Nightwolf

But while the grief over my mom is this deep, penetrating sorrow, the grief over Wolf makes me angry. Angry in an unhealthy way. Like I just want to scream and punch through walls and lash out and burn the world to the motherfucking ground.

I just need someone to give me a match.

“Amethyst?” Lenore asks again, rapping gently on the door.

Slowly I sit up, trying to bring myself back into this world. “Yes. Sorry I was sleeping.”

The door opens, a slice of light from the kitchen. “I can bring you food,” she says softly. “Or, if you’re not hungry, I’ll just put it in the fridge for later.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Okay,” she says. “But you do have to eat. I know it’s hard, but you have to take care of your body, too.”

“So they say,” I say under my breath. There’s a lot of things people tell you when you’re grieving, and one of them is that you have to take care of yourself. Eat right, exercise, make sure you get enough sleep. And, to that I say, what the hell are even those things? What do they mean? I have to take care of myself? No, I’m inconsequential at the moment. I have no thoughts for my body or even how I’m going to survive another day. My entire world has been obliterated and the last thing I care about is that I’m healthy enough to keep living on and putting up with all this shit.

“Hey,” she says and comes in the room, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Do you want to talk about it?”

I sigh heavily. “I don’t know.”

“You should,” she says. “That’s what I learned when Elle died. That the more you bottle it up and keep it to yourself, the more harm it does. That’s why I started getting panic attacks. That was the result.”

I nod slowly. Lenore’s best friend was Elle, but she died tragically in this apartment when a vampire slayer type witch (I don’t know the specifics) stabbed her. It apparently wasn’t on purpose but I don’t think it made a difference. Elle died and Lenore couldn’t even turn her into a vampire because it would only have created a monster.

Sometimes I think back to the hospital, I think about Wolf being there when my mother died, and I wonder if he could have done something. I mean, he could have but I also know he wouldn’t have. As much as he loved her, he would never turn my mom into a vampire, just as he would never do the same to me. The cost is too great. But, god, it must be weird to grapple with that power knowing you can’t use it in the way you want.

“So, how are you today?” Lenore asks, her face twisted in sympathy. Then she catches herself, shakes her head. “Sorry. I know that’s a stupid question to start with. After Elle died, I hated hearing it because I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know how I was. I still don’t in some ways.”

I nod and she reaches out, placing her hand on my shoulder. “You don’t have to talk about it. I can just sit with you in silence. Or you can be alone. I just…want to be here for you.”

The thing is, she is here for me. More than anyone. I moved into Lenore’s old apartment a few days ago. After Wolf broke my heart like a twig…well, I couldn’t be in the same house as him anymore. I packed up my stuff and Lenore said I could stay here, with her parents living in the apartment above mine in this two-level house not too far from Alamo Square. I’ve met her parents a few times and they’re really nice people—and that’s the key thing here. People! They’re humans. Sure, they’re witches, but they’re still human and I need to be around humans right now, people who understand grief properly and are normal and not vampires who exist for centuries trying to skirt death and feelings.

I give her an appreciative look, the most I can muster. “No, it’s okay. I think…I think I need to talk about it. To try and make sense of it. I’ve been so trapped in my head and it just…it all keeps spinning around me like a spider’s web, until I feel utterly trapped in my sadness and there’s no escape. And I know there’s no escape. I know it. I know that this is my new reality forever and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Yeah. It’s like no matter what, you’re stuck. There’s not a thing you can do, and you know, we like to think we have a modicum of control, right? But we don’t. And death just proves it.”

I’m so relieved she understands it. Thank god she’s still part human. “And all everyone says is that grief isn’t something that goes away, that it’s something you learn to live with, adapt with, but I don’t want to live with this! I don’t want to adapt to this!” Those ever-present tears come rushing forward, my heart clenching into a tighter fist. “I want my mother back. I can’t go from having her with me nearly every day since I was born, my best friend in the whole world, my constant, my everything, to just not having her at all. I can’t adapt to that loss, no one can. It’s impossible. This whole thing is so fucking impossible!”