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Ren’s hair is the gorgeous copper of a fading sunset, and the anger radiating off of him is equally breathtaking.
“Just showed that you can write a magical world brimming with complex, label-defying characters and still be a trans-exclusionary feminist disappointment.”
And that’s when I became a problem, not a person.
And then there’s rheumatoid arthritis, a bitch of an autoimmune disease for which there’s no cure, only damage control.
Books help me feel a bit more connected to a world that often is hard to make sense of. Books are patient with me. They don’t laugh at me instead of with me. They don’t ask why I’m “always” frowning, or why I can’t sit still. Books welcome me—weirdness and all—and take me exactly as I am.
Wind sweeps Frankie’s dark hair into inky ribbons that glow against the sunrise. The sun creeps over the water’s edge, bouncing off her cheekbones, the soft upturn of her nose.
Her irises glitter, forest green dappled with gold, like sunlight peeking through a canopy of leaves. “Yes.”
Like I don’t have to choose between these different parts of myself.” “She sounds like the best kind of person, then,” Frankie says quietly. I smile up at her and tell her the absolute truth. “She is.”
Frankie isn’t mine. She’s the team’s. Or, really, we’re hers. She has all of us wrapped around her finger.
Elizabethan oaths are how I hold on to a little shred of dignity.”
I’ll throw myself at him, beg him to give me everything for just a little while. To give me for now until he can have forever with her. Her.
I want Ren so badly. I want him as much as I want to run away from him as fast as I can.
He glances up to the night sky, like he’s searching the stars for something mere earth can’t give him.
“That woman, Frankie,” he says. “It’s you.” It’s you. Two words. Missiles, tearing through my heart, landing on an earth-rattling boom.
Because I know that having arthritis, being autistic, does not make me less whole or human. It doesn’t make me wrong or broken.
And trekking all day through various degrees of pain and discomfort, not to mention the mental work of keeping up with a demanding job and all the socializing, wears me out.
I hold her close in my arms under the night sky’s canopy of fiery stars.
The truth is there, like it’s always been. Sunshine and storms share the sky, but never together. They brush, tangential, fleeting moments of breathtaking beauty—the burning, life-giving sun piercing through a blackened sky—until it’s over so quick, it makes you wonder if it ever happened at all.
“Relationships aren’t perfect, Frankie. They’re living, breathing things. They have growing pains. They have highs and lows. They take trust and forgiveness. They don’t require perfection or flawlessness. They just require two people who want to love each other and keep learning the best way to do that.”
Even when your illness isn’t invisible, people can still be blind to it. But I’m done being embarrassed or humiliated or defensive. I’m being me. Because that’s enough. And for the first time in too many years, I know that I’m loved for exactly who I am. The person who reminded me of that waits for me in a little cabin in the woods. I can only hope he’ll forgive and love me still.
I’d wait lifetimes for you, Frankie. You would always be worth it.”
Tears of heartache become tears of joy, as the clouds break for the determined sun. I kiss Frankie and taste hope.
