I remember

I remember the day of the accident like it was yesterday. It was the day I met Killian.

The train had stopped in its tracks so violently that the whole wagon trembled as if the Earth itself had moved. Like an earthquake had occurred only on our little side of of the world.

Then the lights went off. The cold, blue-toned emergency lights sunk the whole wagon into a grisly, eerie atmosphere that made it look haunted. A faltering, mechanic voice let us know through the speakers that there had been an “unexpected hold up” and that we were going to be there for a while.

We were not notified of how long that ‘while’ would be, but as time went by, people started to become more and more nervous. They started getting up, changing wagons, some even tried to open the emergency doors, unsuccessfully of course. It was loud, and yet, somehow, it felt like everything had gone quiet at the same time. Maybe it was the vibration under my feet that I missed, or maybe it was the knowledge that outside of those walls not a sound would be heard other than the leaves whispering into the wind bleeding through the sealed windows into the wagon and up to the very seat that I had sunken myself into.

I let my sister know that I wasn’t going to make it for dinner and I put my phone away. Then, I fished the tiny little clip on reading light out of my bag and clasped it to my copy of The Mist In The Looking Glass to continue reading where I left off. I wasn’t the type to be outraged and scream incoherently at a staff member that clearly had as much control over the situation as I did, nor was I about to go ahead and try to run off on my own into who knows what in the middle of the night. Although I could not have denied how anxious I was, not knowing what was happening or when it would be fixed, I much preferred to just lose myself into a different world, preferably a fictional one with no trains and no shouting.

Not a half hour had passed before another communication, just as mechanic and impersonal as the first, asked the passengers to please remain seated and said something else about the train that I didn’t quite make out from the white noise behind it. As I was trying to listen in on the conversations around me in hopes that someone had understood and could fill in the blanks, a different voice coming from the opposite direction caught my attention.

“Excuse me, do you mind if I sit with you?”

I turned around and found a young man towering over me, his hand placed on the back of the empty seat to my left. The first thing I noticed was how tall he was. His hair was dark and pulled up in a bun, a couple of curls framing the left side of his face. Sharp jawline, crooked nose and blue eyes —possibly green? It was hard to tell in the dark. Definitely handsome, although I was still a bit weary of a complete stranger walking up to me in the middle of a crisis just to sit beside me. 

He must have read my thoughts, however, because he flashed me a warm, nonthreatening smile and raised his other hand, showing me the book he was holding.

“I saw you were reading too,” he said, and then lowered his voice so only him and I could hear: “The couple I’m sitting next to is driving me insane.”

I chuckled and grabbed my bag from the seat that he was asking for, tangling my arm in the chord as I placed it on my lap. The man gave me a thankful look and sat beside me, carefully enough not to touch my thigh with his.

“I’m Killian,” he introduced himself, stretching out his hand towards me.

I took it. He had soft hands, his knuckles sticking out creating a slight relief, like a tiny mountain range at the start of his long fingers. It was warm and soft, although colder toward the tips of his long fingers.

“Isla,” I answered, smiling at him like I hadn’t just met him.

He squeezed my hand lightly before returning to his book, and I noticed that he was using his phone to light up the pages. After a moment of hesitation, I unclasped the reading light from my book and placed it on the side of it that was closer to him.

“Do you want to use mine?” I asked, sitting closer to him, our thighs still barely touching. Then I explained: “I just thought you may want to save battery.”

“Sure, thank you,” he smiled, leaning closer to me and slouching a bit so that his book would fall under the light of my reading lamp. Only a moment went by before he spoke again: “What are you reading?”

“The Mist in the Looking Glass, by Edith Elfield,” I answered. “You?”

He closed the book so that I could read the cover. Strange Tides, by Julia M. Townes, it read. The only thing in the cover other than the title was a yellow flower on the left side, sitting alone against a black background. I gave it a nod of approval before asking what it was about, not realizing that would be the last time I’d even look at my book for the rest of the night.

Killian and I started talking about everything. Books, our favorite authors, the stories we would like to read… He told me he liked writing too, and even showed me a snippet of the last thing he’d wrote on his phone. It was good, intricate, some kind of high fantasy fiction novel framed within poetry.

