My jaw clenches as I watch the water turn a darker shade of burgundy the more my blood pools, mixing with it slowly. My vision blurs. The terror from my past rapidly pulls me back. Grabbing hold of the porcelain, the blade slips from my fingers and falls to the floor. I lean against the sink, begging the nightmare to please, leave me be, as panic rises under my skin spreading quickly across my flesh like the plague.

But it wasn’t a bad dream. It was real. And just like always, her voice comes back to haunt me.

“I’ll be waiting, Peter. Forever.”

“Forever might not be long enough, Wendy.”

“Then I will wait for you in this life and in the next. I promise. I’ll never stop waiting, Peter. I’ll never stop believing you’ll come back for me.”

The thing is, I did come back for her. I waited. Watching. Observing. From Kingston Gardens across the street from her house. Days turned into months. Months turned into years. Until one day, I couldn’t watch anymore after what I witnessed. One day, I couldn’t stand the way I had willingly changed for her, a destiny she’d be overjoyed to learn that I embraced, if only she hadn’t turned her back on me first. A destiny I can never show her after what happened. Because one day, I had to force myself to turn away and return to Neverland, without her.

“Aren’t they the most beautiful babies you’ve ever seen?” her mother exclaimed that day as I watched Wendy finally emerge from the house.

“Perfect in every way,” he had said at Wendy’s side.

My Wendy. I couldn’t understand why they were talking like that with my Wendy. I watched from afar as her eyes cast to the ground and sadness reached from her heart to mine. I felt the cold hands of death in that moment as it grabbed ahold of my soul so tightly, I willingly gave myself over to it, wanting the darkness to swallow me whole. But it didn’t, not yet, and so I grasped onto the last piece of life I had left inside my soul as I emerged from the gardens, desperate for her to look up and see me after all the time I hid there waiting.

Although, even if she had, she wouldn’t have recognized the boy who started the transition to becoming a man. The beard I once feared was now thick and long on my face. I don’t know how long I had sat there, waiting for her, just like I had asked her to wait for me, but she didn’t. The irony still takes my breath away to this day.