Surviving Valencia

Well, time to move on out.

But I continued standing there, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, waiting for the door to open. The momentum was changing. The intensity of the sun was waning. If it got any later, I would not do it today. If I did not do it today, I would never do it.

I wondered what had happened to that spontaneous girl I used to be. That girl who kissed bartenders and fell down drunk, who didn’t mind houses with rats and roommates.

I missed her.

She made a lot of bad decisions, I reminded myself.

But she, unlike every other version of myself I’d ever been, had a lot of fun.

I knocked on the door again, wanting to say goodbye. Believing I could say goodbye and mean it. But Adrian would not open the door.

So I did it. I left. I picked up the tote bag and sewing machine, realized they weren’t actually that heavy, and carried them out to the motorhome. I set them on the passenger seat, the only free space left, and found my keys beneath the visor. (They were on a fancy silver keychain. Thank you, Bruce Dash.) And I rolled out of town in a blue, triumphant bullet with a shiny silver cart, hopefully pointed in the direction of California.

Part Two

2012

I’d like a chance to explain.

I always felt there were parallel universes. No one would have believed some cheerleader would think about parallel universes, but I did then. I still do. And I’m right, aren’t I? I’m forty-three years old, nearly forty-four. I’m the mother of three. I weigh a hundred and eight-eight pounds. But just two hundred miles away, I am eighteen years old forever. I am dead and gone, and beautiful. Was that really me? It still is. In Hudson, Wisconsin, it still is.

There are other versions of me out there. Unlimited possibilities. Like a Choose Your Own Adventure book with infinite pages. There are versions of us all. There are other versions of Rob, and in each of them he aches for me. I’m not telling you what I merely imagine; this is what I know.

There is the me I would have become if I’d had all the chances I deserved. I always felt that Van and I both died that night. He lost his future, so did I. What they did to me took the forks in the road of my life and turned them into a knife. I was ruined. Worse than ruined, I was humbled. Have you ever been humbled? It is better to be ruined.

Everything had been easy for me. Easy felt normal. I didn’t understand why everyone else made it look so hard. They seemed lazy and clumsy. They seemed like they made excuses. I thought if everyone would just turn it up a notch they would have it, like I did. I didn’t know that I might as well have been a different species. They were never going to catch me.

But after what happened to me, I got it. I became a victim, like I now realize most everyone is. I didn’t go out in public for nearly a year. Everything frightened me. A trip to the grocery store immobilized me. I second guessed myself when measuring the ingredients to make a cake. I would wash my hair over and over, unable to keep track of whether I had washed it at all or had just gotten it wet. I was too insecure to go to restaurants, afraid to order off a menu, afraid I would not leave the correct tip.

Those things that happened that night destroyed me. That’s what I want you to understand. I was no longer the Valencia my friends and teachers and family had admired. That elusive, beautiful part of me, the part I barely understood, but had always taken for granted, was murdered. Even if the rest of me lived on. I was no longer special. I couldn’t show myself. I turned to Rob not with something to give, but with desperate, broken need. He came to me as I knew he would and he learned to love someone else entirely. He did it not for the new version of myself I ashamedly presented to him, but for the girl he remembered, the way someone cares for a loved one with Alzheimer’s.

He mourned the loss of Valencia, despite promising me that I had never left.

He cared for me, he cared for the green eyed child who was not his own and raised him as lovingly as he raised Coral and Mikey. He gave me a better life than Val should have had, though not the life Valencia deserved. But he kept my secrets, and that was worth more than anything.

In my world of parallel universes, there is a version of me, still beautiful, married to someone else. I am living the remarkable life that 1986 assumed was my destiny. Rob is out there too, and we run into each other at high school reunions, and his heart is broken, because of me. And he aches as deeply as he never does now. This is how it should have been. This is the life that would have happened.

It’s funny how this humdrum existence, the one I am spending all my time in, sure feels like the real thing. It’s funny how I think of those parallel universes less and less.

Oh no. Am I disappointing you? Or even worse, perhaps I am boring you. It hurts to be a bore and a disappointment. Valencia didn’t know what it felt like to be either of those.

Despite severing ties with my mother, she still holds me back. I’m like her: A victim of my past perfection. Can’t. Stop. Missing. Myself.

Really, it’s sick.

So where do I start? Actually, that is easy. Obvious, even. I start with Van. I started with Van. Literally, I began when he began. In my heart, he was my only true family. We spoke our own language when we were very young. He was never mesmerized by me, and it was such a relief. No one else was ever completely comfortable around me, and I longed to make someone comfortable. He was, though. How could he not be? It was a relief to be with him, to relax, to be a beautiful mess.

Others tried to overcompensate sometimes, in meanness. They tried to be disinterested and rude, as if that was the bait to tempt me. Look, their actions said, I am different. I am one of the few who has no use for you. They thought it would intrigue me. But I saw right through it.

I was so lonely, wanting to be normal.

Normal, it turns out, is not as great as I’d hoped.

After it happened, I needed to be alone. By alone, I mean with Rob. Only Rob. Going to him was natural, and right. But now I see how it changed us. Of course it changed us. I was still thinking like Valenci

a, still unable to guess the road that lay ahead of me. Not realizing by the time I called him, all my bridges back to my former self had been burned.