Chapter 42 Melancholic Immersion
The bag of blood drips steadily into my arm, and I can’t stop watching it. The red liquid snakes down the clear tubing in a slow rhythm. I know it’s supposed to help me, but right now it looks like something else entirely...like it’s crawling inside me, taking over, forcing me to be aware of every ache, every weakness I’d rather ignore.
I woke up today feeling worse, oddly heavier in my bones, and my mind insists that it's because I slept in a hospital.
It’s dumb logic, I know. But people in theme parks are thrilled because it’s a theme park, people in libraries are quiet because it’s a library, people in churches feel peaceful because it’s a church. And hospitals....Hospitals make you feel sick. Your body and your mind, they align themselves to the setting. They tell you who you are here.
Michael left sometime after I fell asleep last night and came back this morning with breakfast, fruit salad in a little container and a couple more of those health bars. He said he'd fed Ember, cleaned her litter box, played with her for a bit. And for some reason, that tiny, mundane kindness hit me harder than the transfusion ever could. It makes me aware of how starved I am for it.
He’s sitting beside me now, reading to me from where we left off last night. I’m hardly listening. The words float past me, meaningless, until he stops reading. The sudden absence of his voice makes a strange panic rise in me. It's pathetic and irrational but I can’t help it. I turn to him, and he’s watching me.
He closes the book and rests it on the little stool beside my chair, leans back in his own, and folds his arms. For a beat, he doesn’t speak. Then he says, casually......almost too casually, “Melancholic immersion.”
I frown. “What?”
“Melancholic immersion,” he repeats, his piercing blue eyes holding mine with this strange calm conviction. “Most of the books in your apartment that you’ve read, they’re awfully tragic. Including this one.” He gestures at Never Let Me Go, but his gaze doesn’t leave me.
“It’s when you choose sadness willingly. When you let yourself dwell in it, even though you don’t have to. You could stop. You could distract yourself. But you don’t, you invite it instead. That’s what you’re doing, Ryan. You’re choosing it.”
The words settle over me like dust in a quiet room. I don’t answer right away. I can feel the truth of them crawling under my skin, pricking at me. But I scoff softly and shake my head. “You just made that up.”
“It’s real,” he argues. “Some people get home after a brutal breakup and instead of putting on something loud or cheerful, they queue up the saddest playlist they own. Not because it helps, but because it matches how they feel. Because sitting in the hurt feels too honest.”
I blink, I know he didn’t make it up.
The other night at dinner, before blood bags and this quiet unraveling, he’d leaned back in his chair, smug in that understated way of his, and told me he knew words for emotions most people only gesture at. Entire internal states people live inside without names for them.
I’d asked him to prove it.
Onism, he’d said....the frustration of being stuck inside one body, one life, knowing you’ll never experience the world from all the other angles it offers.
Then Opia, the uneasy intimacy of locking eyes with a stranger and feeling, just for a second, like something private passed between you.
And he'd mentioned Adronitis, the way getting to know someone new feels impossibly slow, knowing that all the depth and history you want sits frustratingly out of reach.
I remember staring at him then, stunned and a little undone. So now, I scoff again, weaker this time. “I’m not choosing sadness. I’m not seeking it out either.”
His gaze doesn’t waver. “You are,” he says quietly. “And I think you know that.”
He casually gestures at me. “It’s probably why your favorite book revolves entirely around impending death. Loss that’s inevitable. Lives measured by expiration dates.”
The words land heavy, and suddenly, I think of the text he sent yesterday morning. The one I saw and ignored because it felt cruel in the moment....mocking, even. I’d just been told I was being admitted. My world had shrunk to white walls and clipped voices and blood counts. And there it was....
‘Poor Lilly.’
I remember thinking, ‘I can’t feel sorry for her right now.’
Because Lilly isn’t real.
She’s a construct. A story. Her suffering ends when someone closes the book or turns the page. Mine doesn’t. I don’t get the mercy of a chapter break. I don’t disappear when the narrative demands it.
I’m real.
My pain is real.
And it doesn’t stop just because someone else needs the story to move on.
I look up at him, hesitant. “And what if I am? Choosing to be sad? Is there something wrong with that?”
Michael shrugs, the movement effortless, but there’s a steadiness in him I can’t shake. “Not necessarily,” he says. “But well, I’ve got enough hope for the both of us at the moment.”
He smiles, and it’s one of those smiles that just pulls at you, tugs you in, impossible to resist. I find myself letting out a soft, humorless chuckle, then mirroring it, smiling despite myself. I lean back in my chair and exhale like I'm letting the weight of the room settle. “I feel awful,” I admit softly. “Weak.”
“Physically or mentally?”
“Both,” I whisper, and it comes out almost like a warning. “I know my body’s going to start deteriorating along with my mind from now on.”
Michael snorts, sharp and dry, but not unkind. “Wow....Ryan Ashbrook, I have to say....your relentless optimism is overwhelming, I feel it radiating from here. Please remind me to bottle up all this cheerfulness.”
I roll my eyes and smile again because I can’t help it. “I try, it’s my specialty.”
A quiet settles between us, thick and heavy, before he leans forward. His hand cups my jaw, steady and sure, and then his lips are on mine.
I tense, my stomach twisting. I want to pull back, tell him it’s wrong, that I feel repulsive, that every inch of me wants to shrink away from this because I feel raw and exposed. But he doesn’t budge. He just holds me there with that gentle insistence. Slowly, the tension in my body softens. My chest eases, my hands fall from their defensive position, and I melt into him, into the weight of his presence, into the quiet devotion in the way he touches me.
His lips are warm and impossibly soft, pressing just enough to make me feel the weight of him without overwhelming me. I can feel the subtle heat of his breath, the slight stubble along his jaw brushing against my cheek. When he finally pulls back, it’s just far enough to look at me. And the first thing I notice, impossible to miss, is how his eyes are sharp and warm at once.
“You’re beautiful,” he says softly, almost reverently, like he’s speaking more to what he feels than what he sees. “I thought so the night we met. I think so even more now.”
I catch my breath, there’s no flattery here. No empty words, just truth, stripped and direct. And somehow it hurts....and it heals, all at the same time.