Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
It hadn't been a conscious decision as far as I could tell. It was something I did on autopilot. Like brushing my teeth. Like taking inventory of my new cuts and bruises when I got changed for the day.
For a while, I had started to inwardly praise my powerful observation abilities. Clearly, that had been premature if I missed something so big in my own daily life.
He noticed.
Of course he did.
He noticed everything.
It was part of what made him so dangerous.
"Don't look like a prepubescent boy anymore," he added, making me shoot small eyes at him.
"Gee, thanks."
Sixteen-year-old me would have been very disappointed in how I turned out. She'd always been secretly—or not so secretly—hoping her boobs would show up one day. They never did. I was almost board-flat. Actually, probably even smaller than I had been eight years before. Constant workouts could do that to a woman. And, well, being utterly devoid of womanly softness worked in my favor in more ways than one.
"So, you're leaving."
"I..." I couldn't seem to find the words to deny it. Or confirm. For the first time in a long time, there was no certainty to be found, no clearly defined routine, no endless schedule of grueling workouts, and snatches of uneasy sleep. "I don't know," I admitted.
"What is there to go back to?"
On the surface, that was a stupid question. While he and I, well, we had spent many years side-by-side, we had never sat around and had heart-to-hearts. Neither of us were even entirely sure we had such things anymore. We didn't bare our souls, knowing they were full of ghosts and demons and the kind of rage that boiled, threatened to sear straight through vein, tendon, muscle, fat, and bone, that could burn you up entirely.
We weren't the sharing sort.
But he knew me before I even showed up.
He was aware of where I came from.
What I left behind.
An outlaw biker dad, the best mom in the world, two little brothers who likely weren't so little anymore, aunts, uncles, friends, my crush, a life.
He knew they were there to go back to.
But I knew him well enough to understand that he wasn't asking about that. He was asking me if there was enough of me, of the daughter, the sister, the niece, the friend left. If they would even recognize me. If they would want to.
Because, many many years ago, he had stood where I was standing; he needed to ask himself the same thing.
The answer, for him, was no.
No.
There was not enough of the old him left anymore. And, what's more, what was left was something he knew they could never accept, that he would not be so selfish as to expect them to even try, to pretend, to lie to his face.
He'd walked away.
And when he had walked away, he stayed away.
Maybe he had expected me to do the same.
Maybe a part of me wondered if I would follow in his footsteps.
It had been easy in those first few, hard years to picture myself going back, throwing my arms around all of them, apologizing, asking them to understand, to take me back.
But as things changed, as I changed, as this mission of mine became bigger than myself, it got harder to imagine them wanting to embrace me. And that I could even accept that from them anymore.
I cut people when they got too close.
That's what I did.
And the thought of cutting any of them, well, that was the kind of shit that kept me awake at night, staring at the cracks on the ceiling, feeling the spider web effect of them in my soul as well.
No matter which way you looked at it, the decision would be selfish, wouldn't it?
To stay away, to keep them wondering, to leave them always feeling like something was missing.
Or to go back, and to prove to them that something was missing. The girl they had loved and raised. She was gone. Long, long gone. I wore her shell, but had been hollowed out, filled with things I never wanted them to know existed, never wanted them to see. And then, what? Ask them to try to accept this person?
It was selfish to stay gone.
But it was just as selfish to go back.
In the end, it came down to one truth.
"I promised my mother I would be back one day," I confessed.
I wrote her letters. Every single week, I sat down, found something to write about, took a trip out of our little wooded compound, traveled far and wide to mail it out because I knew that my family had the power of tracking me down if I simply dropped it in the closest mailbox. Once, in a really low moment, in a really sad place in my heart and mind, I had signed off promising that I would be home one day.