Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 111165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 556(@200wpm)___ 445(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 556(@200wpm)___ 445(@250wpm)___ 371(@300wpm)
I’m flayed in front of him.
He reaches out to touch me.
I stumble backward. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t…”
“I didn’t want this to happen. I tried…”
“You did NOT try!” I am seething. I am both indigo pain and white-hot anger. “You didn’t try Laz and you know it. You got scared. You got scared and you ran because that’s what you do.” My throat starts to close up but I manage to get the words out. “You’re right in that you don’t deserve my love. The man who deserves my love is someone who gives as much as he takes. Who faces the fears head on and moves past them. Who has hope. Who tries. You, Laz, you’re stuck in the past. Stuck with what’s easy, what’s shallow. You sing songs that don’t belong to you, you pen poems that you don’t let yourself feel. You’re a fraud, even to yourself. You don’t even know who you are.”
I’ve hurt him. I can tell, see it in his eyes. My words are weapons and he’s feeling them, he’s feeling them.
Good.
It’s about time he fucking wakes up.
“Now, if this is it, if this is what you want, to break up with me, to leave me, then go.” I point to the gate. “Get the fuck out and go.”
He stares at me.
“If you don’t love me, if you don’t even want to try, then go! You are nothing to me anymore, you got it? Not your lover, not your girlfriend, and definitely not your friend. Never your friend. Friends don’t play with each other’s hearts but that’s exactly what you just did.”
His mouth opens to say something.
I don’t care anymore.
“GO!” I scream, the word ripping out of me.
His eyes widen.
He turns.
Storms off around the pool, through the gate, and then he’s gone.
Laz is gone.
He’s gone.
My heart has gone with him.
I fall to my knees, crying, then to all fours, then to the grass below.
I cry and I sob and I scream and I don’t care about anything else right now except the pain inside me. This horrible, sickening pain that eats away at me like I’ve been doused in acid, burning from the inside.
I don’t know how long I cry like that, in my bee suit, on the lawn, the hum of bees occasionally going past.
I think about Laz. I think about my mother. I think about my father. I think about pain.
I’ve lost my best friend.
How will I ever be whole again? How will I ever be me again?
The emptiness inside me expands. Sobs shake my body to the blackened core.
Pickles, my father’s cat, my new cat, comes over to me, rubbing up along my shoulders.
Then a shadow looms over me from up above and for one painless second I think it’s Laz. It’s Laz and he’s come back to tell me that he was wrong. That he loves me and was too stupid to realize it.
“No man is worth this kind of sorrow, sweetheart,” Barbara’s croaky voice says.
I glance up to see her standing in a black silk pajama suit. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen her outside in the sunshine like this. It’s like she lives in a black and white world.
“Come on,” she says, offering a bony hand covered in shining rhinestones and costume jewelry rings. “Get to your feet. Act like a lady.”
Barbara is thin and ancient but she’s stronger than she looks. She helps me to my feet and then looks over me with what seems like disdain. Her penciled brow is raised, her red painted mouth pursed, her gaunt face layered with pale foundation. Her ash blonde hair is pulled back, covered by a red, silk head wrap.
“Sometimes there’s nothing a good cup of tea won’t fix,” she says eventually. She pats me on the cheek then grabs me by the arm and leads me off to her house.
But tea won’t fix this. Nothing will.
Time has a funny relationship with the heart.
After my mother died, there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think about her, didn’t miss her. Not just missing her but aching for her. The love she gave, the space she filled in my life. My mother was everything to me and she continued to be everything afterward, even though she was no longer with us. My heart bled and burned with the same kind of intensity as it loved.
I honestly never thought I would move past it. I didn’t think there would be a day where I wasn’t crying, where I wasn’t praying for her to come back, calling for her in the middle of the night. I didn’t think my future had any peace, any places for my heart to finally be at rest.
But slowly, little by little, things changed. The heart adapted. I never got used to the actual pain of losing her but I got used to the fact that it was a part of my life. It lived with me, became not quite a friend, but a companion. It was dependable. And as time went on, I learned to manage it.