I learned that he too had a sister, although his was older than him and they still lived together. He wanted to move out, but he was in between jobs and his situation wasn’t stable enough to afford his own place. I told him I moved away for college and I was just now about to visit my family for the weekend and tell them I had dropped out six months ago. That I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life yet, but at least I had a job and I made just enough to pay rent.

At least two hours went by and we barely even noticed, as enthralled in the conversation as we were. At some point someone convinced the security guard to let us open the windows and, although the fresh air was much needed, it got cold very fast. Killian and I both ended up sitting on the floor with his sweatshirt wrapped around the two of us, talking about something deep like philosophy or politics and purposely ignoring the chaos going on around us.

I remember the moment the emergency lights went off. Someone screamed in the background. Everyone had been shouting for a while, and there was a baby crying somewhere as well, but this was a very real scream. It stood out. It made the whole train sound dead silent.

Then, a blinding flash of light flooded in from the outside.

I remember little else after that. There was a very loud noise and flames everywhere. Eventually they enacted the emergency protocol and got us all out. Killian held my hand tighter than anyone had held it before. I lost my phone in the ruckus. He held onto me until we were picked up by a bus. The vehicle drove us away from the fire, but I saw enough. There were firemen, policemen, and bodies being dragged out from the wagons. I tried to run towards them, wanting to help, crying. Killian was the one that pulled me away.

I don’t really remember the way back home. I know Killian was next to me. I know he texted my sister when I gave him her number. Everything else is a blur. The only vivid memory I have of that night is of him. His hands holding mine, his hair falling out of the elastic that held it up, his eyes red from the smoke and all the crying. Him being tethered to me like we were glued and sewn together.

I remember waking up in a hospital bed, some doctor mentioning my name to my mother. Killian was holding my hand when that happened. He cried when I squeezed it. My mother thanked him for bringing me home. 

The accident was on the news for weeks. Our train had lost all power, and a team was working on fixing it when another train came out of nowhere. Everything happened too fast. The conductor couldn’t see us with the lights off in the middle of the night. So they crashed. There were about a hundred casualties and so many more people that were badly injured. I was among those numbers. It was an overwhelmingly numbing feeling.

Killian cried when we saw the images for the first time after returning home. We had grown quite close after that whole experience, for obvious reasons. I helped him find a job in the same place as I, and he moved in with me a couple of weeks later because it was too long of a commute from his sister’s house. He would have dinner with me and my family every other week. It was safe to say he became an indispensable part of my life, and we helped each other navigate our trauma and our new —shared—  siderodromophobia.

I fell in love with him. Honestly, I think part of me fell in love with him on that train. If there was anything at all to be thankful for, it was our paths crossing right before the catastrophe.

I never told him, though. I was scared I would ruin everything. I couldn’t imagine my life without him in it anymore, and I didn’t want to risk it. But I took care of him, and that was my way of showing him. Even if he never looked at me the same way. Even when the PTSD got so bad that he would jump at my sight every single time I entered a room. Even when it seemed like he resented me, because, although I never really dared to ask why, he still came back to me almost every single night. We weren’t together, it wasn’t romantic, but hugging each other at night was the only way to keep the nightmares at bay.

And so, that became our new “normal”. We would sleep in the same bed, have breakfast together, then leave for work. There was a time when I would prank him and move his things around so that everything would be different when he got back home, or hide little surprises —like a hundred tiny plastic ducks that I had originally bought as a joke for my sister— all around the house in the least expected of places. He always laughed when he realized. Well, almost always. I found him crying about it one day, so I stopped doing it. I hadn’t realized it bothered him that much. I thought we were just joking around, but then again, I guess he was trying not to hurt my feelings.

“I’m sorry,” I said to him after a couple of days, as we were snuggling up in bed. “I didn’t realize I was being so hard on you.”

He started crying almost immediately. Like a baby. I had never seen him cry like that. He covered us both up with the duvet and curled up into a ball, and I ran my fingers through his hair and helped him breathe, trying to calm him down.

“Shhh, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay, I’m here.”

He kept on sobbing like a little kid. Nothing I did seemed to help. If anything, it only made him cry more. Then, with his voice muffled behind the sheets, he mumbled:

“You need to go.”

I paused, trying to make out what he said, thinking I’d heard the wrong thing.

“What?” I whispered.

“You need to go, Isla” he repeated. “I love you too, but you have to go.”

