The Life: Sacrifice (The Life 3)

I’ve spent the last week and a half taking care of things to make sure Gianna’s life is okay once I’m gone. It’s the least I could do because of what I’m sure my leaving is going to do to her. I keep telling myself that it’s only been a few weeks, that she’d get over me with time. As long as I removed all obstacles from her way, she’d bounce back. I have to tell myself that so I can sleep at night because there’s no other way.

Hopefully, with time she’d move on and forget this phase in her life, look back on it as just a time when… I’ve buried myself in vengeance to keep thoughts of what if at bay. I selfishly haven’t been able to keep her out of my bed no matter how hard I try. Though I feel like a monster each time, she looks up at me with hope in her eyes.

It sucks; I’m being torn in two because the thing I’ve worked so hard for is now close at hand, but it means giving her up. Where just a few short months ago, I’d have done anything for this opportunity that just fell into my lap; a part of me wishes I had more time with her, but it can’t be helped. This trip to Paris is my first and maybe only chance to get the ball rolling. I have no idea what I’m going to find or even how things are going to play out. I just know I can’t let this opportunity slip by. Isn’t it strange that in a roundabout way, she’s the one who made it possible?

Story of my life! She has no idea that her coming into my life will be the precipice for me disappearing from hers. If not for the Ball in Paris, it would’ve taken me at least another year before I was able to give Pop the slip and head into Europe.

Pop watches me like a hawk; he won’t let me anywhere near Europe if his life depended on it. So, I’ve been laying low, not showing my hand in any way. I’d hoped that my preoccupation with Fontane would blind him to the fact that I was planning something, but this little meet tells me that hope was in vain.

I looked at the clock on my desk then switched the monitor to the gym where the girls were practicing their curtsies or some shit. I keep sneaking these stolen moments of her and squirreling them away, storing them in some memory bank, and feeling guilty as hell because she doesn’t know that in about a week or so, her life will be turned upside down once again; by me.

If I could change it, I would, but no amount of guilt can change what has to be. I’ve lived with this thing for too long, been set on this course with no interruptions until her. Somehow, I think it’s selfish to change that now because nothing has changed, really. Me finding someone doesn’t change the facts of my conception; nothing will.

And as much as I feel for her, as much as I wish and hope things were different, there’s one thing that still remains. My mother has spent the last almost two decades living with a constant reminder of the worst night of her life; me. I know Ma loves me, she’s shown it in a million ways, but somehow that makes it worst in my eyes.

I wasn’t something she wanted, but something that had been forced upon her in the most heinous and disgusting way, so even her love for me was thrust upon her. How hard must it have been for her all these years, living with the proof of the darkest hour of her life constantly in her face?

She’s never mentioned it, not once. Never made me feel like anything less than her son, and that, too, somehow fills me with guilt. It’s a lot, isn’t it, to ask of one small woman who’d been left alone in the world because of that travesty. Had it not been for Pop, who knows what hell she’d have endured. So, you see, I can’t let that man pay even more of a price for my existence.

Then there’s Gianna. Sweet, soft, loveable Gianna. After the hell that has been her life, she too deserves someone better than I. Someone who doesn’t come from a place of darkness with the taint that follows me around like a shadow or a second layer of skin that I can’t take off at will.

I know some would say that I too am innocent in all this, that I had no part in what had been done to Ma. But they’ve never had to live with the knowledge that they’d been forged in hell. I snapped out of it and turned the monitor off before I became even more maudlin. There’s no time for a pity party, and I wouldn’t know how to throw one anyway since I’m not built that way.