The Almost of Her

Zelma’s hair is the color of honey when the light hits it just right. Not the raw kind, but golden and warm, the kind you find in glass jars on corner store shelves, glowing under cheap fluorescent bulbs. Her skin reminds you of the color of the sun, almost like the warmest day yet crisp day in Autumn. But her face semi broad nose, full lips, almond eyes with matching mono-lids whispers a different story. People never know what to make of her.

She likes it that way.

She tells me things I can’t see. Like the man in the corner of the grocery store by the pickle jars, the one who follows us down each aisle but never picks anything up. I look. No one’s there. But her lips twist like she’s tasting something sour.

“Don’t look too long,” she says, brushing her straight honey blonde hair behind one ear. “They don’t like being noticed.” She whispers to my ears; I nod in agreement. She says they like it’s a club she was forced into; like it’s always plural. Never just one. And I have learned not to ask.

I am Nayana. My name means “the one who sees,” though sometimes I wish I could close my eyes more than I do and sometimes I wish I could see what she does. I’ve always watched her quietly from the folds of the room. Observing. Waiting. Learning when to lean in and when to back away.

Zelma can hold down a job. She works the administration office at a school on Flatbush, always wears lipstick usually red or rust; and she’s friendly in a way that makes strangers tell her secrets. She folds clothes with neat corners, knows how to make dollar-store shampoo feel like luxury and makes a mean meal when you’re hungry. You’d think she’s fine.

But I’ve seen her flinch at air. Swat at shadows. Swat herself to keep them off of her. Whisper apologies to a wall. I wish I had known it was her prodromal phrase.

At night, her bedroom door stays open with as many lights as possible on but not the ceiling light; she says they fear the light. I know it’s because she’s scared to be alone when the darkness folds into itself and becomes loud.

One evening, she cooked lamb and cried the whole time. Not sobbing…just quiet tears like her body was leaking. “Don’t ask,” she told me. “They’re close.” We ate in silence. I chewed around the salt. I watched her eyes dart around me when she attempted to speak but I said very little; it was like I was there and not there.

When I was ten, I caught her in the bathtub, a twisted towel in her mouth to muffle the sound, slashing at her back with a belt. Deep red welts, angry and raw, snaked across her shoulder blades. I stood frozen, my hand on the doorframe, not knowing if I should scream or leave.

Later, she told me it was the only way to get them off her; they liked touching her inappropriately. “You think I’m crazy,” she said, staring at the floor. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what crazy meant yet.

There was one night…one I never talk about that cracked something between us. It was summer and too hot to sleep. I had opened the window to let in air that didn’t exist. I was fifteen. She came into my room holding a butcher knife, barefoot, her green nightgown sticking to her legs.

She looked at me, then past me. Her eyes went wide.

“Nayana,” she whispered, “don’t move.”

I froze.

Not because she told me to but because I saw the way her grip on the handle trembled. Raising the blade. Is this it? Am I the next hallucination? Is this how I die at 15? I smelled the metal in the air. I felt her breath on my neck.

She lunged. I jumped off towards the wall. She swung the knife in wide arcs shouting in tongues I’d never heard. I dropped to the floor. She slashed at the air, protecting me from a world that only lived behind her eyes. That night, I slept on the fire escape, sweating and shaking and watching the stars blink like they knew a secret.

I tried to get her help as a child, as a teen and well into adulthood. As a child it would be brushed off and people say things like “She’s eccentric.” “She’s just spiritual.” “Maybe she’s sensitive to energies.”; heck even if she was this was consuming her in ways no one else had to grow up and witness. No one says sick. No one says help. No one stays too long.

She once told me she wanted to die because they wouldn’t leave her alone—because they crawled into her dreams and whispered things that wouldn’t stop when she woke up. I had her so close to getting properly assessed, so close to safety, to structure. The mental institution was ready. But she lied…she lied so well they called me to pick her up on my birthday, and when we stepped outside, she ran. Just like that. She knows how to clean the hallucinations off her face like makeup. How to hold just enough eye contact, smile just right, to make the professionals believe she’s tired, maybe eccentric, but fine. I spoke to guidance counselors with desperation in my throat, but they thought I was just another troubled teen acting out, not the quiet child trying to say, Please, there’s something wrong with my mother. No one ever heard what I was actually saying.

