While they fight over me, I have a tendency to disappear. In my dreams at night I look for Jacob, and Ben will pull me out of the night and take what he wants from me and then leave me to fall back into the dark where every sign sends me in loops and the map is washed and faded, illegible and the way home is something reserved for after I have found what I need. It will be interesting when they do my autopsy someday. Not only will they find the pieces of my heart strung together on a tangled black cord but they will discover my shrunken pie-chart of a brain, divided by name, given to forgetting what the right hand was doing while the left hand took control.
I think I found him last night. He's been gone again for weeks and I want to yell at everyone that they are awful for living without him. Forgetting him. For pretending that life goes on because it doesn't. I am still waiting for him. When he was here the only one I missed was Cole, namely because whenever I touched Jacob I would think this was just insane, that I was finally able to not be afraid of his jealousy. But I keep waiting for Jacob to talk to me, to try and make everything better. To keep the boys in their corners and to keep me from sabotaging myself every waking moment of the day and sometimes of the night too.
In my dreams I listen to him sing. I watch his eyes as they smile or show concern when the rest of his face is stone, and I watch as they fill up when he is sad and slowly close when he is tired. Never once did I get to watch him fall asleep. He would not sleep unless I did first, and then he would lie at the ready to fight any demons that appeared in the moonlight, whether they be real or a product of my vivid and quite insane imagination.
Ben does not fight demons in the night, he sleeps on through, a novelty still from years of sleeping all day, or worse, not sleeping at all. He loves the routine of being home but he still loves to work too and I have entirely too much time where I feel the familiar sting of forbidden actions and instead I poke around the unused corners of my brain looking for dreams that are left behind.
