Coraline Frasier, eighteen years old, from a family of power and high regard in Salem, but impregnated by an unnamed lover. She had been sent by family to a convent where she was abused, and in the near end term of her pregnancy, she'd runaway and found this house where she had the baby. Next to her black gravestone stood the one for her three-year-old child, Lola.
The day their names had been etched into black stone, Tilly's hand on the child's gravestone burned as the tears filled her eyes.
She could feel the strike of a mother's pain, the crippling effect of losing a life too young to understand evil. It had taken two whole days for the grief to loosen its hold on Tilly, and she'd nursed the pain alone in her apartment with ice cream, frozen dinosaur nuggets and television.
Perhaps she would never have a child. Perhaps the time she lay curled up in bed nine years ago, holding her stomach and crying, was the closest she would ever come to carrying one.
She had made peace with that. But where she sat now, eating Greek chicken on the forest floor, looking at the gravestone of a child who unfairly lost her life because a world decided secrets and propriety were more important than her story, she mourned again.
Her crow, she was thinking of the black bird as hers now, jumped down and ate the croissant before sitting herself once again on Lola's stone and cocked its head.
A caw of thanks filled the forest, and Tilly smiled.
"You're welcome. I'm going to call you Portia. You're beautiful and austere. If you hate it, let me know."
But then, as she was feeling sadness and that old friend anxiety slowly filling her up, a warm breeze floated around her, a cascade of summer bonfire, smoked marshmallows, and sunlit greenhouses poured over her. She could feel the freedom of the season in this wind that wrapped around her like a gently lapping wave, reminding her to breathe and slow her thoughts.
She loved summer. Its syrupy closeness felt intimate. In a family where intimacy was shunned, she rather liked the way that the air tended to cling to her. She didn't even mind herthick black hair sticking to her neck when she was walking in the sunshine. The smells of summer made her happy. Even now, she could smell the wild onions and thick patches of grass being stirred by the breeze. She closed her eyes and imagined the collaboration of scents that would explode at the Fourth of July festival: sunscreen and bug spray, berries folded into pastry or sitting on pillows of whipped cream, the metal powder of sparklers, the drifting brine from Salem harbor.
She let out a long, slow breath, her love of summer battling with the darkness in her mind.
For her thoughts weren't always her own; sometimes they were leftover voices of those who had tried to imprint a different and darker message inside of her. Don't become too much, don't be a problem.
She understood at a young age, too young, that expressing herself had been seen as a burden. Unfortunately, she had been too young to know that it had been a lie creating the foundation of her anxiety.
And here was the truth about anxiety: it sold the lie that setting boundaries would make you an unkind person, and then it fed off the exhaustion an unbound space created.
And now here she sat in a summer-kissed forest with gentle, lost souls and a crow whom she started looking for every time she left her apartment or the inn, wondering why she wasn't enough. She wondered how she had forgotten all she'd learned when she moved here to heal.
Tilly looked up to the moon, ripped fractions of it visibly glowing through the trees.
"The world is a lot right now. It's all a bit heavy." She clasped her arms around her bent knees. "Do you ever feel like you're too much, but at the same time that you don't have much to offer? I think I've felt this way my entire life," she rested her chin on the tops of her knees. Ghostly souls settled around her. Themoon pressed closer for her moonlight confessions. "There are moments where I want to scream, begging for someone to love me the way it's supposed to be. No grey area, no guessing. Just complete love. Rudimentary, even. So easy to spot a child would know it's a safe love."
She thought of her friends, the family she'd created here. It was a kind of love that just...was. It was asking about their flare-up of heartburn and checking in on how much or how little they loved their work over pasta. Flowers picked for each other, and sitting through uncomfortable moments after feelings get hurt. It was apologies without fear of exile and taking off your mask after a long day. The women in her life had done something rather special: they created a place where you had the energy to fall in love with yourself.
She didn't need the moon to grant her someone else offering her honest love. She had that. But still, there were wide-mouthed moments that felt like they were going to swallow her when she was alone, and left with enough self-doubt and time.
She had boundaries and a readiness to love herself now that she'd never had before moving here.
The first time Ronnie left, she'd spent more time than she wanted to admit rebuilding those boundaries.
Was she doing it again?
She feared she wasn't strong enough to let someone in again and not lose herself.
A mental image of a stoic man staring deeply into her eyes caused her to close her eyes tightly, pressing the heels of her hands against them.
The summer air tickled the hairs at the nape of her neck, and she shook his image out of her head.
That breeze picked up in strength, and she suddenly felt a bubbling happiness of twirling and delightful dizziness. Her head tilted sharply up, and she smiled as she felt Lola's spiritdance around the graveyard, her childlike happiness a rush, so pure and glittering that she couldn't help but be swept away with it.
Sometimes she remembered what absolute genius was woven into the emotional abandon of being a child. They didn't ask permission to feel, to hope, or to twirl. She smiled again for the little girl's soul. She smiled for her own.
Then a new presence filled the space, alive and bold, and her smile widened. Her dearest friend took a seat next to her on the ground. There was something upfront about Jen that Tilly admired. She felt it in the way that the air moved for her, parting for her forward steps and sure spirit.
"I don't have many carefree childhood memories," Tilly mused. "I watch you sometimes and I think how brilliant you are, unafraid to make mistakes. Do you get that with good parents who let you feel?"
Jen took in her friend, her sadness cloaked around her in a way that dulled the light in her eyes, pulling down one corner of her mouth, and she could see the workings of untangling something in her mind.
