Bad at Endings.

Chapter 7

I haven't thought about my father in quite a while.
Well....that's partially true.
I have thought about him but only in the way you briefly think about someone you're desperately trying not to think about.
Having his picture out on my bedside table usually helps.
It helps me to think about the picture and the man in the picture but not the man he actually was. Especially right at the end.
It's an effective diversion.
For me it works.
Or....it used to work.
It worked until John asked me about it.
Until, with his innocently posed question, he tore open the curtains I'd held tightly shut for so many years.
The sharp truth hidden behind temporarily stunning and blinding me.

And now I can't sleep.

Because, now that they are open, they stubbornly refuse to close again.
And every time I close my eyes I am transported back to those last fateful days where he looked nothing like he looks in the picture on my bedside table.
He had looked gaunt and pale and tired and by that time the many rounds of chemo had stolen all of his once so unruly hair.

His curls........ My curls.

“My father had cancer. And then he died.”

I surrender the words to the darkness that hovers in the bedroom around me. It's the only way I'm ever able to say them.
I gift them to the silence around me hoping to be rid of them once and for all.
But I never am.
The darkness swallows them greedily but I still know they're there. I can feel them at the edges and corners of the room.
Hiding.
Waiting.
Waiting for a single moment of vulnerability so they can pounce on me and bring me to my knees.

So usually I don't speak them at all.
But tonight John has pulled them from me with gentle hands.
Carefully extracted from between the torn pieces of my heart.
And I let him do it.
Somehow John is able to open me up and lay me bare and I'm not quite sure whether I like it or if I'm terrified of it.
He brings out both the worst and the best in me just with a look or a touch or a couple of choice words and I wonder if that's actually what love is like.

Or am I just hopelessly infatuated and fooling myself.

I'm not even sure how he feels.
I know he likes me.
He's told me as much.
But every time we talk about us and what we are to each other he just sort of....breaks down.
All his sentences scatter and come out half formed like flocks of frightened birds.
I catch the gist of them but they're gone before I can examen them properly.

Tomorrow is Sunday and then after that Monday and I will see him again at school.
And I'm worried.
I'm worried that he will just go back to ignoring me.
He will pretend as if we haven't spent two hours in a movie-theater with his arm slung around my shoulders and his words whispered warmly into the soft skin just underneath my ear.
As if he didn't come home with me after that.
As if I hadn't kissed him senseless on my bed.
As if he hadn't let me push him down, pin him down, moaning and fingers reaching underneath clothes to find the comfort of heated skin.

It's as if we live in two different worlds.

There's the world where I am allowed to touch him and the world where he won't even so much as look at me.

And I don't know which world is real anymore.

That's the thing with summer romances.
You expect to leave them behind once the season changes.
But John and his sea-blue eyes have stubbornly followed me into winter and it's as if we just don't know how to hold each other without sun, sea and a beach.