Maybe this is all I’m ever going to be.’
‘Wow, nice attitude.’
I turn my head slightly towards him. He always looks like some impetuous gypsy crashing an old lady’s funeral. I don’t know why.
‘Didn’t we make a pact?’ he says.
‘What do you expect?’ I say. ‘I don’t have a soul.’
‘You have a bit of a soul,’ he says.
‘It’s not enough,’ I say. ‘I can’t feel it. What’s the point of having a soul if you can’t feel it?’
A soul should feel like a burning ball of fire in your heart, like a majestic phoenix in a cage of rib-bones, but mine is just a dark, bloody blob in a cavern of flesh.
I can’t see it but I know. I know. You know what your own soul feels like, and nobody else can tell you otherwise.
‘If it’s not enough, you can’t give up,’ says Nook, being infuriatingly rational, rolling a cigarette on his knee.
It’s easy for Nook to say. He has a real soul. It’s probably like a precious diamond on fire, streaked with colours that don’t even exist in this world and singing symphonies.
A mean gust of wind picks up the paper, scattering tobacco across the scrubby meadow.
‘Shit,’ says Nook, beginning the process over again.
It makes me think of all those pieces of myself I’ll never find.
We sit in semi-comfortable silence for a while. I bite my fingernails. I run my tongue over each one of my teeth.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asks Nook, lighting his cigarette.
‘Neil Young,’ I say.
Neil Young is our code word. Neil Young is the beginning. Neil Young is my whole soul, and the first single part of it. Neil Young is life, love, the universe and everything. Neil Young is the word for things that are too big for words.
Nook nods, sagely. We sit quietly, retracing different versions of the same memory.
We were twelve and thirteen, back at the old Boot Street house and playing Monopoly in the basement one evening, sitting on flowery camping chairs and using a Ping-Pong board for a table. Neil Young came on the Oldies radio station, although I didn’t know his name then; Nook’s Mom put it on when she came down to use the dryer. He was singing about a basement and the full moon in his eye.
I looked up and saw the same full moon staring at me, a big, luminous, goony face. Then something weird happened: I started dreaming, but I was still awake. Trees sprouted from the concrete ceiling and the walls crumbled away. Nook and the Ping-Pong table and the washer-dryer vanished, the basement disappeared as hills rose from the flat ground, but the moon stayed constant in the sky, everything else whirling and swinging around it as a different scene assembled, like a theatre set. Now, I was looking down on a valley with a river running through it. I was sitting in a little red tent. I was with my parents, my real parents, the ones everyone said were bad news. Dad was cooking beans on the stove. They had the radio on too, and Mom was singing Neil Young. I remember thinking: ‘She likes this one. That means I like it.’ I joined in, caterwauling even though I didn’t know the words. Mom laughed and kissed the top of the head.
She was just softness and shapes, the smell of talc. Her image wasn’t properly formed.
‘This is the song you were made to, baby,’ she said, looking at Dad.
He grinned at her. I couldn’t make out his face either, just the smile.
I remembered the photo I’d seen of Mom when she was fat and rosy-cheeked, her talking about what happens when two people love each other…
The sound of my heartbeat thudded deep within my belly.
They made me, I thought.
They made me with love.
I was five years old, and I knew why I existed now.
For a fraction of a second I understood what it was to be home, to be whole and found. But then all of that something faded back to nothing. I was twelve again, sat in the basement playing Monopoly in grass-stained dungarees. Nook was staring at me wide-eyed, the boy he was then, wearing a woollen cap and a t-shirt with a skull on it.
‘Loll…’ he said, pointing at me.
My cheek tickled, and I touched my face.
I’d cried a tear, a single tear.
I touched its trail with one finger, lifted it to my lips and poked out my tongue.
It was salty.
I felt weird, like my skin was itching. I didn’t know what to say.
‘What happened?’ asked Nook.
I stared at him, stared beyond him.
‘It was like… I was dreaming,’ I said, ‘but I was still awake. My parents were there. This song, it was their song. We were camping out under the moon, in a wood. My Mom was singing, and I was little. They seemed… nice.’
