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hollyannewrites · 1 year

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No Way to Move On...

“Glad to hear you’ve been enjoying the warmer weather, Myra,” Francene said, crossing her ankles. “Now, I know we had an appointment set for next week, but you called to move up our session. Is everything alright?”

I folded my hands in my lap, considering for a few seconds before I replied. “I think I’m in love.”

Francene grinned, brown smile lines creasing her face. “Well, isn’t that lovely.” She picked up her pen and notepad from the table beside her without looking—she always made an effort to make our conversations feel natural, not like she was observing me clinically. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I nodded, picking absently at my nails. I’d thought about how I wanted to explain the situation on the train ride here, but the details still caught in my throat. What if she thought I was crazy? I’d never brought anything like this to her before—usually we focused heavily on managing my anxiety, or the stresses of living far away from my family. This was… not the same.

“Myra?”

My gaze flicked up and caught her expectant gaze. I’d let the silence hang.

“Right, sorry. Just figuring out where to start.”

“Don’t worry about getting it exactly right. You can just say what you’re thinking.”

I took a deep breath, holding it for a few seconds, then slowly releasing. No way around it, I just needed to get it out.

“Ok, yeah. So, like I said, I think I’m in love. I’m in love with my roommate, Lucas. I might have mentioned him a few times before. He moved in a few days before me, was subletting from someone I didn’t really know. We were awkward at first, but now we get along fine. When I turn on the TV, he’ll come sit and watch with me, or sometimes we just settle on the couch and talk for hours.

We’re a lot alike, in some ways. His family also lives pretty far away, all the way out in Portland, and he almost never sees them. He works from home, does some sort of computer job, and feels a little isolated because he doesn’t really interact with coworkers much. We like the same genre of music—classic rock—and we both love to put on Led Zeppelin while we clean. We’re both left-handed but neither of us own left-handed scissors so we always rock-paper-scissors whenever something needs cutting out. Our politics are similar, we share similar feelings about faith, or rather, lack thereof, and we’ve always agreed easily about how we want to take care of our space.

It’s not like we’re identical or anything, like, he’s a night owl and I’m a morning person, and he is very introverted and I love meeting new people, but there’s nothing so glaringly different between us that we have tension about it. It’s genuinely nice to come home from the grocery store, or therapy, or a walk in the park, and know that he’ll be around the house, and we can hang out.

He sometimes goes out of his way to do nice things for me—like he’ll clean the apartment while I’m gone or turn off all the lights before he goes to sleep because I always forget. He’s sweet, and polite about it. If I bring up the things he does for me, he’ll just shrug and say it makes him feel good to do things for people, especially stuff that makes their life easier. Once he even said that hard work doesn’t count if it’s for people he really cares about.”

My face flushed at the memory. Lucas, in the kitchen, with a dish towel slung over one shoulder, grinning casually. His stormy gray eyes had twinkled a little, and his smile made my stomach flutter. He’d cleaned the mountain of dirty dishes even though it was my turn to do it and primarily my mess—he never seemed to contribute to the pile of sauced-up plates and coffee-ringed cups. I hadn’t thought anything of it then, but now, knowing that he really didn’t use the kitchen, didn’t need to… Well, it makes sense.

“I’ve really grown close with him in the months that I’ve lived there. He’s helped me get past feeling isolated here, since he so often seeks me out. He makes me feel like a valuable presence at home, which has boosted my confidence. I get this rush of comfort and happiness when I think about spending time with him. That’s new for me. I’m pretty sure that I’m really falling in love with him.”

I couldn’t keep gushing about how lovely he was—or rather, I could, but that wasn’t the reason I’d scheduled this session with Francene.

Her face had its practiced, neutral expression in place, the one she reserved for listening and withholding judgement. That careful detachment was the reason I decided to stick with her as my therapist when I moved out here. Her reactions and feelings didn’t cut me off when I started to open up. The uncreased, slightly-head-tilted look relieved the tension that usually coiled around my shoulders, and the words just flew.

As I watched her, she nodded once, an invitation for me to continue. I squeezed my hands together, tight, then picked up my story.

“There’s basically only one thing that frustrates me about Lucas. He has no interest in the exterior. What I mean is, he never wants to go out anywhere or go do anything. I’ve invited him to parties, restaurants, I asked him to come to a Joan Jett concert with me, but no matter what it is or how much I’m certain he’d enjoy it, he always says no. He’s polite about it, for sure, but he literally always rejects the offer. And he doesn’t like when the exterior becomes the interior. Whenever I have friends over, he always hides away in his room and will not come out. He’s literally never met any of my friends or our neighbors, even if I invite him to hang out with us and no matter how much I emphasize that he’s welcome to join our plans.

