Alexis

I have strange dreams that night.

From my father’s lips fall glass bubbles, each thrown at Vincent and I, that explode into jagged broken glass. I’m draping my body over my brother’s, doing my very best to protect him from the rageful shards when they hit. But my brother is not cowering, not like I. As much as I try to shield him, a sharp edge slices down his cheek. He does not flinch, and I wonder if perhaps he was the brave one instead of I, for leaving. For knowing when to abandon a lost cause instead of pretending things could change.

And then I’m standing in the bathroom of my childhood house. My mother, dressed in that moth-eaten white gown, is lowering herself into the tub – a basin that has suddenly morphed itself into a human sized gold-plated tureen – a decorative bowl I’ve only seen in newspaper cutouts and antique shop windows in the more fortunate neighborhoods in town. But the tureen is not filled with water. It is filled with a luxury tea, something we could never afford. A honey-amber color that smells sweet and rich and generous.

“¿Mamí?”

 I watch, motionless, as she sinks her head beneath the golden water and opens her mouth, smiling. She holds herself under until she’s thrashing in death’s throes, and still her head does not resurface. She keeps herself under, dying viciously beneath her pretty things, smiling beautifully and smelling of sweet tea. And instead of reaching into the tub to pull her back out, to save her, I stroke my fingers through her hair, and I pray for it to be over.

My mother grips my wrists, wraps my hands around her throat, and–like the good son I am–I close my fists, shoving her deeper under the surface. The last bits of air leave her lips in small glass bubbles.

When I arrived at my first dorm room in the Alloy I made myself a cup of tea with leaves so expensive it could have easily fed us for days back in Atlas. I poured so much sugar into that cup that I could barely even taste the tea. I sat on the edge of that bed – the first bed I didn’t have to share – and I cried. I cried so hard I broke blood vessels in my eyes.

I was showered in luxury in the Alloy, in hot water and rich foods and pretty things. After some time, I nearly forgot what it was like when I was a kid, before Neriah–before my father's factory job, when we all slept in the same bed; when all we could afford was grain for bread and cheap meat, typically some kind of pheasant or pigeon; when the only sugar we ate was in the fruits I would steal, or the biscuits Vincent would bring home from the girl at school who developed some sort of attachment to him–be it affection or pity. I think I chose to forget, to make it less painful. To minimize the guilt.

It took me a long time to understand that bad lives aren’t punishment for some past life or wrongdoings. Truth is bad things often happen to good people and sometimes you’re just born with a shit hand in life and you can’t have a choice in the matter because that’s just the way it is.

Some people have shitty jobs and shitty dads and shitty lives. That doesn’t mean they deserve it. It doesn’t mean I deserved it either.

I’m not a monster. I’m not a monster.

I am just a boy who had to grow up too fast, a boy who didn’t know any better. 

A boy who is still capable of good.

There’s a cup of tea in front of me, one that the nymph girl provides me with early in the morning on a silver dining tray. I take the spoon that was resting in the golden tureen and mix in four heaping spoonfuls of sugar. This time I don’t cry, I just drink, slowly and then all at once. And then I pour myself another cup from the kettle. I do not forget that hurting, hungry boy that haunts my past. I think of him. I think maybe he’s the one drinking the next cup, the rich tea so sweet it makes his teeth hurt. No, I do not cry. I smile.

I thought it was too late for me to salvage myself, my love and patience. But maybe I can grow back into my softness. It takes a lot of bravery to see so much and still be kind. Like Aiden. His divine forgiveness, unrelenting tendencies of finding the purity in every person.

Even when I’m trying to save him, he’s saving me. Over and over. Simply by loving me.

We did not choose this life, nor the pain we have suffered. But we chose each other. 

I think, if we cannot choose who we are, the most important decision we can make is who we love.

Above all else, I choose Aiden. To love, to learn from, to believe in, to save. And he chooses me. 

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