Starts again.
Differently.
“I thought you could do better. That’s — that’s what I kept telling myself. That you deserved better than whatever I am. That if I stayed I’d just keep —”
He gestures vaguely at me.
At the pill bottle still in his hand.
“Doing this to you.”
• • •
“So you left.”
“I thought you’d go to college. I thought you’d get out of here like you always wanted and you’d be okay. I thought —” He exhales. Rough. “I’m so fucked up, Ro. You know that. You’ve always known that.
And you just — you keep looking at me like that anyway and I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t.”
I stare at him.
• • •
“So your solution was to disappear.”
“My solution was to stop being the thing that was making you worse.”
“You were never —”
“Ro.” He looks at me then. Finally. His eyes dark and exhausted and carrying something I still can’t fully see. “Look at the bottle. Look at what I did to you.”
• • •
I look at the bottle.
Neither of us says anything.
“I’m not —” I start.
Stop.
Start again.
“That’s not because of you. That’s because of everything. That’s because my brain has been doing this since I was eleven years old and you don’t get to take credit for all of it.”
• • •
“I know,” he says.
“But you’re not totally wrong either,” I say quietly.
He nods.
Once.
Like that was the honest answer he was waiting for.
We sit with it for a second.