Like I said, I’m more of an extrovert, so I guess he’s just a tiny bit anti-social sometimes or easily overwhelmed by new people and situations, but it’s still frustrating to try to share my life and invite him in and to meet with such strong resistance. Like, would it kill him to go to the park just once?”

I winced at my choice of words. Across from me, Francene’s pen was scratching along the lines of her notepad, picking up in pace when she saw clocked my reaction.

“How does it make you feel that he doesn’t agree to these things?” she questioned.

“I mean, I get it now. It’s difficult, yeah, but like I said, I really do like him, so I can usually overlook it.”

If I wanted this to work out, I’d have to overlook it.

Francene cleared her throat softly—I’d let the silence hang for longer than I meant to. “So, you came to see me about your relationship with Lucas?”

Time for the moment of truth. “Sort of. On Monday, something happened…” How was she going to react to this? The thought tightened my throat.

“What happened on Monday, Myra?” A glow of concern colored her brown eyes.

“My landlord came over, with someone looking to sublet. A very nice girl from Seattle.”

“Ah. So you didn’t know Lucas wasn’t going to continue subletting there?”

“Not exactly. I asked Andy—that’s my landlord—about Lucas leaving, since he hadn’t said anything to me. And Andy got a little upset with me. He asked me if I’d been lying, if I’d had another person living there with me even though I’d only paid for my room, not both.”

His face had been rather red, and spittle gathered on the lower bristles of his mustache as he’d blustered about rental agreements and improper use of his property and a dozen other things that were lost on me. The girl who’d come with had stared at me openly, confused and suspicious but not unsympathetic as the tirade dragged on.

“I managed to explain to him that I hadn’t brought Lucas to live there—he’d moved in before me, after all. We’d never met before I arrived here that first day. Andy asked to speak to ‘this Lucas character’, so I led him to Lucas’ room, and knocked on the door. He was almost certainly home—like I said, he never goes out much, but like usual, his bedroom door was shut. I realized while I was knocking that I’d actually never been inside of his room or seen what it looked like inside.”

Francene was frowning at this point, and she flipped to a new page of notes.

“After a minute or so of knocking, Andy just loudly announced that he was coming in, and he opened the door. And…” My breath hitched. “And the room was empty. I don’t just mean he wasn’t there; it was completely empty. Four blank white walls, a hardwood floor, and a thick layer of dust on the single windowsill.”

The pen stopped scratching. I squeezed my eyes shut—it was too late to take it back.

“Andy turned on me, and glared, and said he didn’t appreciate me wasting his time with pranks. He asked me to give him some space to show the apartment and waved me off. I tried to explain but I really couldn’t think of anything to say. What explanation was there? My roommate who was apparently a squatter had moved out all of his things and vanished overnight without me noticing? It just didn’t make sense.

So I went into my room, and sat on my bed, and just sorta spaced out until I heard the front door slam shut behind Andy. I crept out of my room and wandered from room to room, trying to find anything that belonged to Lucas, a note he’d left or a missing sock he’d forgotten or anything at all, but there wasn’t anything. It was like he’d never been there at all.”

I spared Francene the details of how hard I’d been crying as I ended up in his empty room and curled up on the dirty ground for hours—it wouldn’t matter in just a few minutes anyway.

“I was shocked, confused. I couldn’t imagine him disappearing without saying anything—we were closer than that, or at least I had thought so. After a bit, I made up my mind to reach out and ask him what had happened, but then I remembered I didn’t actually have his phone number. We saw each other constantly, so it just somehow never came up. We’d left each other occasional notes on the fridge, although there weren’t any still stuck on there when I looked for them.

So I didn’t know how to get ahold of him. It’s not the dark ages, so I decided to try social media. Who doesn’t have any socials these days, right? I went on my phone, opened Facebook, and typed in his name. Lucas Planck. A small handful of accounts came up, but I felt like I knew enough to figure out which one was his. I clicked through a few until I found one that I thought was his, even though the profile picture was just some sunflowers. It listed the hometown as Portland, showed what college he’d gone to, and had a few liked posts about Metallica and some old articles about developments in computer science. I opened the old profile pictures and found one that had his face in it—and sure enough, it was him.

I sent him a friend request and a quick message asking him if we could talk. I didn’t get a response right away, and I was feeling really anxious, so I just wanted to see if he came up anywhere else online. I typed his name into my browser, and the first few things that popped up were about other Lucas’, but near the bottom of the first page of results, there was an article from a few years ago. It was published in the local paper here, and I opened it in a new tab.”

