Page 47 of Poetry of Flowers

Train seats. Right, we were on a train.

Someone pulled me back by the collar bone, breaking my sleepy trance.

Thank God.

This nightmare has haunted me for years. It’s always the same, but during the dream, I can never remember that I had this dream before. I’m always eight and want to tell my mom something before she turns into this monster I fear the most. Then I drowned.

“You’re okay.”

It wasn’t a question. Kayden squeezed my upper arm until I’m firmly back in the here and now.

I wasn’t okay, I was drowning not in water but in my fears. They were the water in my nightmares. They suffocated me until my mind stopped talking to me.

Maybe I should have continued with the therapist, but my father wouldn’t have been able to afford her much longer anyway.

Would it have made me better? For me, words on paper were my healing, I wrote because the paper listened without talking back, the paper absorbed my thoughts without judgment.

Overreacting was in my nature, just like overthinking. When my classmates chuckled behind me, I always thought it was because I did something embarrassing, and when I actually did something embarrassing my mind told me everyone thought about it twenty-four seven. It was horrendous that I always made everything about myself in my mind.

I felt like even my therapist would judge me for my behavior, telling me that’s not normal or send me to an asylum right away. Those things scare me. That’s why I want to overcome my... problems.

Or was I just sad?

Only when people have a sad episode, it usually went away. My sad episode had already lasted around nine years.

Could you be chronically sad?

“Come here, lay your head on my chest,” Kayden’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts and back in the here and now once more.

Kayden cupped my cheeks softly and led my face towards his chest. “What can you hear?”

Thump …

… Thump

Thump …

“Your heart.” I answered, the rhythm was calming and steady like a lullaby. “Yes, it’s still beating. You know what this means?”

“You’re... still alive?”

His chest vibrated with chuckles. “Yeah, that too, but mostly it means we are real, you’re not suffocating, Tillie.” Kayden takes my wrists in his hands and presses his index and middle fingers on my pulse points, so I could feel the thumping of my own rhythm.

“A perfectly healthy rhythm.”

He knew what I dreamed about because I was a sleep talker. I hated that about me. I didn’t like to leave my bleeding wounds open for everyone to see.

“You sure you don’t want to study medicine?” I asked him, scoffing as I pulled my arms back under the blanket someone must have placed over me. It was pink with red hearts printed, so it must be my cousins.

Kayden shook his head, “I would kill my first patient.”

“Oh no, you wouldn’t, but maybe the second or third, you tend to overthink at first, and then you get sloppy,” I joked, but he rolled his eyes.

A cold draft was coming in and rain was falling against the train windows. When Autumn and I were younger, we watched the raindrops that were running down her bedroom window. We each bet a bonbon on the drop that would be the first to reach her window sill.

It was a simple game we could play for hours.

“Where are Theo and Autumn?”

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