Nook was quiet a moment, chewing his lip as if thinking of the right thing to say. There wasn’t one. My parents were locked away in some prison where I couldn’t visit them. They weren’t allowed to contact me. And everyone said it was for the best.
‘Did you feel… sad?’ he asked.
‘No, I think… I think I was happy,’ I said, tentatively, because now I was numb from head to toe again.
‘What did it feel like?’
I thought about it, even though it was already hard to recall.
‘It felt like I was real, like I belonged somewhere.’
‘Lau-rie,’ said Nook, in a scolding, drawn-out way. ‘You do belong, right here.’
He lurched forwards and hugged me, refusing to let go as I wriggled.
‘Get off,’ I moaned. ‘Stop it!’
His face was wet because he was crying too, in the way that people do without making any noise, or screwing up their faces. Just like, leaking.
‘I’m just happy you were happy,’ he said.
I licked his face. His tears were salty, too. I thought mine would taste different because I was different, but they didn’t.
‘Urgh, gross!’ he said.
That got him off me; I knew it would. He pulled away and turned, laughing, wiping his face.
Nook was glad I could feel something, anything, thinking it signalled the beginning of some great awakening. I would become a Real Girl, just as everyone hoped. It was true that Neil Young had made something grow inside of me, something that hadn’t existed before. I had cried a tear. I knew I had loved once. Those things mattered.
But the pea-sized bit of soul rattled: tiny and alone, in a vast, empty space.
Neil Young is still the only tear I’ve cried in my entire life. Even when the man who raised me from seven turned into a yellowed skeleton on a ventilator, even when Nook hated me and wouldn’t talk to me, even when I watch those sad, sad movies, or see those adverts with the starving, fly-eyed babies in Africa…
Nothing. Not a drop.
I look up and I’m back on Cemetery Hill. I’m nearly eighteen. The birds are still singing, children are playing…
Life goes on, despite me.
‘Tell me the other stories,’ says Nook, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Tell me about Rapunzel, and Sunflower.’
Neil Young, Rapunzel and Sunflower: these are the names we have given to the found pieces of my lost soul.
‘What’s the point?’ I say. ‘You know them already.’
‘So what? Tell me again. You haven’t told me in a while. I haven’t even talked to you in weeks. We might think of something new.’
Poor Nook, ever the optimist. It must be a curse, to always believe the best but see the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever really believed in anything, not even God. I’ve never been afraid of ghosts or monsters under the bed. I never bought into the whole Santa thing. In fact, I always thought there was creepy about an old fat guy breaking into my house at night while I was asleep. It always reminds me of the Bone Man.
‘Okay,’ I sigh. ‘Well, Rapunzel, I was fourteen. I was skipping out from St. Mary’s, hiding in the Heart Foundation charity shop. The one in Underdown, because I got a bus out of town so no one I knew would see me. I found these Ladybird Easy Reading books. One had this golden-haired girl on the cover, saying “hey boy” to some idiot prince at her window. It’s about this couple living next door to a total bitch of a witch. They stole herbs from her garden and she made them give up their firstborn daughter.’
‘I know about Rapunzel,’ says Nook, batting his eyelashes.
‘So I started dreaming again,’ I say, ignoring him, ‘like I did before. The shop turned into a living room. The lights were turned off, but there were these flashes of red and blue coming in through the window. My parents were packing up the house. Someone was hammering on the door. I was there, watching, but I wasn’t really there. I was alone somewhere else, hidden away. I remembered Dad telling me not to make any noise and giving me this Rapunzel book, like I was supposed to read it in the dark. I knew something bad was going to happen but I didn’t understand what, or why. But then I guess I was back in the Heart Foundation shop, just, you know, gawping at this old lady… She turned away to serve a customer, and I slipped it into my jacket and ran.’
The pea of my soul had become a conker, after that. It still rattled, but not as loud.
‘And you think maybe it’s the same book, the one you owned before?’ he asks.
‘Maybe. It smells the same.’
I’ve read Rapunzel a hundred times since then. It doesn’t do anything for me now but because of it I have known a kind of loneliness. It is the loneliness of being inexplicably soulless in a world full of souls.
