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Sometimes, in my dreams, I reach for her.
I always wake up before I can touch her shoulder, but I remember it so vividly for just a second, paralyzed by fear and drenched in sweat. And then I forget.
Memories like butterflies, fluttering around me outside of my reach. Sometimes, there is a lone moth, hovering on the outskirts of the beautiful swarm, and it’s as though I can feel it looking at me before they fly away together.
I can’t see her when I’m awake, but I feel haunted. There is a shadow in my apartment when I get home, a presence by my side out in public. The ghost of a hand over mine in sleep, a breath close to my ear saying something I can’t quite make out.
Kat, I repeat to myself in the dead of night, stuck in the limbo of sleep and awareness, when the darkness feels stifling over my lungs. Kat Mikaelsen. Kat, Kat, Kat.
She’s gone, I know she’s gone.
So why can’t I accept it?
~*~
Nora lives in Los Angeles. I scroll through her social media from time to time, her and Autumn. Autumn has a son. The pit in my chest grows and yearns. They are so far, and yet the rubber band around my heart keeps snapping when I see their faces. We got old, we lived.
Kat didn’t.
~*~
I don’t remember that summer. I remember the taste of my own tears when we arrived in Vancouver. I remember the profound loss of something missing, something irretrievable.
Mom got me another camcorder as a moving present. She was still mad at me for the concert stunt, and I could see her frowning at me with disapproval whenever she thought I wasn’t looking, but the new camcorder was sitting on my new desk in my new bedroom, tied with a pretty purple bow.
It was never the same, though. It sat on my desk for months gathering dust. Who would I record? The world had lost its luster. I couldn’t conceive of a movie without my muses.
Vancouver became home, but it wasn’t at first. The summer after we moved, I spent most of my time alone haunting abandoned playgrounds and the patches of trees here and there. I watched girls in my classes at school pass by on the street, lost in their own worlds, while I was stuck alone in mine. There were loads of punk girls, but I never really approached them. It felt strange, like a realm I had once belonged in and now never could again.
The name calling never stopped, but nobody ever stood up to them for me. Maybe I grew as a person that summer, maybe I was tougher than before. Here, it didn’t really matter. I kept my head down as much as I could. Whatever was beautiful and dazzling about living from that summer was gone, and I was stuck in a gray cold city, all alone.
There were friends, sure. People whom I tagged along with to class, thrifting, hanging out at the parks smoking cigarettes. One girl had dark hair streaked with violet, and who always smelled of smoke. When I kissed her, I pressed my thumb into her cheek, but it was smooth skin instead of rough and acne scarred. That brought me back down to earth, I think, and we didn’t really speak again after that.
There was another girl, my last year of high school, who taught me how to skateboard. She was the kindest girl I met in Vancouver, and she stuck by me and rolled her eyes when some of our friends wanted to get up to drunken antics. I wasn’t one for stupidity anymore; my bones rejected it. The world had moved on and I was older and more mature. She and I would sit together by an old gelato shop down the street and share a cup as we talked. I think she moved away after that to go to college in New Brunswick, and I wasn’t sure what to say in our letters as the years passed.
Autumns and Noras, all around me, finding me wherever I went. A Black girl with a freckle near her iris and blunt nails, a punk girl with dyed hair and scraped knees; I caught glimpses of them every time I turned my head.
I never saw Kat again, though, not really. Never quite the same.
There was a woman in college, with a pixie cut and wicked eyeliner, who saw me dancing in a bar and took my hands to sway back and forth. Under the dim lighting, it could have been her. I wanted it to be her. For months, I brought her back to my dorm and kissed her in darkness, so I couldn’t see that her eyes were brown, not blue, and that she didn’t quite smile the same way as Kat did, all wry and full of snark until she softened a little, and you could see that desire to fly in her face, that look that was so uniquely her that no one else could ever repeat it.
The woman wasn’t much fond of this arrangement, and dumped me a few months in. I missed the warmth, the connection – tenuous though it was – but it was a relief to not pretend anymore that she was someone else for the entirety of our time together.
~*~
The summer of 95 becomes an afternote in my story.
When people ask, I talk about growing up in Velvet Cove, but never them. I talk about the woods and the movie store, about my quest to make a movie which was ultimately fruitless. I express how sad I was to leave for Vancouver but how it became my home after a while, and now I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. People laugh and move on in the mingling scene, while I stand by the door clutching an alcoholic drink I hate in my fist while my ears ring with laughter that I haven’t heard in years and probably will never hear again.
Pumpkin dies. I graduate from college and get my master’s in film studies. I live in a small apartment with a girl from sophomore year and listen to her and her boyfriend have sex through the thin walls every night. I never buy a scale again and I trash the one haunting me from Velvet Cove to Vancouver.
I dream about Kat.
Not every night, but I never quite expect when she’ll come back. Some nights I dream about work, about menial tasks. Others I dream of a glowing purple light, and a girl’s eyes. She keeps calling to me, but her voice becomes only a trace when I wake up, her breath and moving lips are the only indication. I know she’s asking for me, though, because I keep reaching.
I always keep reaching.
