Begin Again(51)

My throat tightens. “I’m not—I know that. That’s not it at all.”

He doesn’t back down the way I expect he will, letting me say the words but not letting them sink in. “Maybe it’s not, but I think you need to hear it,” he says.

My palms are so sweaty that I can’t help rubbing them against the edges of my coat. I scramble for something to say, some way to dismiss him, but it’s almost as if my lungs won’t let me. They can’t seem to find the air.

“Sometimes your friends will need help. And sometimes you’ll need it. But that doesn’t mean that we have to solve everything for each other.” His mouth twists to the side. “That’s the point of having friends, plural. A support system. Everyone helps when they can. They don’t spread themselves too thin.”

“But I’m not,” I say quietly, stubbornly.

“Aren’t you, though? I mean—you’ve been so busy trying to fix things. Shay’s major. My sleep schedule. These ribbons for your boyfriend. Every single email to the show and your old column. You’re telling me nothing in your own life is falling through the cracks?”

I need to shut this down. Need to find some way to gracefully end this conversation before it leads somewhere I don’t want to go myself, let alone with someone else.

“I just . . .” I swallow hard. Try to fall back on the same reason I gave him a few weeks ago, walking back from trivia, when he first brought the fix-it urge up. “It makes me happy, being able to help.”

But this time Milo just tilts his head at me, as if to say, Does it? As if to silently call me out on something that’s too complicated to give a name to, too closely woven into my being to define.

“I think you should be happy in your own life first,” says Milo.

My eyebrows lift before I can stop them. “Do I seem unhappy?”

Milo shrugs. “Well—yeah, sometimes. But we all are sometimes,” he says. “I think the only difference is whether you’re willing to acknowledge it. And sometimes I think your whole obsession with fixing things is you not acknowledging it.”

There’s this moment then, when it feels like something in me breaks away; some kind of barrier between me and a truth I’ve been avoiding so long that despite all my attempts, it’s buried itself in me. It’s suddenly so loud that I know if I peer at the feeling—if I really let myself sit in it, instead of pushing it down the way I usually do—it’s less happiness, and more relief. Not the addition of something good, but the absence of something else.

Because the truth is, knowing I can be helpful means that I’m not a burden. And in the years when my dad was away—the years he left me with two women who may have loved me deeply and endlessly, but certainly never imagined having to raise me in their retired years—I couldn’t help feeling like one a lot of the time. They didn’t know what to do with me. Not my dad, who suddenly just stopped being a dad; not my grandmas, who tried their best, but could never fill that space my mom left behind; not even the Whits, who could treat me like a member of the family, but only ever to an extent.

And yeah, when I was a kid, wanting to help came naturally. My mom helped with her quick tongue and ability to shed light on issues. I helped them by listening and shedding light on people. We were bonded by the mutual satisfaction of knowing we’d been able to use our abilities to make other people feel heard, feel cared for.

But after she died, after I started feeling so separate from everyone else, it started to feel less like an instinct to help, and more of an itch. A compulsion. The more people I helped, the easier it was to shove that feeling of being a burden away.

You don’t need to prove anything. Even as the words are trying to settle in me, I can’t help resisting them. When you get used to living a certain way—used to measuring your life, and maybe even your worth in a certain way—it’s so much easier to keep going in an old rhythm than to try to pick up one you’ve never known.

My eyes burn, a strange convergence of realizations all hitting me at once. Not just the mindset that’s driven me these past few years. But everything in my life that I’ve put on hold because of it.

And there it is—the heart of what Milo’s dad meant. These are the pieces I haven’t picked up. The mess I’ve been ignoring. I can’t scorch the earth and pretend it never happened. Blue Ridge State is my chance to begin again, but I still have to look back if I want to look ahead.

“I want . . .”

The two words are so overwhelming in their potential. I’ve always known what I wanted. Always had my life mapped out. But those were concrete, measurable achievements. The things that I want are things I haven’t let myself consider. Things I’m not sure I can even have.

I want to love and be loved without ever having to wonder if it’s conditional. I want a life that is sometimes just my own, without feeling like I’m responsible for anyone or anyone is burdened with being responsible for me. I want back what I lost—at least however much of it I can still get.

“What?” Milo asks quietly.

I clench my fists at my side, steeling myself with a confidence that feels borrowed. Like I’m pulling it out of the past, out of my younger self’s heart. It takes a few long moments, but then it settles in me, adapts to my new edges, to the new cracks in between.