I studied schizophrenia like it was my second language. Quietly, after school. In libraries. On dial-up. On cracked phones. Into adulthood. I chased it through case studies, forums, books. Trying to match the shape of her mind to a name. Trying to name the thing so I could fight it. But the more I studied it, the more it stared back at me. I’ve never told anyone how many nights I’ve wondered—am I next? Is it hiding inside me, too? The fear that my thoughts will one day betray me, that the line between real and not will start to flicker and vanish.

And as she leans on me cracking so thinly and I alone trying to gather enough gold and poorly attempt my own version of Kintsugi. It’s just me…alone, little infant me. Little toddler me. Little child me. Little teen me. Little tired me.

Zelma smiles when they leave then looks at the air beside her and nods; then hums a tune I recognize and only identified as her song of victory.

She only talks to me and her mother about them. She says I’m the only one who doesn’t lie; until she thinks I lied. “Everyone else pretends,” she says. “Like they don’t see the cracks.”

Some days I think I do see them little shimmers in the world. The smell of sulfur when there shouldn’t be any. The way the hallway stretches too long at night. But I tell myself it’s just a trick of the senses.

Just almost.

She keeps journals. Not for thoughts, but to record their movements. Pages filled with things like

June 2nd — Two of them in the hallway. One tall, one shaped like smoke. Watched me while I folded clothes. Left after I turned the fan on.

June 7th — The red-eyed one said not to go to the bar. Went anyway. Met a man who asked too many questions. Was he one of them?

June 10th — Dreamed Nayana was surrounded. Woke up with blood on my hands. Was it mine?

She locks the journals in a breadbox that doesn’t lock. Once I asked her why she doesn’t see a doctor. She stared at me in an offensive glare for a long time. “Why would I let someone take my mind apart? I am not crazy! You just can’t see! You’re not gifted in these visions. I was born long before you.”

Zelma still folds my clothes when I visit, clothes that she’s bought me that never fit my size. She still kisses my forehead and tells me I’m her anchor. She still cooks meals like I haven’t eaten in months even though I still have to be mindful if there’s anything in it.

But I’ve noticed and know things others do not acknowledge. How the knife block is always one blade short. How she rubs her back against the bathroom doorframe like she’s scratching an itch no one else feels. How her eyes dart sideways when I’m talking.

She lives in two worlds. One foot in each. And neither lets her rest.

I started dreaming of her shadows. Not hers…mine. They sit at the foot of my bed some nights, watching. They don’t move, but they hum in low frequencies I feel in my bones.

I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never spoken it aloud.

Because what if it’s starting? What if almost becomes real? What if I’m just her echo? Have I conditioned myself to see? Am I finally gifted? Am I finally cursed?

One afternoon, we were eating plums on the porch when she asked me “You ever think about why they picked me?” I didn’t answer. “I used to be like you. Quiet. Bright. Kept things inside. Then they came. And I couldn’t shut it out anymore.” “What if they’re not real?” I asked gently. She looked at me with angry eyes glassy like a window in rain. “If I bleed from something, Nayana, does it matter if you can’t see it?”

There are no diagnoses in her world. No medication. No hospital stays. cycling through stages at a time in her mind. Just contrived rituals. Salt at doorways. Lemons in bowls. Whispers to mirrors. And me.

She trusts me. Enough to be real with me. Enough to show the unraveling. But love doesn’t stop fear. And fear doesn’t cancel love.

I keep my distance now not out of cruelty but out of a need to survive; to keep myself tethered.

Still, I watch.

This is all routine. I can’t remember when it became routine but one day it did; like a chronic timeline of despair. I watch the curve of her smile before it collapses into suspicion. I watch her shadow as it stretches further than mine. I watch her disappear in plain sight mid sentence of a tirade she is going on.

And I wonder when does seeing become believing? When does almost become always?

Zelma is not gone. She wakes and she breathes. She makes fried fish on Fridays and sings in the kitchen to old records. She dresses in bold colors and remembers every birthday. She laughs at my jokes. She loves me fiercely when the mood fits. And some days, she stands at the window with a knife in her hand, whispering warnings to something that doesn’t breathe.

People only see the parts that look familiar.

I see all of her.

They think she’s a myth. A story too strange to hold. But I know better. I know the weight of what isn’t there. I know what it’s like to grow up with someone whose mind lives in the in-between. I know how the almost of her has shaped all the real of me. And I know the silence I carry like a stone in my mouth. That one day it might be me standing at the edge of what’s real, whispering warnings to the air, and hoping someone’s watching or at least willing to genuinely listen.