Shoshana Dahdi

RUNNER UP

Taliyah

It was five years ago, on a suffocating August afternoon. The air hung thick and wet, pressing in through every open window. Heat settled into the walls, into the furniture, into us. The smell of cut hay drifted through the house and refused to leave. My dad moved from room to room insisting on airflow, propping doors wide, chasing a breeze that never came.

I was eighteen that summer, restless with the future. University was waiting. My life felt mapped out, certain, inevitable.

I did not yet know how quickly certainty could collapse.

Not a day has passed since that August that I haven’t found my way back to you.

My sister and I lived in extremes. One moment we were tangled in laughter on the bedroom floor, watching anime until our eyes hurt; the next we were shouting over something trivial, like my crumpled blue top buried at the back of her wardrobe.

“Taliyah, where’s my blue top?”

“How would I know?”

We fought loudly and pointlessly.

But beneath it, we told each other almost everything.

There was a spring morning when we wandered into the long grass behind the house, following a narrow stream as it curved through the trees. The leaves were new, that bright, translucent green that looks as though it has just been invented, and sunlight slipped through in fragments, dappling our arms and faces.

We walked without direction. Then we danced. Then we sang.

I trailed my hands along branches as we passed, feeling the softness of leaves and the quick sting of thorns. Taliyah’s hair fell in loose curls down her back, longer and browner than I remembered, freed from its usual knots. We wore thin, flowery dresses, our scarred knees bare to the air.

We spoke in half-whispers, as though the moment might disappear if we were too loud.

“Taliyah,” I said quietly, “I think I have weird-shaped boobs.”

She glanced at me, completely unbothered. “I quite like mine.”

“That’s not very helpful.”

She laughed, and the sound carried through the trees.

In a clearing, bluebells spread so densely they erased the earth beneath them, a carpet of blue that felt almost unreal. We stopped without speaking.

It felt like stepping into something sacred.

Then she spotted a pile of woodchips at the edge of the clearing.

“Let’s make a path.”

We carried handfuls back and forth, shaping a winding trail through the flowers. She sang as she worked, her voice stretching almost too far, almost too thin.

But she was happy.

That kind of happiness was rare and fragile, as though looking at it too directly might frighten it away.

So I let her sing.

Watching her, something inside me steadied with the quiet certainty that this bright, unguarded version of her was worth everything.

The otter appeared so suddenly it felt imagined, slipping from the stream with its fur clinging to its narrow body. Its eyes flicked between us.

We stilled.

Then we looked at each other.

“I think…” I hesitated. “I think we’ve destroyed its home.”

The words landed heavily between us.

Taliyah’s face crumpled. “Oh no. You’re right.”

The tears came quickly, as if they had been waiting just beneath the surface.

“We have to put them back.”

She moved urgently, gathering armfuls of woodchips and returning them to the riverbank as carefully as if precision alone could undo the damage. I followed her lead, though I did not feel it with the same intensity.

But I understood her.

She carried a softness that did not know where to go. Most of the time, her feelings stayed locked inside until they escaped sideways in anger or silence.

Here, with this small creature, she allowed herself to feel everything.

And I loved her for it, even if I did not yet know how to say so.

Years later, at the climbing wall, I saw her cry like that again. We were older then, or at least pretending to be.

“Taliyah… do you self-harm?”

She looked startled. “No. Why would you say that?”

“I read your diary.”

The space between us tightened.

“I didn’t do it,” she said quickly. “I just draw it so I don’t.”

“Taliyah…” My voice faltered. “I read it.”

Her eyes filled and something in her folded inward; she looked younger than she was.

“You can tell me.”

“No, Shoshana. You don’t understand.”

The silence that followed felt enormous.

Eventually, she told me she would get help.

I held onto that promise not because I trusted it completely, but because I needed to.

Loving her meant choosing belief, even when fear pressed in.

And then there was August. The heat against the windows. The doors left open. The smell of hay drifting through the house, thick and sweet and inescapable.

A day like any other.

Until it was not.

I used to think love would be gentle when it arrived, something clear and recognisable.

But loving Taliyah was never gentle.

It was loud and unfinished. It was arguments over nothing and laughter that left us breathless. It was knowing exactly how to wound each other and choosing, sometimes, not to. It was carrying her without realising I was doing so. It was the weight of her and the lightness too.

It was the forest.

The singing.

The otter.

It was all of it.

And then, suddenly, it was memory.

Now it is the smallest things that return her to me:

A flash of blue in a field.

Someone singing slightly off-key.

The stillness of water before something breaks the surface.

And always, the heat.

That heavy, breathless August heat.

In loving memory of Taliyah.