January's End

 

when I am the snow without 

the season

made to believe in the riddle 

not the reason

Breaking Point

 I woke up not in heaven, but in another hospital room. It took me a few minutes to get my bearings. 

When I did I saw Michael sitting in the chair next to me. He looked like absolute hell, but at least he was sober. 

“Wolff,” he said. “Welcome back.”

“Why am I not dead?”

“Because I woke up and found you before you had a chance to die. So here you are.”

A long, horrible pause passed. 

 “I’m sorry," I said.

Michael gave me a weird smile. “For what? Not dying, or trying to kill yourself six inches away from where I was sleeping?”

“...I don’t know.”

“Well, we’ll have words about it later, but it will have to wait because I have other places to be.”  Michael stood up, his car keys jingling in his hand. “Your mother is on her way. Our family is a major donor to this hospital so they're letting you go home with her.”  He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t make me regret that.”

Confused, I returned, “Where are you going?”

“Rehab. See you around, Wolff.”

In that moment I understood that he was not only going to rehab, but that he was also leaving me. As I watched him walk out of the door I never hated anyone more in my life.

The Happy Ending -- New Prologue

 

Prologue

 

I know a thing or two about fairy tales.

Not the Disney kind. The kind that gives children nightmares.

When I was a kid, a family friend gave me a recording of Rumpelstiltskin for Christmas. Either they had never listened to it, or they had a sick idea of fun, because nothing about that recording was suitable for children. The memory of Rumpelstiltskin’s scream as the queen got his name right still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

That kind of fairy tale.

Look up the definition and the first one will say a fairy tale is a magical story set in an idealized world, filled with happiness. But the sting comes in the second definition: a fabricated story, especially one intended to deceive.

It’s a paradox, and one I’ve lived. I was the little girl orphaned young, sent off to live with the wicked relative. The teenager who fell in love with a dimpled prince, only for forces of darkness to separate us. The woman who realized I had read the moral of the story wrong from the start, and battled evil for my own survival. 

I experienced the magic, and confronted the lie, in search of my happy ending. 

Because even in the Disney fairy tales, happy endings aren’t simply granted—they’re earned.

This is how I earned mine.

Servant of Time, Redux

I am the servant of time

of a truth I cannot

form

made of wisps and

dirt and stolen pieces of

lung

I tried to breathe around it

that was always my way

until the gasping became a

forbidden scarring in the

mind

do not talk of journeys

of hope without destination

decades mean nothing to me

I am still there

counting the tick tocks of

passing

serving a master who knows

I will never be free

Turning Point

 

I slipped into the booth across from Bryan, where he sat nursing a drink.  At his half smile I said in a stiff voice, “Hi.”

“Hi. You’re early.”

“So are you.”

“I’m always early,” he returned. “Do you want something? Iced tea?”

“No thanks.”

Bryan lowered his gaze to his glass. “How are you doing at Bob’s?”

“Fine.”

“You’re registered for school.”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks.”

A waitress approached our table; Bryan waved her way. “It’s no problem,” he told me. “But you wanted to talk about something, and I don’t think it was school.”

I took a moment to steady myself. For some reason, having Bryan squarely under the heel of my shoe felt a lot less rewarding than I’d thought it would. “Bob said when I went to live with him that I would need to do something with you once in a while,” I answered. “I guess we need to set something up. If you want to.”

Bryan just looked at me.

“If now isn’t the time-”

“It’s as good a time as any.”

“We don’t have to do this,” I said, but he replied, “Just tell me what you had in mind.”

“I don’t know. Maybe dinner every couple of weeks.”

“Dinner every couple of weeks,” Bryan repeated. He laughed a little. “Wonderful.”

“If you don’t like it-”

“I don’t think I have a choice. Fine. We can do that.”

Bristling now—how was it that I kept coming off like the nasty, horrible person, when our reality was his fault?—I snapped, “Everything is difficult enough. You don’t have to make it worse.”

 “I’d like to know how I could possibly make it worse than it already is.”

“What did you think was going to happen?”

Bryan’s faint air of amusement vanished. “I have no expectations anymore. I just have how it is.”

“And how is that?”

“Exactly what you’re proposing. That you’ll spend an hour with me once every two weeks. And then, when you turn eighteen, you’ll tell me to fuck off and it will all be over.” Bryan pushed his now empty glass to the edge of the table. Wordlessly the waitress scooped it up on her way to the bar. “So,” he said, “let’s just get on with it, shall we?”

“This is how you wanted it,” I reminded him, but he was quick to answer, “This is not how I wanted it. This might be how I made it, but this was never how I wanted it.”

“Are you saying I should just forget what you did?”

“I’m not that delusional.”

Frustrated, I demanded, “Then what is it you do want?”

