Her home is Connecticut. Her home is with her parents.
But then, that’s not true, is it?
Her parents have never been her home. Her parents never really cared about her. She was lonely back there.
She was lonely and ignored and alone and… strangely unseen.
Until me.
Until I saw her that night, climbing up on the roof. I saw her and couldn’t stop watching her.
And I watched her be ignored and passed over by narrow-minded, unimaginative people. I watched men and boys salivate after her but staying away because she was unconventional. She was in her own world.
I watched that. I watched all of that and I sent her back to it.
I sent her back to those people who hurt her in the first place. Who took away her safety. Who made her feel unsafe in her own skin. Who made her so afraid that she was ready to drive out of there – drunk – putting herself in jeopardy.
That still terrifies me. It makes my breathing stop. She was so unsafe and so unhappy there that she didn’t think about anything except getting out of there.
Fucking Christ.
You make me feel safe…
I make her feel safe. She told me that and I just ignored it.
I ignored it and I sent her back.
I sent her back to people who judged her from the beginning, from the very beginning for being who she was.
Moon and magic.
Fuck.
Fuck.
But then, what’s the other option? Keeping her here? With me?
I don’t even know how…
But I can learn, can’t I?
I can fucking learn.
I look at her journals with new eyes. These are her dreams. These have been her dreams since she was sixteen and she gave them to me. She didn’t trust me. She thought I’d reject her but still, she gave me her dreams.
Because she’s brave.
If she can be that brave, then I can learn to be brave too.
Can’t I?
If she can love a hard man like me, cynical and old and emotionally stunted, then I can learn to be soft for her. I can learn to protect her better.
Yeah, I can learn.
I can fucking learn.
For her.
They think I’m crazy.
They think I’m in shock.
They think I’ll snap out of it sooner or later when I see that the thing I believe in, the thing that I trust is not going to happen.
They even tell me this.
My mother is the first one to say I’m being crazy and unrealistic. She says I’m being a moon-eyed teenager, a dreamer who’ll get both her heart and her mind broken.
She even tells me about my father.
My real father, the one who I’ve never met before. I never thought she’d tell me his story. She guards that secret like her life depends on it and since the only reason I found out was because she was drunk one night and didn’t know what she was saying, I never expected her to tell me about him.
But she does.
She sits on the edge of my bed – my old bed in Connecticut – and for the first time ever caresses my hair. She strokes it and I have to blink back tears while I’m lying on my side, with my hands under my cheek.
She tells me that my real father was this charming guy she met at her country club. He lived in New York City and was in town visiting some friends for a while.
“We fell in love,” she says soothingly. “Or at least, I did. I even wanted to leave your father for him. For Christopher. We spent lazy afternoons together when your dad wasn’t here. I thought he was going to marry me. He said he loved me and I’d never felt that before. Your dad doesn’t love me. I don’t love him either. Never did, never will. Anyway, I’d never been in love before, you know. So I thought I was finally getting a chance at it. I was finally getting that dream that I didn’t even have for myself. I never thought I’d fall in love. But then, his trip ended and he left. And when I found out about you, I tried to contact him. He told me to move on. It was an affair and it was over. I didn’t even get a chance to tell him about you before I found out that he had a family of his own.”
My tears sluice down to my pillow but hers are still at the edge, filling her pretty eyes with pain.
“So I decided that I’d never tell him. I decided that I hated him. It was easier to pretend that than actually face the fact that I was a bored, easy suburban wife who fell in love with a charming man from out of town. It was easy to pretend to myself that it was an affair like all my other affairs.”