‘So, maybe all of the stuff from the house ended up in charity shops and car boot sales,’ says Nook. ‘We should go to more of those places, and you can… smell stuff.’
He smiled a little, in that mischievous, Peter Pan-ish way of his.
‘I’ve already looked,’ I say.
‘They get new stuff in all the time,’ says Nook. ‘And you haven’t been to the car boots because you don’t have a car.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, apathetically.
I guess the truth is, I can’t really be bothered to try anymore, though I promised him I would.
‘What about Sunflower,’ he prompts, elbowing me slightly.
‘I was on a school trip in London,’ I say, in grudging monotone. I’m bored of hearing myself talk now. ‘I was fifteen. We went to the National Gallery, and saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I started feeling dizzy, blacked out, dreamt I was in hospital. Someone bought me a vase of sunflowers. All of the nurses were trying to talk to me, and I wanted to talk back but I couldn’t. I was stuck inside myself. When they left me alone this tall, thin, shadowy man with no face slipped into the room. The Bone Man. He had cold, skeleton hands and he was trying to grab something in my chest, clutching at thin air. But whatever he was looking for… it wasn’t there. It was already gone. I came to and I was still at the National Gallery, and they thought I’d had a seizure.’
That day, the conker became a coal, the same hopeless lump I carry now. I don’t feel fear, but I know I have something to be afraid of. I cross my hands over my chest as the ground slants dramatically beneath me. It’s like an earthquake, but only I can feel it.
My soul rolls back and forth with a dull, hollow rumble.
My heart is beating fast.
Nook is watching me carefully.
‘You okay?’ he says.
The world falls still, stops spinning and changing and lurching.
‘Maybe I’m just crazy,’ I say.
‘You’re not crazy.’
Nook is the only one who believes me. Everyone else I’ve told says this ‘soulless’ thing is just a metaphor. I really do have a soul, I just don’t think I do because of the Bad Thing. But Nook knows. I’ve shown him how I can’t bleed. He has stared into my eyes and seen the emptiness there.
‘I want to keep looking,’ I say. ‘But where do we look?’
He takes another long drag, thinking.
‘Everywhere,’ he says.
‘But, what if there’s nothing out there to find?’
‘There is. All of this, it means something. But you’ll never know what if you give up.’
I think of the armistice, the promise I made when I broke his heart: If I loved him I’d never give up on finding myself.
Why did I make such a stupid promise?
I remember that time when I was sixteen and his Mom came home early; the repeated affirmations of We’re Not Related By Blood.
It’s hard to erase the history you’ve written, even when it’s ugly.
I remember him drunk-singing I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, not-speaking for hours in the dark car, hearing him cry through the wall…
Almost all of the pain he’s ever felt is because of me.
I rest my head on Nook’s shoulder, and he takes my hand.
‘Neil Young,’ I say, like an amen.
‘Neil Young,’ he says back.
I’m sitting at the top of Cemetery Hill overlooking Mossgrove village. I can see the squarish bell tower of the church below. People are walking their dogs and their children. The park is full of lovers and the sky is full of birds.
Fuck them, I think.
I hate everything.
I can’t feel anything, and I hate myself for it.
There’s nothing worse than sunshine when you’re always cold. There’s nothing worse than summer when you’re dead inside.
I pull my coat tighter. It’s too small to do up now, I’ve had it since I was a kid, but it has a quilted lining inside. Some of my hair breaks free from beneath my hood, stretching out in front of me like an arm. It looks like it’s waving for help. Maybe it is. Maybe every part of me that is still living is trying to get away from the rotten, stinking carcass part.
I tuck it back in. Forget it, hair, I think, you’re going down with this ship.
I close my eyes, listening to the roaring inside.
It’s been two years. Two years since I felt anything at all.
I feel so empty.
I wish I could cry. It would feel so good to sob and bawl. I’ve always been jealous of those who can: babies, women on TV, boys when you break up with them…
Everyone loves a cold stone in a warm hand, I guess.
Someone is walking through the tall grass and the tombstones behind me.
‘Catching some rays?’ comes a familiar Celtic lilt.