“For you to come home. For you to go to Northwestern after you graduate. And,” he concluded, in a voice so low I could barely hear him, “more than all of that, I want you to stop treating our relationship like some kind of fucking nightmare that you can’t wait to be rid of.” 

The waitress deposited his refill on the table. Bryan moved to take it, but I was quicker. Holding the whiskey well out of his reach, I asked, “What are you trying to do, drink yourself to death?”

“What do you care if I am?”

“Oh, that’s fucking great.”

“You don’t need me. You don’t even want to see me. How I choose to live my life shouldn’t make any difference to you.”

“That doesn’t mean I want you dead!”

“I’m dead to you now, anyway.”

Infuriated, I shot back, “If you are, it’s your own fault.”

“And let me assure you, I’ve beaten myself up for it far better than you ever could.” Bryan held out his hand. “So, if you don’t mind, I’d like my fucking drink now.”

“You were the one who didn’t want me around anymore!”

“We all know what I said and did, Katie. I can’t keep begging for you to understand. You’ve made your decision. Now let me make my own fucking decisions.”

“But all I want is to know why. You can never tell me why.”

“I did tell you,” Bryan retorted, and for the first time I noticed that his outstretched hand was shaking. “Maybe you don’t understand this,” he said, “but I thought all I’d become to you was some kind of fucking obstacle that you were stuck with and that you couldn’t wait to unload at your first opportunity. I’m sorry if this isn’t a good enough reason for you, or if it sounds trite, but I felt rejected, all right?  Like I meant nothing to the one person who meant everything to me.” 

He turned his head, his embarrassment almost palpable.

“I’ve been told I have an abandonment complex because of what happened with my mother,” he said. “That I don’t want to be left again, so I leave first. If you can believe that recycled, fucked up psychoanalytical bullshit.”

I could believe it. And because I did, I forgave him.

This is How I Break - Rick's return

 

I prayed to a god I no longer believed in and pressed the call button.

The line never rang on his end. There was just his voice, saying, “Hey, you,” in such a gentle way that suddenly I was in floods of tears. Whatever cool, sensible words I’d meant to utter were drowned in a tidal wave of grief. “Why did you come back?” I demanded. “Why didn’t you just stay away?”

“I guess because I didn’t want to.”

This classic Rick answer hit me like a hammer blow. Reeling, I told him, “I didn’t love you. I never even liked you. I was only with you because I didn’t know how not to be. You never gave me a choice.”

There was a long pause on the other end. I hated myself for being so cruel—so false—but had no will to apologize. I just sat there, dying inside, until Rick said, “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah,” he answered. “Okay. That doesn’t change how I feel about you, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean go ahead and say whatever it is you need to say, if it will make you feel better. It won’t make any difference to me.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I think you understand.”

“No, I don’t. What do you want?”

“You know what I want.”

“You can’t want to get back together,” I charged. “It would be insane.”

“We never broke up. You just needed some time away from me, and I needed to sort my head out. If you’d wanted me around, I would have stayed. I kept my distance until you needed me to come back. Now here I am.”

“What makes you think I needed you to come back?” I argued, but when Rick returned, “Are you saying you didn’t?” I lost my venom. In fact, I lost it completely. I just curled up into a ball on the floor, the phone still pressed against my ear, and nearly tore myself apart with the force of my sobs.

“Stevie,” Rick said, his tone changing, “I need you to get up and open the door.”

I struggled for breath as my bare feet worked against the floor, over and over again.

“I know you’re having a terrible time,” he told me, “but you need to be strong for just a few seconds, all right? Stand up, go into the living room, and open the door.”

“I can’t do this, I’m not going to be okay, I keep trying and I’m never going to be okay...”

“Stevie. Open your door.”

“...What?”

“Open your door,” Rick repeated. “You’re going to be all right. You just need to open your door and let me in.”

“You’re here?”

“I’m right outside. And if you don’t let me in, I’m going to break the door down, and the neighbors will call the police. You don’t want that, do you?”

I certainly didn’t. But I had already stopped listening, because I was now running into the living room. I threw the door open and there he was, filling up the whole space.

Rick.

He caught me as I fell into his arms.

For a moment I was convinced my imagination had conjured him, but he felt strong and solid and like a million beautiful dreams all come true at once. Even Daisy, rubbing her head against his leg, wanted to be near him. “Don’t let go,” I wept to him.

“I’m not going to,” he said. “Ever.”

Lost

 

The pen bothered me. It was fat and filled with ink cartridges, from black to the colors of the rainbow.

“Where’d you get this again?” I asked him. 

The strange animal character on the screen jumped over a crumpled brick wall with an appropriate boing sound.  “I found it,” he answered.

“Where?”

Now just a tiny dot hopping around some far corner of his pixelated meadow, he shouted back, "In the library."

“Okay," I said, but I still didn't remember. And I had no idea how to bring any of it back again.