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“I don’t see any red flags here, other than he’s got a J name. J-named men are the worst. I’m following him on Instagram from my throwaway account to keep up surveillance. You may proceed.”
“Nope. We haven’t signed contracts yet. They really need nurses at Royaume, they said they’re more than happy to make the switch. And it’s only a six-week assignment, we’ll be in and out. Just for the summer.”
“I think I’m going to save it until you see it.” I put up a hand. “Now remember, no matter what’s behind that door, don’t fall in love with me. That’s not what we’re doing here.” Emma laughed, and I felt relieved that I’d regained enough composure to be funny.
“She was a single mom, Justin, doing the best she could. She couldn’t afford overnight daycare and I was really independent. Honestly, it was fine 99 percent of the time.”
Sometimes the best way to show love or be kind to someone is to meet them where they are.”
“I’ve had a lot of bad things happen to me, Justin. I think sometimes the key to happiness is framing those things in a different way.”
Make me hyperaware of her comings and goings. Make me try harder to be less of a burden so maybe she wouldn’t feel the need to put me down again and go. Do well in school. Do my own laundry. Make my own food. Don’t ask for anything. Don’t need anything. Clean up after myself. Then after her. Be helpful. Be invisible. Be small.
It was like there was no peaceful place to exist, no emotional safe space. I could have chaos, or I could have worry. I could be in the tornado, or I could be in the eye. But I could never be out of the storm. It was so, so exhausting to live this way and I had always lived this way because when it came to my mother, I didn’t know how to not care.
This was not a woman I wanted to end things with after four dates.
If you can choose anger or empathy, always choose empathy. I couldn’t. At this point anger was all I had. I got up and closed the blinds.
craaaaanky.
It was so easy to love this version. Maybe she would stay this version. Maybe she was doing okay. Getting help. Settling down with age, wanting something steadier.
But I had nowhere else to go and no one to go to. Nowhere to be small.
I leaned my hip on the counter. “I have this thing where I get small,” I said, looking at the towel as I dried my hands. “I get really withdrawn and I just want to be alone.”
I don’t need anyone. And I know that sounds sort of terrible, but it’s actually comforting to know that I have this ability to need no one. It feels like a superpower. Like I’m untouchable.”
“Unhealed trauma is a crack. And all the little hard things that trickle into it that would have rolled off someone else, settle. Then when life gets cold, that crack gets bigger, longer, deeper. It makes new breaks. You don’t know how broken she was or what she was trying to do to fill those cracks. Being broken is not an excuse for bad behavior, you still have to make good choices and do the right thing. But it can be the reason. And sometimes understanding the reason can be what helps you heal.”
But if you don’t think your life would be better without them in it, then accept that they have cracks. Try to understand how they got them and help fill them with something that isn’t ice.”
The broken parts and the broken people inside. All mine, all at once.
“So you’d give up someone perfect because his life took a shit turn and he ended up having to raise some kids.”
Of everything, the trash bags were somehow the worst part. They were so dehumanizing. It made me feel disposable.
Not everything that comes out of crisis is bad. Sometimes your traumas are the reason you know how to help.
You can’t negotiate feelings. You can’t convince someone they feel something they don’t. She either felt for me strongly enough to stay and accept my situation with my family, or she didn’t.
He pulled me closer and kissed the top of my head. And for the first time maybe ever, I felt like I belonged somewhere.
“You paddled here,” I deadpanned. “On the unicorn floatie.”
“If this isn’t magic, then what is?” he asked. “What does it feel like to be under a spell if this isn’t it?”
The realization dawned before me. I’d been more affected by my upbringing than I’d been willing to admit. Because where else had I learned to live like this? Who else did I learn it from if not Mom, the woman who erased my past and never stopped moving? She’d trained me too well.
There are so many things in life that exist on a spectrum. Trust. Kisses. Love.
I felt full of cracks all of a sudden. Deep, long, jagged cracks. And they’d always been there. I’d just learned to live with them so long I no longer noticed them. I’d hopped over them and built little bridges and taken other routes, but I never filled them. I never fixed them. I didn’t even know how.
But I knew now that Justin was the only person in the world I could ever disappear into.
“We’ll try it,” she said, into the phone. “I’ll stay.”
but I was realizing that even though I loved her, I wasn’t sure I liked her.
“Sometimes I feel like the seasons could come and go and come and go, a hundred years could pass, a thousand, the ground could collapse under us, this house could crumble and go back to the earth, and we would still be standing here frozen in time, because every second I’m with you is eternal. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“I want you to know that your empathy is beautiful, Emma. I hope you never lose that. I do hope that one day you get some boundaries though.”
Because when you’re in love, you do hard things. And nothing about anything was easy right now.
“You’re not asking too much,” he said. “You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.”
It was the depth of the deception. The layers upon layers of lies she told to keep me from ever knowing this existed.
My mother’s neglect wasn’t the product of mental illness, or lack of resources, or circumstances beyond her control, the inability to do better. My life was chosen for me. It was chosen by her.
I’d been operating on the belief that I should be the most important thing in her life. How could I not be? I was her baby. I was all she had. So if she mistreated me, it was never for lack of love, because of course she loved me. How could she not? I spent my life excusing the very real evidence that I was nothing to her. I was a gerbil she kept in a too-small cage. A fish in a cup of water. Something to look at and entertain her when she was bored and wanted to play house.
It was the death of the last innocent, naive version of myself. That Emma no longer existed. I was snuffed out like one of her candles.
I felt myself get small. I got so small, I vanished. It was catastrophic. A total decimation. A detachment like I’d never experienced.
That if you can frame the terrible things in the best possible way, that’s where true happiness comes from.
I knew the decades that could pass in a minute. I’d somehow aged more than that today. I’d lost eons and I’d never get them back.
How do you recover from something like this? How do you walk around in the world after finding out your whole life was a lie? How do you wear mascara and buy stamps and go to the carwash and vacuum and do all the things that fully functional people do?
“You are not what happened to you. You are what you do next.”
Instead she’d end up being the one who got away. Not a soulmate, just the love of my life. And unfortunately they’re not the same thing.
For the first time in my life, I was capable of love—and the loss that came with it. I could handle it now. I’d healed enough for it.
“I didn’t feel abandoned,” she said, looking me in the eye. “’Cause I knew if I ever called you, you’d come.”
I’d passed a test I didn’t even know I’d been taking.
A year ago I would have been mad at her for leaving. It was black and white back then. To me, love meant you stayed. But now I understood that love sometimes means you let someone go.
The best kind of love doesn’t happen on moonlit walks and romantic vacations. It happens in between the folds of everyday life. It’s not grand gestures that show how you feel, it’s all the little secret things you do to make her life better that you never tell her about.