It’s Noel, a.k.a. Nook.
My foster brother.
My best friend.
My… I don’t think there’s a word for it.
We glance at each other, both dressed for midwinter on a 25°C day, me in a padded jacket, a hooded sweatshirt and jeans; him in a long black trench coat and lace-up boots.
‘You know me,’ I say. ‘I’m a sun bunny.’
‘You look like shit,’ he says, sitting down cross-legged.
‘I know,’ I say, staring ahead.
‘What are you doing out here?’
‘Fresh air?’
‘Thought you were allergic?’ he says impishly, pulling out a packet of tobacco.
‘I am. Didn’t you just say how terrible I look?’
‘Haven’t seen you around the house in a while.’
Nook and I live together, but I’m like the ghost that haunts the place. I’m only ever seen at night, raiding the fridge. Mostly I just avoid him, and the world. Me being here, outside, right now: it’s practically a miracle.
‘I’ve been hiding,’ I say.
‘Why? We should be out there, looking,’ he says.
‘What’s the point?’ I grunt. ‘I’m tired of looking. Maybe I’ve given up. Maybe this is all I’m ever going to be.’
‘Wow, nice attitude.’
I turn my head slightly towards him. He always looks like some impetuous gypsy crashing an old lady’s funeral. I don’t know why.
‘Didn’t we make a pact?’ he says.
‘What do you expect?’ I say. ‘I don’t have a soul.’
‘You have a bit of a soul,’ he says.
‘It’s not enough,’ I say. ‘I can’t feel it. What’s the point of having a soul if you can’t feel it?’
A soul should feel like a burning ball of fire in your heart, like a majestic phoenix in a cage of rib-bones, but mine is just a dark, bloody blob in a cavern of flesh.
I can’t see it but I know. I know. You know what your own soul feels like, and nobody else can tell you otherwise.
‘If it’s not enough, you can’t give up,’ says Nook, being infuriatingly rational, rolling a cigarette on his knee.
It’s easy for Nook to say. He has a real soul. It’s probably like a precious diamond on fire, streaked with colours that don’t even exist in this world and singing symphonies.
A mean gust of wind picks up the paper, scattering tobacco across the scrubby meadow.
‘Shit,’ says Nook, beginning the process over again.
It makes me think of all those pieces of myself I’ll never find.
We sit in semi-comfortable silence for a while. I bite my fingernails. I run my tongue over each one of my teeth.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asks Nook, lighting his cigarette.
‘Neil Young,’ I say.
Neil Young is our code word. Neil Young is the beginning. Neil Young is my whole soul, and the first single part of it. Neil Young is life, love, the universe and everything. Neil Young is the word for things that are too big for words.
Nook nods, sagely. We sit quietly, retracing different versions of the same memory.
We were twelve and thirteen, back at the old Boot Street house and playing Monopoly in the basement one evening, sitting on flowery camping chairs and using a Ping-Pong board for a table. Neil Young came on the Oldies radio station, although I didn’t know his name then; Nook’s Mom put it on when she came down to use the dryer. He was singing about a basement and the full moon in his eye.
I looked up and saw the same full moon staring at me, a big, luminous, goony face. Then something weird happened: I started dreaming, but I was still awake. Trees sprouted from the concrete ceiling and the walls crumbled away. Nook and the Ping-Pong table and the washer-dryer vanished, the basement disappeared as hills rose from the flat ground, but the moon stayed constant in the sky, everything else whirling and swinging around it as a different scene assembled, like a theatre set. Now, I was looking down on a valley with a river running through it. I was sitting in a little red tent. I was with my parents, my real parents, the ones everyone said were bad news. Dad was cooking beans on the stove. They had the radio on too, and Mom was singing Neil Young. I remember thinking: ‘She likes this one. That means I like it.’ I joined in, caterwauling even though I didn’t know the words. Mom laughed and kissed the top of the head.
She was just softness and shapes, the smell of talc. Her image wasn’t properly formed.
‘This is the song you were made to, baby,’ she said, looking at Dad.
He grinned at her. I couldn’t make out his face either, just the smile.
