Palming my face, I take the jar to my room and place it on my dresser. The Valentine’s card I got for her is resting there too, something I grabbed before I moved.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I stare at the new addition to my space before grabbing my phone and typing out a text to Mom. She responds almost instantaneously.
Mom:
Love you too, baby boy. And your little sister says hi.
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Author’s Note
I know what you must be thinking. Screw you, Barbara. Am I right?
First off, I’m sorry for the emotions you’re probably feeling right now. For the record, I loved Emery too. In fact, I am Emery. That’s why I needed to write this book in all it’s raw, real glory. I knew how it’d end. It’s a fear of mine that I’ve battled since I realized something was wrong with me.
When you have a chronic condition, you spend a lot of your life being doubted by others. Not all diseases can be seen. In fact, a lot of them aren’t. That’s why invisible diseases can be so deadly, because nobody knows they’re there until it’s too late.
Not only do you have to suffer silently from pain and other symptoms, but you have to watch what your misery does to everyone around you. Loved ones. Friends. You name it.
Underneath the Sycamore Tree started as a short story called Mama’s Eyes that I wrote for my Creative Writing class in undergrad. It was a story I wrote from the heart about how the relationship between a mother and daughter changes when the daughter becomes chronically ill. It’s a story I reflected on for many weeks before submitting it, and maybe years before choosing to take everyone’s advice and expanding it into a full-length novel.
This book was both one of the easiest and hardest ones to write. Odd, right? I wrote this faster than I wrote any book before. When a story comes from the heart, it’s going to gut you and cleanse you all at once. It’s therapeutic but also painful in ways that is hard to explain. You’re reliving moments you wish to forget.
Like the first chunk of hair found on a pillow, the first of many prescriptions, missed classes, seeing your family look at you like you’re slipping away, and the fear—the fear of not knowing what’s going to happen because doctors don’t seem to believe you even though you struggle getting out of bed, and you’re skin and bones, and your hair is falling out. After a while, you begin believing them when they say you’re crazy.
This book is the representation of something very rarely found in literature. Often, we’re scared of reading stories that remind us of real life. I get it. We all want to escape reality, right? Reality always finds us though when we finish the last page.
I wanted to write a story that was so raw it stripped the soul. Every now and again, I think we need a reality check. Fiction can speak millions of truths that we’re not always willing to hear in the real world.
So this is mine.
This is my pain.
This is my fear.
This is my worst nightmare.
Please keep in mind that this is fiction. Getting a lupus (or any illness) diagnosis does not mean you’re fated to die. It means you’re fated to fight, and that’s something you need to accept from the start in order to make the most out of the life you’re given. It’s not easy, but I promise you’ll get through it a day at a time.
No other book I write will be like this, and I promise you’ll get a more traditional happily ever after from here on out. Even if you might not love me right now, know that I love all of you.
Keep fighting my loves,
Barbara
Where The Little Birds Go Sneak Peek
PROLOGUE
Kinley / Present
I never expected him to come crashing back into my life. Without warning, without a single clue, I was face to face with my greatest weakness. Nobody knew that I was already familiar with the silver-eyed charmer whose face encompassed every magazine, newsstand, and Hollywood tabloid cover.
Before Corbin Callum became America’s biggest star, he was just the new kid in the middle of nowhere New York. I knew all his secrets from the start—where he got the scar on his right eyebrow, why he has two black tally marks tattooed on his left pec, and who he lost his virginity to. It isn’t information I gathered from the press or pieced together from rumors.
Long before we dove headfirst into the industries we’ve dreamed of being big figures in, we made a pact that we’d never leave each other behind. But our aspirations were larger than the old versions of ourselves that thought everything would remain the same. We couldn’t keep up the charade, pretending to be the teenagers who had the world at their feet.
Once upon a time, I was his.