I’d never expected my own father to desert me in such a way, to rip away the one thing he knew meant the world to me. I’d found it hard enough to forgive him for what he did to my mom.
But when I had to give up my dream of studying dance at the most renowned school for the arts, the school I’d long dreamed of attending, because of his actions, that had been the last straw.
Any trust I once had in human kind was obliterated. If my own father, the first man I loved, could do such a horrible thing, could cast me aside so easily as if I were nothing, then there was no doubt that others would do the same.
And then mom had taken her life, had given up on everyone and everything else and just ended it all and that had sent new fear coursing through me. She was the last mainstay I had left. The last bastion of strength.
I was still reeling from my father’s betrayal then. Still trying to find my footing as this new person I’d been forced to become. And then her suicide pulled the rug out from under me completely.
Suddenly I was alone in the world, no parents; no safety net. And there was my brother. Only fifteen at the time and still a child in so many ways. I’d had to make some hard choices quick.
I couldn’t let him suffer because of the adults in our lives the way I was. I had to protect him no matter what. It wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be to give up dance.
By then I’d locked off my emotions anyway. I no longer saw life through those rose tinted glasses. It was as if someone had ripped a veil from off my eyes and nothing was ever the same.
So by the time we met, I had already become too jaded to fall for his charm and good looks. But it seems no matter how I told myself that, he’d still found a way to chip away at my defenses.
What scares me most is that I want so badly to trust him, to believe him, but know that I can’t. How can I open up myself to someone, especially someone like him, with his past?
It would’ve been much easier if I didn’t feel anything. Maybe then I could’ve had a meaningless fling until we both got it out of our systems and went our separate ways. But I was beginning to think it may be too late for that.
All evening I’d been on tenterhooks around him. I could feel something growing inside me, it was strong and beyond my control; something I don’t understand and don’t know if I want.
Having only known him a few short weeks, things have been moving way too fast, that much I know. But somehow it’s starting to feel like we’ve known each other much longer. Like we’d known each other in some other time and place.
It’s too bad that I stopped believing in fairytale endings and beginnings. Not since the father I adored totally and brutally destroyed the strongest woman I knew.
I’d always looked up to my mother, always believed in her strength. Her life stories were always on point, and the fact that she encouraged both her children to be what they wanted to be in life, always made me see her as wise.
For me, there was no one like my mother and no love like the one my parents shared. Divorce was never something I gave a thought to. None of my friends were from broken homes.
Even as a teen my parents’ loving relationship was part of my solid foundation. Knowing that I had two such people in my corner, watching my back, had always been a source of pride and security for me.
It was also part of what made me so sure of myself. I thought that it would last for the rest of my lifetime. That even my own children would one day benefit from that love and strength.
Until it all ended so horribly. Now I no longer believe. I don’t trust anyone who claims to feel love in any of its forms, it’s not real. How can it be? Hadn’t I seen the end result of what supposed love can do?
It was only as I read the letter that my mother had left behind that I woke up and entered the real world and not the one I’d constructed in my head all those years.
I realized that my poor mother had based all her strength on the love she thought my father had for her. It was because she thought she was loved that she was able to hold her head up so high in the neighborhood among the other wives.