I met Amaia when I was around seven or eight. At the time, she looked different, very different. I had injured myself badly, not badly enough to cry, but badly enough to fear telling my mother. My pain was always an inconvenience. For some reason, whenever I tried to keep a secret for myself, it seemed too difficult a task and I failed, but that day I thought of having someone to tell and it somehow went down easier. Amaia came along after that. She made keeping secrets a second nature, shushing me always, teaching me how to reach for any word but the one I shouldn't be saying. I was both relieved and disturbed by her presence, but having that kind of weight around me helped me gain a sense of myself. I was constantly being drawn down by a certain heaviness with her around, sometimes to the point of not being able to get up and go about my day, and I wasn't so light and hollow anymore. Amaia would then teach me not to listen, placing her cold palms over my ears to protect them from noise, leaving only her songs of terrible mishaps and endless possibilities to echo in my brain, and soon she would find that I shouldn't be looking either, so she put her glass-like fingers, like murky water or thick fog, over my eyes and played images of unreal misfortunes in my head. I was starting to wonder where my lost senses go when they are not with me, and I was ready to accept the fact that she most likely takes them to herself. Amaia never left. On especially long days, she often urged me to lay my head on her shoulder and doze off. Some survival instinct made me agree to the former but not the latter. I would dream with a photograph of her under my pillow, but never with her next to me. She once told me that she felt that her sole purpose was to pull me away from great pains, and to grant me the slumber of a child with not a worry in the world, to be an emergency exit. She said she could make it easy, and I did want easy, admittedly, but I also grew to want so many other things. Amaia was constantly haunted by the shadow of life, because she was the shadow of life, and sometimes we cannot scurry to the shade even if it's more merciful than the scorching sun. I now trod to the steady beat of a heart, and wished to look into the face of reality, and I didn't understand whether I found it underwhelming or terrifyingly too much, but I wanted it anyhow because I am nothing outside of it, and because I hadn't only my pain to consider. Amaia wasn't the only thing clinging to my ribs. She did not go, still, she spread her roots farther than I can reach, knowing I will not reach behind doors that I'd locked myself. I know that when I am fully ready to forgive myself for ceasing to move, I will sleep on her lap and let her count my losses and make my name fade away, and I will allow myself a smile of relief, but I hope it will not happen out of pity for either of us, nor out of impulse, nor out of spite, nor out of madness, and I hope it is not her who forces me to bed.
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