I never reach out to Autumn and Nora. I consider it. When social media comes around, Autumn Lockhart and Nora Malakian are the first names I search for. My finger hovers over the “message” button, a flurry of words and thoughts in my head to tell them. But something always stops me. the delivery man brings my food, my cat jumps up onto my lap for cuddles. I never get around to it.
I think about writing them letters that I’ll never send, but the syllables die on my tongue as the pencil hovers over the page. I am not a poet; I am not a writer. All my cringey references that they seemed to like no longer belong to me. I don’t think I am who they knew anymore. What if it becomes clear that I don’t remember but they do?
I begin to question it all. Did they actually like me that much? Did Autumn care for my presence? Did Nora find me annoying? I place distance between us. No, they were the best friends, the two of them, not all of us. That summer, they only kept me around because I wouldn’t stop following them. Whatever fragments of memory I still have are warped beyond repair. I believe that the closest friends I’ve ever had wanted nothing to do with me.
My queer awakening becomes the purple haired girl in Vancouver, not the musician, not the skater, not the writer. I pick some random people from work as my best friends. I totally used to be into amateur filmmaking, but mostly just of myself and my cat. Oh no, yeah, I grew up in a small town in Michigan, but nothing weird ever happened. I didn’t have friends when I was younger, not even as a teen. I never met my soulmate. I never lost my soulmate.
No, I never had to lose my soulmate.
~*~
The tattoo on my arm comes to me in a dream about Kat. The image floats to the surface as my soul returns to my body in the darkness of night. The artist asks what it means, and I tell them I’m not sure. It means something, I feel it in my bones, but I’ll never understand what.
There are others, too. A moth on my back, between my shoulder blades. A moon on my heel. A sun on my upper arm, opposite the big tattoo. The one I like most though is the raven on my side, closest to my heart. It’s in flight, wings aloft, purple eye gleaming. When I feel that rush of anxiety in my chest, my hand moves to the raven. Somehow, I can feel its soft feathers graze the vulnerable skin of my palm. It is in flight, free to soar the skies, but it hangs back with me as comfort, as love.
~*~
I travel to Alaska, to Italy, to Peru. If I stay moving, never still, I cannot dwell on what I am forgetting. I go alone, but I begin feeling the ghost at my elbow, nudging me forward.
My mother asks whatever happened that last summer in Velvet Cove. Sitting at the dining table, I respond “I don’t know”. She says I changed, and I smile because I know it’s true, but it fades as the weight of her words settle on my shoulders. I changed.
Swann of the past becomes a distant memory. The blonde streaks in my hair fade to gray. I have smile lines now even though I don’t think I smile that much these days. I know I am getting older, and I feel time moving, but a part of me is stuck somewhere, in limbo. Not Swann, but something else, something vulnerable missing from my body, the lack of it painful every day.
~*~
Find me!
I’m here!
Waiting.
~*~
I never fall in love again. Maybe I just don’t try. I can’t. I’m always searching for something – someone – I can’t find in this world. I’m so lonely, like I was when I was a kid. This childish yearning for love, a desperation that is a part of my DNA. Maybe I really was unlovable. Maybe I’ll never stop being unlovable.
Kat becomes insistent in my dreams. She is pulling me somewhere I cannot see. Her voice, like honey on my tongue, lures me down into the depths of Hell. Only because it is her do I follow.
She is close, I can feel her. Sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see myself as a teenager again, wide eyed and fresh faced. A raven perches itself on the tree next to my car when I leave work, that gleaming purple eye winking at me. the past lingers on the periphery of my vision, the tide coming in. I will remember, it says. I will remember.
~*~
I start working on a psychological horror novel. I can't explain it to people, not really, not yet. Something about it is a call into the void, with a message I cannot repeat. I have to tell this story, though. I feel it in my bones. Maybe it can say what I need to say to Autumn and Nora. Maybe one day I can send them my book without a note and they'll understand what I'm trying to tell them.
It was only ever for them, anyway. Autumn and Nora and Kat. My Bloom and Rage.
~*~
When Autumn calls, I feel Kat more strongly than ever before. Go, she whispers close to my ear. Go, and find me.
Autumn sounds older, and when she laughs there is a weariness that breaks my heart. She is afraid to call me and I am afraid to pick up. I wish I remembered her more. I wish I knew in my heart what to say, instead of fumbling around in the dark without the tools to express what I really mean: I love you. I miss you. I want to have you back in my life again.
It won't be the same, though. It has been too many years alone. What I can settle for is Autumn, and Nora, and Velvet Cove, if just for one last time. I have survived all this time by myself, living off the summer of 95. Maybe this can subsist me until I die, happy and young and reaching for my loves.
I don't tell Autumn this, but I hope she knows. I have to believe she knows.
~*~
A dream, purple eyes, and half of my soul.
I’m coming, Kat. I promise. I'll find you. We will be together again, all of us.
~*~
The raven next to my car seems to smile as I begin my drive. I feel the fluttering on my ribs, and I hold my palm there for a moment. The flapping of wings matches the beating of my heart, as though they are one and the same.
In a glorious arc, the raven swoops off down the road, and I have a fleeting image of following a beautiful girl through a forest, her blue eyes dancing and her hand outstretched for me. She wants me to follow, and I always will.
And so I follow the raven home, where she has always been.
Home.