The sparkle of her nose ring in her nostril.
Why have I never thought nose rings were attractive before?
The ring there is soDaphne.
Today Daphne.
Not any Daphne that I’ve ever known in the past.
She’s not chaos. She’s controlled.
Mature.
Still something of a whirlwind, but not overwhelming. Still fun, but no longer full of poor choices.
She’s intentional. She understands her power, and she wields it instead of letting it wield her.
I used to think Daphne was angry all the time. You could feel it radiating off her, and you knew it would inevitably lead to something big and terrible, but it was anyone’s guess what would finally set her off and send her down a path she couldn’t come back from.
Margot said she was misunderstood.
And that finally makes sense.
Daphne wanted to stop the polar ice caps from melting and she couldn’t. But not only could she not, trying to on her own got her in trouble.
No one ever taught her how to steer her activism. How to accept the limits of what one person could do. How to find the people already doing the work to help them, instead of feeling like no one else cared while trying to do it all herself.
Her family wrote her off as the problem child instead of finding an outlet for her big feelings, and so her big feelings eventually turned into rage.
Like my family didn’t understand my fascination with bugs and worms and dirt, and told me to focus on gasoline and convenience store profit and loss statements instead.
It took my father going to jail and me being thrust into the CEO position at M2G too early, too unprepared, and with too much of the wrong personality type for the job for those childhood dismissals to turn from quiet bruises to my psyche into my own rage.
But I got there too.
And now I can’t stop wondering what else Daphne and I have in common that I never could’ve suspected.
I catch myself reaching for her hair and tell myself to quit projecting.
Maybe I’m completely wrong about who she is and how she feels and what she wants.
But it’s the first time she’s made logical sense to me.
And it explains why she’s still here. Why she tolerated my bad moods and my pissy behavior at the beginning of the week.
Because Daphne has something very few others in our families have.
Compassion. Empathy. And a soul-deep understanding of what it means to not fit.
“Scupplenutter bought the big dick energy,” she mutters.
Goddamn pillow wall.
The way she’s talking in her sleep makes me want to hug her again.
Line our bodies up.
Kiss her awake.
