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My mother’s necklace glimmers in the light, nestled against the collarbone of a girl who was almost mine.
My little thief. My little lying thief. I don’t care what she’s done. I don’t care who she’s become. I will love whatever she is now. I bury my face in her hair. “I love you so much. I should never have let you leave.”
cry for all the moments in our past that meant nothing. How deeply I felt them all and how badly I wish I had never left. I suppose I should consider myself lucky to learn just how shallow his feelings for me actually were, but I’m not. If someone would allow me to go back to those days, to return to my ignorance, I’d accept the offer gladly.
Perhaps it’s time I came around to this way people have of saying things they don’t mean. If I’d realized sooner that this is how the world works, I’d be so much better off right now.
There’s a fiction we tell ourselves when we’re saying goodbye to someone we love. We always pretend there will be another time, because it would be too painful to acknowledge it’s the last.
“She’s the most beautiful thing,” I whisper. He turns and his eyes go from my hair to my eyes to my nose to my mouth. “She’s one of them.”
But then he takes three large strides to where I sit, and he drops to his knees in front of me. His head falls to my lap, like a child’s might. His voice is strangled when he finally speaks. “Please don’t leave me. I will find a way to earn your forgiveness. Please, just give me a chance.”
Even the best foundations have some dirt mixed in. That’s what makes them harden into something solid and unshakeable.
If you are soft and sweet and need protection, I will love you. And if you are a weapon capable of destroying people in ways I haven’t even dreamed of, I will love that version of you as well. Whatever it is you are, I want you and I wouldn’t change it.”
