June First

by Jennifer Hartmann

“Besides, I think my mom might have a baby tonight.” “Really?” “Maybe. She said her belly felt like a hyena was chomping through her loo-der-us.”

“June always feels like a new beginning.”

The truth is, my mother wasn’t wrong when she told me that June was a new beginning. It just wasn’t the beginning anybody wanted.

A peacefulness enters the room. A mother’s love.

“I’ll love you like my very own, Brant. I’ll love you like Caroline loved you. You have my word.”

She hums a lullaby. It’s not the same one Mom sang to me, but it makes me both happy and sad at the same time. Happy because I feel loved. Sad because the person I love most isn’t the one holding my hand and singing me lullabies.

I feel claimed. And after losing everything I love, it feels really good to belong to someone.

She claimed me like the sunrise claims the morning sky with lightness and blush, promise and wonder. She claimed me like a cyclone funneling through a quiet town, taking no prisoners. She claimed my good and my bad, my light and my dark. She took my broken, ugly bits and molded them into something worthy of display. She turned my agony into art. June claimed me in a way that could ultimately be defined by a single word: Inevitable.

And to understand the end, you need to know the middle. I’ll warn you, though—it’s not a pretty middle. It’s messy and complicated and at times soul-crushing beyond comprehension.

The first law of nature is self-preservation. Cut off that which may harm you. But if it is worth preserving, and is meaningful, nourish it and have no regrets.

I’m hopelessly, irrevocably in love with you, June Bailey. The desperate, aching kind of love. The kind there’s no coming back from. The kind there’s no way out of. The kind that’s going to be the death of me one day. I fall more in love with June than I ever thought possible as we clutch each other in a moonlit graveyard on her eighteenth birthday, with my mother on my mind and the scent of sweet desserts dancing in the air.

“You were unsure which pain is worse: the shock of what happened, or the ache for what never will.” —SIMON VAN BOOY, EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL BEGAN AFTER

A new beginning, tainted with the stains of the spills I left behind.

“Grief is selfish.

“You’re not responsible for the way others react to what you need to do to get better.”

“What happened between you both was big.” Kip meets my eyes. A beat passes. Then he finishes, “Be bigger than it.”

“No relationship comes without a fight, but it has to be worth fighting for. It has to be worth all the sacrifices you’ll inevitably have to make.”

A tragedy occurred, that much I know. I just don’t know if the tragedy was in her leaving me… …or loving me.

And when you’ve lost everything that matters, a crumb might as well be a four-course meal.

I’ve always put June first. She’s always put me first. And I hope, I pray, I beg, That someday… We’ll finally be able to put us first.

“I told you I’d wait forever.”

“Never underestimate a man willing to wait forever for the woman he loves.”

Never underestimate a man willing to wait forever for the woman he loves, for there is nothing he’s not capable of. Noble to some. A fool to many. But to that woman? He is everything.