Authors: Riley Jean
“How am I supposed to know?”
I took a deep breath, in and out. “If you think this is easy on me, you’re out of your mind. I’m sorry that I hurt him. I’m trying my damnedest to leave him alone now. But if you won’t help me, I’ll call him myself.”
He sighed. “Okay. Hold up. I can hack into his email. If he ordered flowers, the receipt will be in there. My cousin owns this flower delivery place. He always went there for Evelyn.”
I waited on the line, my heart pounding away, as Cole logged into Vance’s email. It felt all kinds of wrong. But I couldn’t help myself. My emotional limits were already at capacity today. Receiving these flowers from Vance was hurtful, but it spoke of his pain, too. Plus, if he reached out, didn’t I at least owe him a response?
“Acceptance? …Ahhh shit!”
I tensed at his sudden expletive. “What? What do you see?”
“Uh… nothing. I gotta go.”
“What the hell, Cole!”
“Uh… Sorry dude, no receipt here. The flowers must be from someone else.”
A tingle slithered up my spine. “You’re lying. This isn’t fucking funny. Stop messing with me and tell me what the hell you see!”
“I’m not lying! Haven’t you figured out by now that Vance would never do something to hurt you like that? You’re the one who left, Scar, so no offense but he’s none of your damned business anymore. What was the one thing I asked you to do?
Let him go.”
“Cole!”
The line when dead.
And I was struck with wondering how silence could be so excruciatingly loud.
I stared at those roses, absorbing their darkness, speculating what their color meant. Sorrow? Hatred? Goodbye?
And the single red rose…
It taunted me. Haunted me.
Accused me.
Of betrayal.
I hadn’t escaped. He found me here.
But if not Vance, “Then who…?”
I lied to Cole. There was one other person who had given me roses… One year ago today.
Not possible. It couldn’t be.
Everything around me grew hazy. Muted. Everything except that one rose. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Whoever sent me this bouquet knew about
that night.
These flowers represented each and every dark emotion I’d been drowning in for the last twelve months. Whether they were meant to hurt me, or scare me, it worked.
It couldn’t be. It made no sense.
Still, who else would have sent me black roses, today, on the anniversary of his death?
I picked up the vase overflowing with roses; the glass was cool and its weight heavy in my hands. My breathing grew irregular. My head swam. Memories too painful to recall came rushing back in staccato flashes. Outrage and fear and guilt gripped me, tightly twisting, like fingers closing over my throat. It was too much. Too much…
A loud crash rang out in the small space, the only sound in a world of nothing. Shattered fragments of glass and flowers and water rained down through my fingers. Everything blurred together.
That’s where Claire found me later that night, broken on the floor. She didn’t say anything, just got down on the carpet in her pretty pink dress and wrapped her arms around me.
I felt naked. This was the Scarlett no one was ever allowed to see, the one hidden in the murky depths below. Just when I thought I’d left it all behind, these emotions reared their ugly heads. I felt stuck in this constant cycle of bottling it all up, and exploding.
I was wrong. I wasn’t fine. And leaving my hometown didn’t erase my problems, which meant this whole thing was just another elaborate failure. That’s what hurt most of all—all the people I’d hurt in my process to outrun this, and it was all for nothing. My fear was the culprit, indecision my downfall. Life doesn’t pause for anybody. And complacency held up about as well as a house of cards in front of a bulldozer.
Demons couldn’t cure other demons. But apparently, neither could avoidance.
“I’ve done things I’m not proud of,” I confessed between cries. “Horrible things.”
She spoke softly as she helped me bandage my hands. “That don’t make you a horrible person.”
I shook my head. “You don’t understand, Claire.
I am.
I am a horrible person.”
“But you’re sorry, ain’t ya? You feel bad about it? In your heart?”
I nodded. I felt it all. I felt too much.
“That’s how I know for sure. Horrible people don’t feel conviction like this.”
I laughed a little through my tears. “So that’s the answer? Embrace the guilt? Be doomed to feel like this forever?”
“No,” she said, and her smile grew hopeful. “You can let go of your guilt. You can be free from your burdens and your past.”
I wiped my tears. “But how? I don’t feel like I deserve it.”
“That’s the beauty of grace,” she told me. “No one deserves it.”
* * *
[Journal]
Sometimes I think I can fly… and I never find out I can’t, until I crash.
* * *
That Sunday, I asked Claire for a ride to church.
For a long time now, I’d been struggling with the whole idea of faith. My reasons ranged from anger to loneliness. There were too many unanswered questions in this world, too much that didn’t seem fair. To put it plainly, I was hindered by the limitations of my mind. I wanted easy, black and white. I wanted a concept that fit neatly into my own little box. But how often do complex questions have simple answers? Not often, I supposed. So I came with an open mind and a hungry heart.
The service wasn’t what I expected. The congregation was small, not one of those mega churches they show on TV. I was so nervous, I accidentally dropped the little cracker during Communion. Panic hit me.
I dropped the body of Christ!
But Claire said not to sweat it, she was pretty sure the five-second rule still applied. Surprisingly, the people didn’t make me feel judged or like an outcast, either. Instead, they recognized that I was new, and invited me over for pie.
And the sermon? Pretty sure that sermon was written specifically for me.
I clung to every word that fell from the pastor’s mouth about a God who was bigger than my circumstances, and a grace that offered so much more than a temporary escape. After a lifetime of striving for perfection, I was under the impression that falling short made my whole life a complete failure. But I realized I had missed the whole point. We weren’t designed to be perfect; we were designed to be loved. And forgiven. Just as we were—flaws and all. And there was nothing we could do to separate us from that promise. All we had to do was accept it.
