I ran away. I was really good at that, actually; if you asked anyone who knew me, they’d agree. I wasn’t even sure what I was running from, or running to. I didn’t want to think about Kael, his face twisted in confusion, his eyes bleak with desperation. We’d just tasted our anniversary cake, and then I’d left. A year after we’d gotten married. What was wrong with me? What kind of woman did that? Left someone she’d been with for years to go off and find herself?
I’d realized it before we got married – that I couldn’t see the future with him. When I tried to, it was only a blank slate of nothing. I tried to conjure our future children, or the house we might live in, or how we’d look together grey and old. But I couldn’t see it. I tried and tried, but I could not envision that life with him. And I knew that that wasn’t his fault, not entirely at least. I didn’t know who I would become, or who I wanted to become, even. So how could I continue on with something when I couldn’t even see the next few steps in front of me? Did I want to be a mother? Did I want to go back to school? Did I want to chop all my hair off and dye it pink and go live in Seattle? I didn’t know.
When I sat down and looked within, I couldn’t find myself anymore.
I didn’t know when I’d lost her, or how, or why. I just knew I had to try to find her again, or risk losing myself so completely in this relationship that I never would. My life had somehow become about cooking and cleaning and work, trying to be the perfect girlfriend or wife (although I often fell short, I’ll admit). Where was the girl who had been so uniquely strange? Where was the girl who had told her friends about faeries and insisted that they were all Fey? Where was the girl who made paintings with her fingers and watercolor brushes, and pasted petals and torn paper onto the page? Where was the girl who couldn’t stop writing, who wasn’t just waiting for life to happen but actively seeking it out? Those big feelings, too large for my own body, that sent me, balloon-like, across the city and to the stars? I felt that someone had pricked my skin, and now I was hanging over the fence posts, deflated and more lost than ever.
I wanted to find my way up into the skies again.
And Kael… I didn’t know if he would come with me or not.
My mother drove up from Florida to take me back down with her, and some of my belongings. I was going to stay with her and my father in their small apartment with the extra bedroom while I figured out my life. And Lexy’s ex was going to help me get a job where he worked, while I waited for my massage license to transfer to Florida. I had some things figured out, at least. Before I left, I decided to dye my hair purple. Because I’d always wanted to, and I figured fuck it – why not? Some girls got bangs, but some girls, when they already have bangs, dye their hair a crazy color that they inevitably fall in love with. At least, I did.
I couldn’t look him in the eye as I left. Neither of us understood what this was, but we knew what it might become: a permanent breaking. I don’t think either of us wanted to acknowledge that. Would he drink away my memory with his friends? Would he go out and look at other women and want them, the way he’d once wanted me? Would he miss me, or just the life I could provide him?
I guess there was a part of me that wondered if it was less me he’d loved, and more the role I filled. There was that quote I’d heard of course: “men will choose to get married and then, the next woman they meet will fulfill that role.” So it was a matter of timing, and not love? And I wondered about that. I wondered if he’d only loved me, wanted to marry me, or if I’d just been there at the right time? A young 22 year old girl when we’d met, a slightly older woman now. I’d bled for this love; I’d loved him freely, and thought he could be the person to put my young dreams to rest, to make me into the 50s housewife archetype I thought I’d needed to become. Perhaps even wanted to become, in some strange way,
Because who would believe that the little wild sea urchin, the faerie who was lost in her cups, the broken girl who’d shattered friends and men with muddied thoughts and crude actions, could become something so pristine and shining? Who would look at me, with my a-line skirt and red lipstick, my cupcakes in the oven, and think: that girl was a fucking mess who hurt everyone she ever loved! It was a disguise, in a way. Maybe if I looked the part, I would become the part. And then no one would have to look deeper. I wouldn’t have to explain.
Now I was asking: is that really what I wanted?
I was proud of my sobriety, though not the reasons for it. I was proud of my writing, though I hadn’t been writing like I should (but when had I ever, really?). I was proud of my faerie wings and my intense feelings and the battles I’d won with my mental health. I was proud of the fact that I’d made the dean’s list in massage school, and that even when it had been so hard, and took so much out of me, and I’d cried many a night, that I’d actually done it. I’d become a massage therapist. I had so many stories to tell. Wasn’t that a wonderful thing?
I would not lose those stories.
