Point of Retreat(50)

“Promise me you'll hear me out without arguing first," she says. "I'd like to have a mature conversation with you."

"Lake, you can't sit there and say I don't hear you out. It's impossible to hear you out when you're carving pumpkins all the damn time!"

"See? Right there. Don't do that," she says.

I grab the throw pillow next to me and cover my face with it to muffle a frustrated groan. She's impossible. I bring the pillow back down and rest my elbow on it as I get comfortable and prepare for her lecture.

"I'm listening," I say.

"I don’t think you understand where I’m coming from at all. You have no clue why I'm having doubts, do you?”



She’s right, I don’t. “Enlighten me,” I say.

She takes her jacket off and throws it over the back of the couch and gets comfortable. I was wrong, she’s not here to lecture; I can tell by the way she’s speaking to me. She’s here to have a serious conversation, so I decide to respectfully hear her out.

“I know you love me, Will. I was wrong to say that earlier. I know you do. And I love you, too.”



It’s obvious this confession is merely just a preface to something else she’s about to say. Something I don’t want to hear.

“But after hearing the things Vaughn said to you, it made me look at our relationship in a different way." She pulls her legs up on the couch and sits Indian style, facing me. "Think about it. I started thinking back on that night at the slam last year, when I finally told you how I felt. What if I wouldn’t have shown up that night? What if I wouldn’t have come to you and told you how much I loved you? You would have never even read me your slam. You would have taken the job at the junior high and we probably wouldn’t even be together. So you can see where my doubt comes into play, right? It seems like you just wanted to sit back and let the chips fall where they may. You didn’t fight for me. You were just going to let me go. You did let me go.”



I did let her go, but not for the reasons she’s telling herself. She knows this. Why does she doubt it now? I do my best to be patient when I respond, but my emotions are all jumbled up. I’m frustrated, I’m pissed, I’m happy she’s here. It’s exhausting. I hate fighting.

“You know why I had to let you go, Lake. There were bigger things going on last year than just us. Your mother needed you. She didn’t know how much time she had. The way we felt about each other would have interfered with your time left with her, and you would have hated yourself for it later. That’s the only reason why I gave up, and you know that.”



She shakes her head in disagreement. “It's more than that, Will. We’ve both experienced more grief in the past couple of years than most people experience in a lifetime. Think about the effect that had on us. When we finally found each other, our grief is how we related. Then when we found out we couldn’t be together, it made it even worse. Especially since Kel and Caulder were best friends by then. We had to interact constantly which made it even harder to shut off our feelings. And then to top it all off, my mom ended up having cancer and I was about to become a guardian, just like you. That's how we related. There were all these external influences at play. Almost like life was forcing us together.”



I let her continue without interrupting her as she requested I do, but I just want to scream out of sheer frustration. I’m not sure what point she’s getting at, but it seems to me she’s been thinking way too hard.

“Remove all the external factors for a second,” she says. “Imagine if things were like this: your parents are alive. My mom is alive. Kel and Caulder aren’t best friends. We aren’t both guardians with huge responsibilities. We have no sense of obligation to help each other out. You were never my teacher, therefore we never had to experience those months of emotional torture. We’re just a young couple with absolutely no responsibilities or life experiences tying us together. Now tell me, if all that was our current reality, what is it about me that you love? Why would you want to be with me?”



“This is ridiculous,” I mutter. “That’s not our reality, Lake. Maybe some of those things are why we’re in love. What’s wrong with that? Why would it matter? Love is love.”



She scoots closer to me on the couch and takes my hands in hers, looking me straight in the eyes. “It matters, Will. It matters because five or ten years from now, those external factors aren’t going to be at play in our relationship anymore. It’ll just be you and me. My biggest fear is that you’ll wake up one day and realize all the reasons you’re in love with me are gone. Kel and Caulder won’t be here to depend on either of us. Our parent’s will be a fleeting memory. We’ll both have careers that could support us individually. If these are the reasons you love me, there won’t be anything left to hold you to me other than your conscience. And knowing you, you would live with it internally because you’re too good of a person to break my heart. I don’t want to be the reason you end up with regrets.”