We weren’t supposed to take that gift and disregard it, or hide it away. We were supposed to let that love into our hearts. We were supposed to learn from the past, grow from it, and move forward to become better people. And most importantly, we were supposed to share that love with others.
And I was struck with a thought… Maybe it wasn’t too late for me. Maybe it was time to make the choice to be led by my heart rather than my fears. After all I’d done, if God could forgive me, if He could still love me… couldn’t I forgive myself?
No words could quite explain how this idea made me feel. It was liberating, like a light clicked on and this elusive feeling of purpose was finally within sight. I didn’t fully understand how or why. I had no clue what this was supposed to look like. All I knew was… I needed it.
At the end of the service, a line of men and women formed, inviting folks to come up for prayer. I found myself putting one foot in front of the other, walking straight towards them before I’d even thought it over.
Despite our separation, I still felt my best friend’s influence in my life. He was right, it was time to let go of my grief and work through my past. I needed help. I needed to talk to somebody. And it seemed like prayer was a good place to start.
* * *
[Journal]
This isn’t life. This is nonexistence.
* * *
The church put me in touch with someone that I could talk to. We arranged to meet there for an hour every week. They were flexible with my school schedule, and Claire gave me rides. In fact we were able to align our meetings to the same time Claire came to practice with the band.
We began (where else?) at the beginning. I spoke of growing up with high expectations and the pressure of perfection on my shoulders, which ultimately led to my extreme fear of failure. Sad to say, even as I recounted my youth, it was hard to miss my family, because along with them came so much fighting and disappointment. Now that we were separated, strained relationships had turned into strangers. And the resentment I felt for my parents and brother were just one small step away from apathy.
“When was the last time you really talked to your mother?” my counselor asked me.
“Well… she emailed me once at the beginning of the semester to make sure I arrived in Texas in one piece. And I think another time after that…”
She paused from writing in her notepad and looked up at me. “Two emails in the last two months?”
“Yes. That sounds about right.” I drummed my fingers on the couch. “It was about the same when I lived at home.”
“I see.” She continued to take notes. “And what do you think would happen if you called her tonight and wanted to have a real conversation?”
I thought for a minute. “It’d be weird. Neither one of us are really good at that. I don’t know what there would be to say.”
“You have a lot to say, Scarlett. It’s possible she’s just as unsure on where to begin. But that doesn’t mean you both aren’t capable. All it takes is one person to get the ball rolling.”
* * *
We worked diligently through my youth and moved on to the clique and my first relationships. I told her about how close my best friends were, but how we drifted apart after high school. I spent almost a whole hour talking about Nathan, and only around five minutes on Miles.
When I was young and naïve, I remembered thinking about both boys,
“I can bring out the best in him,”
but I couldn’t. Or telling myself
“maybe this time will be different,”
but it wasn’t. Or believing
“he cares about me,”
but he didn’t.
They never did.
“It sounds like Nathan hurt you pretty deeply,” she said. Always a smart cookie, that one.
I shrugged. “Not that he cared.”
“I’m not convinced he didn’t care. The opposite of love isn’t hate, Scarlett, it’s indifference. Sometimes it’s difficult for adolescent boys to express their feelings.”
“Oh, he had no problem expressing exactly how he felt,” I said, remembering the glorious
“Fuck Buddy”
song.
“Hmm. There may be more to that story than we know. But I’m going to suggest you try and find closure with this, even if you aren’t able to get the outcome you desire. There’s a lot to learn in first relationships especially. People do crazy things when they’re hurting. Can you relate?”
I bit my lip, picturing the face of another. We hadn’t even gotten that far yet. “Maybe.”
“Nobody’s perfect, Scarlett. They have a saying here in the south: the only animal that can’t fall down is the worm.”
Next I talked about Ricky. Despite all the good times I revisited, about flashcards, foosball, poker games and late night visits, I got emotional, knowing our story didn’t have a happy conclusion. In the end, we’d let each other down.
This was where things started to get a little hazy chronologically. I busied myself with covering about everything I could, while systematically avoiding two specific men and any details pertaining to the past year.
Of course when I brought up what Ricky taught me about embracing my anger, she had something to say about that.
“Anger isn’t a cure, Scarlett. It’s a poison. One that you have to treat before it makes its way through your entire system. Healing can be very difficult once you let it infect your heart.”
* * *
[Journal]
Nathan once accused me of using Miles. I finally realize he was right.
It wasn’t intentional. Miles knew I was still heartbroken when we first got together. Healing takes time, and he understood. He tried to make me feel better, and some days it worked. Maybe I would have fallen in love with him, eventually.
I hadn’t dated Miles for the sole purpose of revenge against Nathan. But on occasion I had used our relationship to try to hurt him. Was I any better than Nathan?
And maybe Miles was physically unfaithful to me. But how long were we together while I subconsciously pined for someone else’s attention? I was emotionally unfaithful, so was I any better than Miles?
When you’re young, experiencing new relationships and first loves, nobody really knows what they’re doing. We chase the butterflies and try to capture the perfect moments. But the more you grow, the more you realize that’s not what it’s all about. Love becomes real when the ideal fades away. When that one person becomes more important than yourself. When you make the decision that no matter the cost, you’ll never stop fighting for them. When you can face each other, scarred and unashamed in this dark, lonely world, and feel like you’re finally home.