Evie of the Deepthorn by André Babyn

Author:André Babyn [Babyn, André]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 2020-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

3

Sometimes when I walk home from school it feels perfect. Timeless. Impossible. I don’t know how else to explain it. The trees are green and tall, the air light and crisp, or pure and hazy, even the weeds choking the sidewalk have a sort of ethereal quality that makes it seem like they belong, like they’re necessary, like they’ve always been there, like somehow I am part of them, reaching up from their cracks in the pavement and stilling themselves in eternity. Sometimes I stop and listen to the insects buzzing in the grass, listen for birds, or hear the wind blowing through the trees, and I feel like a part of something much, much larger than me. Like I don’t exist and I don’t need to. Like I’m just a minor detail in a painting — just a bystander standing far away on the acropolis, rendered in heavy oils by some top-hatted Romantic in the nineteenth century.

I like that feeling — a kind of annihilation.

Being emptied out, in the best way.

I feel closest to Evie when I’m in that mood. I imagine she is so much nearer to the earth, to its rhythms and mysteries. Her problems are larger than mine, but they feel easier to solve.

It’s stupid. I know it’s stupid.

But it helps me to imagine that I could solve everything that’s wrong with me, feeling ugly and having parents who don’t like each other and spending too much time alone and thinking too hard, through a single thrust of a dagger. And not even my dagger — Evie’s. Evie’s dagger.

It’s easier for me to believe that I could fix things with a tool of Evie’s than my own. Sometimes I let myself believe that everything would be better for me if I found the right guy. Like I could pour out my heart to him and he would fix me somehow. I’d feel whole, always. I know that’s wrong, but a much larger part of me than I’d like to admit believes it. Maybe I’m not even sure I know it’s wrong. Maybe it would be better — how could I know either way? I’ve never had a boyfriend. Not even close.

It seems pretty good.

But I’m also afraid that even if I did find the right person, I’d ruin it by being too honest with them. Like there’s a limit to how much you can share before you betray your true self. And I know my true self isn’t any good.

No one would love it.

That’s why, right now, it’s much easier to be interested in guys I never talk to. To watch them from afar. To imagine they are daggers, daggers I could use in my own hands, when the time is right, if that time ever comes. Mostly they are infatuations that I can comfortably nurse for months. Jess once told me that if I talked to them I wouldn’t find them as interesting, and maybe that’s true. She also said I should get a boyfriend

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