I remembered the photo I’d seen of Mom when she was fat and rosy-cheeked, her talking about what happens when two people love each other…
The sound of my heartbeat thudded deep within my belly.
They made me, I thought.
They made me with love.
I was five years old, and I knew why I existed now.
For a fraction of a second I understood what it was to be home, to be whole and found. But then all of that something faded back to nothing. I was twelve again, sat in the basement playing Monopoly in grass-stained dungarees. Nook was staring at me wide-eyed, the boy he was then, wearing a woollen cap and a t-shirt with a skull on it.
‘Loll…’ he said, pointing at me.
My cheek tickled, and I touched my face.
I’d cried a tear, a single tear.
I touched its trail with one finger, lifted it to my lips and poked out my tongue.
It was salty.
I felt weird, like my skin was itching. I didn’t know what to say.
‘What happened?’ asked Nook.
I stared at him, stared beyond him.
‘It was like… I was dreaming,’ I said, ‘but I was still awake. My parents were there. This song, it was their song. We were camping out under the moon, in a wood. My Mom was singing, and I was little. They seemed… nice.’
Nook was quiet a moment, chewing his lip as if thinking of the right thing to say. There wasn’t one. My parents were locked away in some prison where I couldn’t visit them. They weren’t allowed to contact me. And everyone said it was for the best.
‘Did you feel… sad?’ he asked.
‘No, I think… I think I was happy,’ I said, tentatively, because now I was numb from head to toe again.
‘What did it feel like?’
I thought about it, even though it was already hard to recall.
‘It felt like I was real, like I belonged somewhere.’
‘Lau-rie,’ said Nook, in a scolding, drawn-out way. ‘You do belong, right here.’
He lurched forwards and hugged me, refusing to let go as I wriggled.
‘Get off,’ I moaned. ‘Stop it!’
His face was wet because he was crying too, in the way that people do without making any noise, or screwing up their faces. Just like, leaking.
‘I’m just happy you were happy,’ he said.
I licked his face. His tears were salty, too. I thought mine would taste different because I was different, but they didn’t.
‘Urgh, gross!’ he said.
That got him off me; I knew it would. He pulled away and turned, laughing, wiping his face.
Nook was glad I could feel something, anything, thinking it signalled the beginning of some great awakening. I would become a Real Girl, just as everyone hoped. It was true that Neil Young had made something grow inside of me, something that hadn’t existed before. I had cried a tear. I knew I had loved once. Those things mattered.
But the pea-sized bit of soul rattled: tiny and alone, in a vast, empty space.
Neil Young is still the only tear I’ve cried in my entire life. Even when the man who raised me from seven turned into a yellowed skeleton on a ventilator, even when Nook hated me and wouldn’t talk to me, even when I watch those sad, sad movies, or see those adverts with the starving, fly-eyed babies in Africa…
Nothing. Not a drop.
I look up and I’m back on Cemetery Hill. I’m nearly eighteen. The birds are still singing, children are playing…
Life goes on, despite me.
‘Tell me the other stories,’ says Nook, dragging on his cigarette. ‘Tell me about Rapunzel, and Sunflower.’
Neil Young, Rapunzel and Sunflower: these are the names we have given to the found pieces of my lost soul.
‘What’s the point?’ I say. ‘You know them already.’
‘So what? Tell me again. You haven’t told me in a while. I haven’t even talked to you in weeks. We might think of something new.’
Poor Nook, ever the optimist. It must be a curse, to always believe the best but see the worst. I don’t think I’ve ever really believed in anything, not even God. I’ve never been afraid of ghosts or monsters under the bed. I never bought into the whole Santa thing. In fact, I always thought there was creepy about an old fat guy breaking into my house at night while I was asleep. It always reminds me of the Bone Man.
‘Okay,’ I sigh. ‘Well, Rapunzel, I was fourteen. I was skipping out from St. Mary’s, hiding in the Heart Foundation charity shop. The one in Underdown, because I got a bus out of town so no one I knew would see me. I found these Ladybird Easy Reading books. One had this golden-haired girl on the cover, saying “hey boy” to some idiot prince at her window. It’s about this couple living next door to a total bitch of a witch. They stole herbs from her garden and she made them give up their firstborn daughter.’