It was a mistake, bringing this to Francene. I could feel myself shaking as I spoke, and I didn’t want to see her reaction to this. I didn’t want her to know—she’d call me crazy. I’d sound crazy. But there was no way out, now—I couldn’t leave without an explanation, and there was no explanation for everything I’d said so far except the truth.

“Local man’s body discovered in apartment after several days—the smell alerted neighbors. That’s what the article was called.” I swallowed hard. “Just underneath was a picture of Lucas, and a short article about how a neighbor smelled something horrible and called the police, and they discovered a body that had been dead for some time, after a head injury from an accidental fall in the bedroom had caused bleeding in the brain, or something like that. It said—the article claimed—that the dead man was Lucas. My Lucas. My roommate Lucas. And it was his picture on the article.”

My knuckles were white where I squeezed my fingers together.

“I almost threw up, reading the page over and over. And then… And then Lucas walked into the room from the hallway, frowning.”

He’d been paler than usual and sighed heavily as he came into view. With a slow nod, he’d settled down on the far end of the couch, cross-legged as always, and pointed at my screen.

“He apologized that I’d found out like this, that he’d meant to tell me. I was pinching myself to see if I was having a nightmare, but I wasn’t. Lucas stayed very calm as he explained to me that the article was correct, that that was him, and that he’d been drifting around this empty apartment, unseen and unheard, until I’d shown up, and I saw him. He said as far as he could tell no one else had been able to see him, and I seemed nice and it felt so good to just have someone to talk to, and so he’d hidden the truth.”

His eyes—or what looked like eyes to me—had watered, and he’d swiped at them with the back of his sweater. Would his sleeve have felt wet if I touched it? Could I have touched it? I realized that we’d never physically touched, never brushed up against each other, never even come close. He had pushed up his thick curls where they flopped over his left ear, and under it, I could see an angry, inky-purple bruise, swollen and yet obviously indented. Saliva had coated my tongue, and I’d swallowed down the bile that crept up my throat.

“I didn’t know what to do, pinned in place by the surrealness of what was happening. He didn’t seem to know where to go from there either, so we just sat, silently, for what felt like hours. Then he stood, and walked out of the room, and said if I wanted to, we could talk about it in the morning.

I didn’t sleep—I couldn’t. I just kept thinking about how much I cared about him, and then lurching feeling I’d felt when I saw the empty room and thought he’d vanished and I didn’t know how to reconcile that my close friend, the person I’d started to really fall in love with, was dead and had been the whole entire time.”

I was staring into my lap—I didn’t want to know what Francene was doing, and I couldn’t really hear her pen over the roaring blood in my ears.

“I thought I’d have time to figure out what I wanted to do, but my landlord texted me yesterday that the girl from Seattle had agreed to sublet, and she’s moving in next week. She’s moving into Lucas’ room. I can’t tell her we’ll be sharing our home with a ghost that she might not even be able to see, but I also don’t want to stop being able to hang out with Lucas. I’ m not... I’m not afraid of him, of what he is, and somehow, I still want him there. I still feel that connection. But she’s coming, and I’m going to lose that, and I don’t know what to do even do. It’s not like I could move out—Lucas couldn’t come with. And I can’t stop her from coming. But what can I do?” My voice got louder and louder as the questions spilled over.

When I finally paused and looked up, Francene was staring. She was trying hard to keep her face clear of emotion, but underneath, the fear and disappointment and concern were obvious.

“Alright, Myra, why don’t we slow down and talk a little more about this? Is there anything you haven’t mentioned about when you see Lucas, or how he acts toward you?”

She spoke very gently, and even though the word never crossed her lips, I heard it plain as day. Crazy. Francene had decided I was crazy, delusional, insane. This conversation wasn’t going to help me figure out how to stay with Lucas. She’d diagnose me with something or other, ship me off to a facility or drug me into a haze—I couldn’t bear it.

I pushed up from the leather seat, grabbing my purse and quickly going to the door. “Thanks for listening, Francene. That helped, really. I feel better about it. I think I’m good now. I’m gonna go,” I gushed as I opened the door and hurried into the hall.

I heard her footsteps coming after me, but I just called out to the receptionist, asking her to cancel my future appointments, and hustled out the front door as fast as possible, briskly making my way out onto the busy sidewalk towards our apartment.

Lucas and I would just have to come up with our own solution. He’d listened to me all evening yesterday while I rambled, and he’d even suggested I try talking to Francene, since she usually helped me so much when I was upset—he couldn’t have known how she’d react.

We’d figure it out, somehow. We’d figure it out together. It’ll be hard, but that doesn’t matter—I care about him. I might even be in love.

#hollyanne writes #original fiction #ghost #romance #love #therapy #death tw #implied mental illness #fiction #short stories #creative writing #original characters #open ending #mental health #major character death

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