Category : Books-Fiction

Sub Category : Drama

    I don’t remember what life was like before I met Pan.
    Maybe that’s a bad thing. It’s definitely not what professionals would call healthy. I think, when I told my therapist about him, she called it a “fixation”.  Three sessions later, she changed the word to “compulsion”. I looked them up; fixation means obsession. Compulsion means addiction. Definitely a bad thing.
    It didn’t feel so bad, back when it was all happening. I guess it never does, but Pan wasn’t my metaphorical drug habit or whatever. He was my happy place, my safe haven. His eyes were the ones watching me when I first woke up, the dizzying green the first color I remember.
    Well. That, and red. Always the red.
    Explaining exactly what Pan meant to me during that time in my life can be difficult for anyone who hasn’t actually met him. I can draw my pictures and list my thoughts, but it all comes out filtered and stumbling, closer to a fairy tale imp or childish villain than the real life boy with the soft smile who stole a year of my life away. No one understands what it means when I say I can still hear his quiet laugh if I’m not paying attention. Why he still has a hold on me when I’ve come so far otherwise.
    There are still things I can’t talk about. The color red, for instance, sends my heart into my throat on occasion, or the too-familiar sound of gunfire in the early hours of the morning. I can’t walk down the street alone anymore without my old knife gripped tight inside my pocket. My therapist says it’s normal for someone like me to not have adjusted to real life yet, like I’m Alice back from Wonderland and my brain’s still tripping down rabbit holes. Reality’s the rabbit hole, he would have said. People like us don’t belong there.
    People like us. Even in my head, he’s still playing games. It doesn’t matter if I’m actively listening in or purposely ignoring it, I can always hear his voice.
    He’s the only one who calls me Jane anymore. Everyone else dances around what to call me, christening me with names of their own making--darling, kid, blondie--or the ever familiar hey, you! I have enough identities to wear each one like someone else’s shoes and never repeat a day. Jessie said she envied me, said now I could pick whatever name I wanted and start over completely new. I told her I wanted to stay Jane. She pretended not to hear me.
    I wish I could start over. Pick a new name, start a new life, move on without this terrible weight in my veins that keeps me from flying away. I keep looking for excuses to be that girl again, some sign that maybe it wasn’t all a lie. How ridiculous. How sad. How stupidly naive. Of course it was.
    The whole world wants me to just get over the whole thing, pretend like it was all a bad dream and I know exactly who I am and where I belong. But I keep coming back to that old rabbit hole. I wonder, if I went back to that place where I lost my everything, would it still be there? Would I still want to move on?
    Pan says I won’t. He says it’s a part of me now, that longing for something different. That’s why I can hear him. I haven’t let him go.
    I want to prove him wrong. I want to let him go. I need to know that some part of me wants him gone, and will do what it takes to put the past behind me. But I can’t help feeling that the last thing I want is to forget.
    I’ve forgotten enough for a lifetime.