Dreams of 18(101)

By the end of it, I’m crying. I’m sobbing and I want him, I need him to hear me. I beg him to understand.

When he steps closer to me, I think he does.

His hands reach out and he wipes off my tears and I tighten my fists in his t-shirt. I try to hold onto him, keep him here so he doesn’t go anywhere.

So he doesn’t leave me.

I watch him through watery eyes as he leans down and kisses me on the forehead.

God.

God.

He gets it, doesn’t he?

“Maybe you don’t need those things, but you deserve them,” he rasps against my hair. “You deserve them more than anyone in this fucked up, shitty world. Go home, baby.”

He moves away then.

My hold on him is so tiny and so unaffecting that he breaks it easily. And by the time I realize what’s happened, he’s already opening the door of his truck and climbing inside.

“I can’t go home,” I blurt out to his back. “This is my home. This. Here.”

His hand rests on the door as he faces me.

He takes one sweep of my body, my bare feet, the shirt of his that I’m wearing. My splotchy face and rumpled hair, before he comes back to my eyes.

“This is no one’s home. Never has been.”

That hits me so much and so hard that I don’t recover from it until he’s already in the truck, backing out of the driveway.

He does it so fast that all I can see for a few seconds is a cloud of dust.

Once it settles though and he’s disappeared down that winding trail that cuts through the woods and ends at that rusty mailbox on the side of the road, I take off after him.

I run and run along that dirt path, hoping to chase him down. I call out his name over and over because how can he say that this cabin isn’t a home?

How can he say that?

How can he say that when we’ve been building it together over the past few weeks?

I run and run after him so I can tell him, it’s ours.

This is our home.

But he’s gone and I don’t see him, not even the tail-end of his black truck, and that just takes away all my fight, and I crumple to the ground and fall on the pieces of my broken heart and my dreams.





The cabin feels dead.

It feels like it did the first day I moved back in after years and years of being away. During those initial days, everything was covered in a thick film of dust and old memories.

I cleaned it up the best I could before letting it go and drowning in alcohol.

Until she showed up.

Until she fixed everything. Fixed me. Saved me.

I walk in further, my legs taking me to the kitchen without my volition. As if they can’t believe she’s gone and they need to check it for themselves. The kitchen is usually where she’d be when I came home from work, always baking something, smelling so sweet and looking so soft.

When I find the kitchen empty – expectedly – my feet stumble.

My body and my heart can’t understand the fact that she’s gone. They can’t believe that I’ve sent her away.

They can’t comprehend this thing that I’ve done.

This awful, cruel thing.

They don’t get how I called her mother. How I hurt her when I’ve always promised to destroy anything and everything that dares to harm her.

My brain understands it though.

My brain grasps the betrayal.

It understands the fact that I haven’t been able to protect her. I haven’t been able to keep her safe from the world.

I understood that last night when I was reading her journals. Her thoughts and dreams that she left for me so casually on the coffee table.

Where they sit even now exactly like I left them.

All this time I kept thinking that my ruined relationship with Brian and gossip, that article, were the only casualty and consequence of that kiss.

And I could’ve stopped it all.

I could’ve stopped that kiss from happening if I had just stepped away that night and not been greedy to bask in her light. If I could’ve just walked inside my house and not approached her when I saw her through the windshield of my truck.

She was there, picking the roses, and she looked so… beautiful and fragile and pale with the moonlight illuminating her delicate lines that I had to go to her.

I had to approach her.

My legs wouldn’t listen. Like tonight, they had a mind of their own.

I wish they had obeyed me.

I wish I’d stopped myself from going to her like I had done a million times before.

Then none of this would’ve happened.

She wouldn’t have suffered like she did.

Because the biggest casualty of that kiss was the girl that I sent away this morning.

Violet.

Her.

She paid for it; she was fucking crucified for it. For something so pure and innocent. Something that was supposed to be private and for her and her only.

I could’ve protected her.

I should’ve protected her. Like I should’ve tried harder to send her away.

Because I’ve been hurting her. I’ve been hurting her in the ways I didn’t understand until I read her journals.

She’s in love with me.

She loves me.

Or maybe I did understand. She said she had a crush on me, didn’t she? So maybe I knew about her love but still, I kept her here.