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The moment Emma came into view, my entire world slipped into slow motion. My brain took a screenshot. I felt the moment freeze and save. She was beautiful.
was physically willing myself to act normal. Be cool, Justin. Be. COOL. She’s just a regular person. I glanced at her. She was definitely not just a regular person.
“You don’t want to live somewhere? Like, find a forever home where you can plant things in the earth?” She looked back at her mom’s luggage. “Maybe one day. But so far I haven’t found a home I’d want to stay at forever.” “Maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe it’s a person.” She blew a soft breath through her nose. “Maybe it is.”
the counter and peered around the cavernous kitchen. “You know what? This man needed me.” She gazed back at me thoughtfully. “I think he’s been sleepwalking. I’m going to wake him up.”
I sat back in my corner. I didn’t want to assume Emma wanted me closer. She looked at me, amused. “All the way over there?” “Well, I don’t want to crowd you. Though the docking station is available if you’d like to give it a try.” She made a show of thinking about it. “You know, I would like to give it a try. See what all the fuss is about.” I grinned and made a come-here motion with my hand and she scooted over and let me put an arm around her. The highlight of my entire week, hands down.
I set my lips into a line. “So you think she got so depressed she decided to steal two hundred thousand dollars?” “Justin, people get so depressed they kill themselves.”
“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.”
“So how do you reconcile that?” I asked. “How do you learn to forgive her?” She shrugged. “You don’t have to forgive her. You really don’t. You can still love someone that you’ve decided not to speak to anymore. You can still wish them well and hope for the best for them. Choosing a life without them doesn’t mean you stop caring about them. It just means that you can’t allow them to harm you anymore. 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.
She put a hand to her chest. “Let’s be very clear here. I am not the obstacle in the way of your happiness. That person is you.”
The hug was a warm factory reset. I didn’t want out of it. It was the weirdest feeling, like I wanted to leave with him, just walk right out of my job and go. Those cartoons where the character smells something delicious and it puts them in a trance and they float after the scent in a daze.
I was going to get to her or die trying.
I didn’t know why it was so hard to say what I was feeling. Maybe because it felt hard to feel what I was feeling.
And for the first time maybe ever, I felt like I belonged somewhere.
“We’ll try it,” she said, into the phone. “I’ll stay.”
“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.”
“You’re not asking too much,” he said. “You were just asking the wrong person. Ask me instead.”
“I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since the moment I laid my eyes on you. And I know we haven’t known each other long, but I don’t care, because it’s true and it’s there, and it doesn’t matter to me if it makes sense or not. I’ve been waiting my whole life to feel like this and I thought it was a curse that nobody else ever worked out. But it wasn’t. It’s just that they weren’t you.”
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.