I looked up at him. Or down, I can’t remember clearly. I remember his words leaving a bittersweet aftertaste in my mouth when I repeated them.

“You love me?”

He put a lock of my hair behind my ear and smiled at me, a crooked smile, a sad one. It did not resemble his usual smile at all.

“I do,” he murmured. “But you have to let me move on. Please.”

I tilted my head, confused, tucking my hair behind my ear again, as he hadn’t managed to get it out of my face. 

“I… I don’t understand…”

“Isla, I wish… I wish I had met you earlier,” he explained. Or he thought he did. I still wasn’t sure of what he was saying. “But I didn’t, and there is nothing we can do now. Please, it’s been a year. You… You have to go. You have to move on too.”

I got up from the bed. From our bed. Although it used to be just mine. Apparently one of the windows hadn’t been properly shut this whole time, because a gust of wind flung it wide open, causing the curtains to flap around uncontrollably. I saw tears roll down Killian’s cheeks again as he buried himself in his duvet. I realized for the very first time that he had changed my sheets and made the bed with his instead. Weird, I thought.

“I know you don’t want to hurt me, Isla,” he mumbled, under his shaky breath, holding onto the sheets like his life depended on it. “Please.”

“What are you saying?” I exploded. “This is my house, I invited you into it, why do I have to go?! Why does anybody have to go? I thought…”

The wind knocked over a figurine from the shelf. I went to pick it up and saw Killian flinch from the corner of my eye. I realized as I picked it back up that it wasn’t mine. In fact, the bookshelf wasn’t mine. Nor were the books in it. I looked around the room. It looked nothing like mine. I looked at my friend, feeling anger towards him for the very first time.

“Did you change everything in my room? Don’t you have your own? Why are you trying to kick me out of my own house?”

There was a long silence. Killian uncovered his face and moved towards me, slowly. I floated back down towards him and sat down on our bed.

“It’s not your house anymore, Isla,” he said, softly, his voice still hoarse from crying. “It hasn’t been for a long time.”

I whispered a very soft “What?” as reality dawned on me. I looked around again. There was a typewriter on the desk in the corner, the one I never used for anything other than dumping used clothes on it. The walls had been painted over and my posters were gone. Two water color paintings were hung up on the wall instead. The entire room was packed with stuff I didn’t own. It looked smaller without my mirrors.

“You’re not really here, love,” I looked down at him. I was the one crying now. He grabbed my hand and I looked at it, but I only saw his slender fingers grasping the covers. “You died when our train crashed.”

I let go of his hand, shaking my head.

“No.”

“Isla, please—”

“NO!”

I scurried away from him. The gale-strong wind entered the room with renewed strength and almost knocked over the whole shelf. Killian flinched and covered himself with the sheets again, pure fear in his eyes. I looked at my hands. Was it the wind? I looked back down at him.

“I’m… Dead?”

Killian started sobbing again, nodding, covering his face with both hands.

“I couldn’t save you. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Isla, I’ve done everything I could think of to make up for it, I… I didn’t want this. I’m so sorry.”

His apology made me feel sad. I lowered myself to be at his level again and grabbed his hands. I felt a shiver go down his spine.

“Hey,” I called for him. “Can you hear me?” He nodded. “Can you see me?” He nodded again, still crying. “And you… you’re sure that I’m…”

Killian broke down crying again. I hugged him. He didn’t hug me back. At least I didn’t feel him. Although I think I cannot actually remember a time that I did. Not after that first day. Not since we got off the train. Tears started rolling down my face as I realized. For a moment I worried I might get his shirt wet, before I realized they weren’t really falling anywhere.

We stayed like that for a while, in complete and utter silence. I looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. There never used to be a clock there. It marked 23:59 PM. The date was that of the day prior to the accident, but the year had gone up by one digit from what I remembered. I hadn’t realized it’d been that long.

“I believe you,” I muttered. “I believe you, Killian. I’m sorry. I love you.”

He raised his hand to touch my cheek, but it went right through me. We both cried.

“I love you too.”

I kissed him. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I did. I didn’t feel anything. He gave me a very weak smile.

“Your lips are cold.”

I chuckled.

“Take care of my family.”

He nodded.

“I do.”

I nodded back at him, tears rolling down both our faces. The clock marked 00:00 AM.

“Goodbye, Killian.”