Somewhere Between Rules and the Horizon
(AKA Rehab Romance)
written by: Daisy King
She didn’t talk, not really.
Words stuck like gum in the throat,
half-chewed vowels and maybe one consonant
if you caught her on a good day.
Social anxiety, they said,
as if fear had a clean diagnosis.
He was there for pretending too well-
years of costume changes,
smiles that never touched anything warm.
Dissociation: a clinical term
for disappearing without leaving the room.
They met in the stale smoking area
between Group and the dining room,
both trying to look busy.
She traced circles in her notebook.
He counted ceiling tiles.
It felt like falling in slow motion.
They weren’t supposed to touch.
They touched anyway.
Fingertips in the back of the van to town,
knuckles brushing in line for meds,
toes under the table playing cards.
Each contact a stolen song lyric
they hummed to themselves later.
There were beach walks, supervised.
But even the staff got tired,
and they drifted
to the tide-line.
She stared at the waves like they shared secrets
they were trying not to tell.
He pointed- “Look.”
Dolphins like punctuation marks.
A whale’s tail
slapping the sky shut.
“Look at me”-
When she raised her eyes
he kissed her with a salty mouth,
her lip trembling like she didn’t know
if it was safe to be a body.
They were two ghosts
pretending to be made of skin again.
Then came the rule: No Contact.
Because connection, apparently,
was a symptom too.
So they wrote notes
folded into vitamins,
hid glances in group check-ins.
She learned to speak with her eyebrows.
He stopped disappearing.
Love doesn’t always look like roses,
he said once.
Sometimes it looks like
a missed dose,
a shared blanket,
a smile you only let out
when no one’s watching.
They got better.
Or they didn’t.
The world opened again,
or maybe it never had.
But they still carry that beach in their heads-
where the dolphins swam like question marks
in the waves, and a whale
lifted the weight of the sea
just long enough
for them to believe
they were real.
- Somewhere Between Rules and the Horizon - May 25, 2025
- Amends - November 11, 2020
- An Ode To Life’s Little Threats - August 24, 2020
