Cycle

Weeks. Then a month. Then I stopped counting.

The marks faded. I told myself that meant something. I told myself a lot of things. That it had been a strange night, that I had drunk too much, that the woman in the bar had been beautiful and I had been lonely and my imagination had done the rest. I told myself this so many times the words lost their shape.

But the pull did not fade. It deepened, settled into the marrow, became the first thing I felt waking and the last thing I felt before sleep. A low sweet ache with no source. A door in me that had been opened and would not close.

I started missing things. Dinners. Deadlines. Calls from my mother, from friends, from the one person at work who still covered for me. The plants on my windowsill curled brown and died. I let them. I let all of it go, piece by piece, and watched myself do it the way you watch a house through a window, from very far away.

I stopped eating properly. I stopped sleeping properly. What I did, mostly, was walk. Those same wet streets, the bar, the alley, retracing the route like a prayer, looking for a woman who had not given me her number, who had not, when I thought about it, given me anything but a kiss on the wrist and a sentence I could not stop hearing.

You are exactly where you're supposed to be.

I looked for her in every cool, dark woman in every cool, dark room, and none of them were her, and I went home alone each time and stood at the window and felt the pull like a hook in my chest and knew, slowly, that I was not looking for a woman. I was waiting for an owner.

By the end I had nothing left. My job was gone. My friends had stopped calling. The apartment smelled of stale water and unwashed sheets, and the notepad on the desk, the one that used to list goals for social confidence, held one line, written over and over in my handwriting until the pen had torn the paper.

Find her. Find her. Find her.

The night everything broke, I sat on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and my phone dark in my hand and the rain coming in through a window I had left open for weeks, and I thought, simply, that I was finished. That the world had closed around me and there was no air left, and that this was what I had chosen, and that I deserved it.

And then a knock. Soft. Patient. As if it had all the time in the world.

I opened the door and she was there. Elena. As though no time had passed at all. As though the month of rot had been a single held breath and now she had decided to let me breathe. She did not ask what had happened to me. She did not glance at the ruin of the apartment or the ruin of me. She simply took my face in her cool hands and kissed my forehead, very gently, and said, "You're ready."

I went with her. I did not pack. I did not lock the door.

What happened next I cannot tell you in order. We were in a car, her hand on my thigh, the city lights smearing past. We were in a room with no windows and candles that did not flicker. There were others there, beautiful and still and watching, and their eyes were her eyes, and I should have been afraid but I only felt relief, vast and drowning. There was wine, dark and thick, and I drank it, and it tasted of her. There was her mouth on my throat again, and her hands, and my own voice breaking open, and a pleasure so total it stopped being pleasure and became something closer to being unmade.

I remember her whispering against my skin, give it to me, all of it, and I did. I remember thinking, with the last small clear corner of my mind, this is my soul, this is my soul, and I am handing it over, and then the corner went dark too.

I woke in my own bed. Clean sheets. The window closed. The apartment spotless, aired, the dead plants replaced with new ones, green and bright on the sill. My phone showed seventeen missed calls and a message from my old boss asking where I'd been, that they could talk, that there was still a place for me if I wanted it. The rent, which I had not paid, was paid. The fridge was full.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, in clean clothes I did not own, with a faint sweet ache in my neck and the taste of dark wine at the back of my throat.

Everything was fixed. Everything was in order. As if the month of ruin had been a fever dream that someone had quietly tidied away.

And I knew. Sitting there, in that impossible clean light, I knew what it meant. I knew the cost of the order, and who had paid it, and what I owed, and that I would pay it again, gladly, the next time the pull in my blood grew loud enough and the world went dark enough and she appeared at my door with her patient smile and her cool hands.

The cycle was already turning. I could feel it beginning, the low sweet ache threading back through me, the small clean corner of my mind already whispering the only prayer I had left.

Find her. Find her. Find her.

And this time, I did not even pretend I wanted to stop.