“I think you should fucking see that the only thing that stood in your way was believing you did. Like me, like me always so sure that you found me too much, like everybody else did. Always sure that every word had to be an insult, instead of something that you simply struggled with, that you didn’t think you could be, that maybe you even told yourself you didn’t long for. Until it was too late.”
She put her face in her hands then.
And only lifted them when he spoke again. Faint, like all the fight had been beaten out of him. “It was after you were gone from my life that I fully realized the way I felt. And then all I had was—”
“Stories to tell. Stories about the way things could be, if only,” she finished for him.
And he nodded, he nodded.
“For a brief time, I could say what I longed to in them. I could be what you inspired me to be. But then you started to fade from my mind, the hope of you faded, and with it went any ability you had ever helped me to have. Because you did help me, Em. You were the example I looked to, the hope in my heart. I took from you and left you with nothing, I left you withnothing.”
“That’s not true. Life did that to me,” she said, andas she did she thought of all the things that had really burned her romance out of her. The whispers of people she thought were friends in college. Christian and his cruel obliviousness. Every indifferent, mundane man, everyone who had actually taken something from her, so gladly, and never thought to ask if she needed anything for herself. “The miserable mundanity of the world did it. Just like it did to you.”
And then he just seemed to crack right down the center.
He couldn’t even seem to stop things spilling out.
“Jesus, that’s so accurate I can’t even see how you didn’t see it before,” he said, and when he did she thought of all the ways she hadn’t.
And all the ways she had.
“Honestly I think I did. Sometimes I did. But I always told myself it had to be something else. Not wanting me to touch you because me touching you was irritating; looking at me as I ate because it disgusted you, instead of what it really did. Never thinking it must have looked like a steak to a starving man, never thinking it must have seemed like so much abundance to someone without. Because I could see you, I can see how you are exactly. But I couldn’t seemyselfthrough your eyes. I can never see myself through someone else’s eyes. Everybody is full color to me, a huge story filled with incredible detail, but when I imagine them seeing me all I can imagine is a plain sheet of paper,” she said, almost to herself more than anything else. Going over everything about herself that had led them here, just like he was doing. Ripping the bandage off to expose the ten-year-old wound underneath.
Making it bleed, she thought.
But then he cut in.
“If that were true I don’t know how I filled a thousand of those pieces of paper with you,” he said, with so much sudden emotion in his voice it split the sentence in two, three, a thousand. She had to piece it back together herself, with shaking fingers.Ten books, she thought.Ten.
While trying not to cry.
“Oh god, they were all about me.”
“So you can see it now.”
“The jumper.”
“Yes.”
“Jessie with the ears peeking through her hair.”
“It used to drive me out of mymind.”
“Clara and her love of vampires. Bethany with her back seat full of books.”
Because I had DVDs on mine, she thought as she remembered him peering into her old Ford Pinto. Disdainful, it had seemed to her at the time. Desperate and then caught, it looked to her now.Am I in the frame from your point of view, Chappell Roan sung in her head.
While he told her she was.
“They were all you. It was always you, every line, every word. I gave you everything I couldn’t in all the books I ever wrote. I couldn’t do anything else, you were my only thought for so long. I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you,” he said.
But all that did was open up a world of even further emotional horrors.
“Oh god, please tell me that’s not the real reason you couldn’t.”
“I told you it wasn’t torment.”
“But thatis. Oh god, that’s awful, it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