‘I know about Rapunzel,’ says Nook, batting his eyelashes.
‘So I started dreaming again,’ I say, ignoring him, ‘like I did before. The shop turned into a living room. The lights were turned off, but there were these flashes of red and blue coming in through the window. My parents were packing up the house. Someone was hammering on the door. I was there, watching, but I wasn’t really there. I was alone somewhere else, hidden away. I remembered Dad telling me not to make any noise and giving me this Rapunzel book, like I was supposed to read it in the dark. I knew something bad was going to happen but I didn’t understand what, or why. But then I guess I was back in the Heart Foundation shop, just, you know, gawping at this old lady… She turned away to serve a customer, and I slipped it into my jacket and ran.’
The pea of my soul had become a conker, after that. It still rattled, but not as loud.
‘And you think maybe it’s the same book, the one you owned before?’ he asks.
‘Maybe. It smells the same.’
I’ve read Rapunzel a hundred times since then. It doesn’t do anything for me now but because of it I have known a kind of loneliness. It is the loneliness of being inexplicably soulless in a world full of souls.
‘So, maybe all of the stuff from the house ended up in charity shops and car boot sales,’ says Nook. ‘We should go to more of those places, and you can… smell stuff.’
He smiled a little, in that mischievous, Peter Pan-ish way of his.
‘I’ve already looked,’ I say.
‘They get new stuff in all the time,’ says Nook. ‘And you haven’t been to the car boots because you don’t have a car.’
‘Maybe,’ I say, apathetically.
I guess the truth is, I can’t really be bothered to try anymore, though I promised him I would.
‘What about Sunflower,’ he prompts, elbowing me slightly.
‘I was on a school trip in London,’ I say, in grudging monotone. I’m bored of hearing myself talk now. ‘I was fifteen. We went to the National Gallery, and saw Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I started feeling dizzy, blacked out, dreamt I was in hospital. Someone bought me a vase of sunflowers. All of the nurses were trying to talk to me, and I wanted to talk back but I couldn’t. I was stuck inside myself. When they left me alone this tall, thin, shadowy man with no face slipped into the room. The Bone Man. He had cold, skeleton hands and he was trying to grab something in my chest, clutching at thin air. But whatever he was looking for… it wasn’t there. It was already gone. I came to and I was still at the National Gallery, and they thought I’d had a seizure.’
That day, the conker became a coal, the same hopeless lump I carry now. I don’t feel fear, but I know I have something to be afraid of. I cross my hands over my chest as the ground slants dramatically beneath me. It’s like an earthquake, but only I can feel it.
My soul rolls back and forth with a dull, hollow rumble.
My heart is beating fast.
Nook is watching me carefully.
‘You okay?’ he says.
The world falls still, stops spinning and changing and lurching.
‘Maybe I’m just crazy,’ I say.
‘You’re not crazy.’
Nook is the only one who believes me. Everyone else I’ve told says this ‘soulless’ thing is just a metaphor. I really do have a soul, I just don’t think I do because of the Bad Thing. But Nook knows. I’ve shown him how I can’t bleed. He has stared into my eyes and seen the emptiness there.
‘I want to keep looking,’ I say. ‘But where do we look?’
He takes another long drag, thinking.
‘Everywhere,’ he says.
‘But, what if there’s nothing out there to find?’
‘There is. All of this, it means something. But you’ll never know what if you give up.’
I think of the armistice, the promise I made when I broke his heart: If I loved him I’d never give up on finding myself.
Why did I make such a stupid promise?
I remember that time when I was sixteen and his Mom came home early; the repeated affirmations of We’re Not Related By Blood.
It’s hard to erase the history you’ve written, even when it’s ugly.
I remember him drunk-singing I’m Gonna Make You Love Me, not-speaking for hours in the dark car, hearing him cry through the wall…
Almost all of the pain he’s ever felt is because of me.
I rest my head on Nook’s shoulder, and he takes my hand.
‘Neil Young,’ I say, like an amen.
‘Neil Young,’ he says back.