𝙹𝚄𝙽𝙺𝙷𝙴𝙰𝙳༉‧₊˚. ᴄʜʀɪꜱ ᴄᴏʀɴᴇʟʟ

𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗻.

SHE WAS NEVER GOING TO BE RICH AND FAMOUS,

and Delia was okay with that. Besides, it's not like she had any particular quality that would grant her stardom anyway. She had always been drawn to literature, and even when she was getting high could enjoy an excellent absurdist novel, which was saying a lot because she was sure no other junkie appreciated Albert Camus' work like she did.

She wasn't going to be rich and famous, and she probably wouldn't be a professor either. Maybe a kindergarten aid. Or maybe teach in some private school that didn't require degrees. Or didnt mind a vast collection of pointless AA chips.

Everyone was doing something. Her friends made music, but that was already established as something Delia had no place in. Her old college companions had since faded away, becoming professional adults instead of drinking buddies.

She could always travel with one of the bands she was familiar with, take pictures, or lug around gear. But that seemed all too familiar to her mother,  who'd already exhausted the groupie-to-journalist pipeline.

Delia did not want that. She loved her childhood, meeting her heroes and bouncing from east coast to west, but her mother, Diane, was now on her third husband. Even if she didn't want to admit it, Delia craved something stable for her future, and her childhood was in no way typical or comfortable.

Delia would be placed on a plane to Oregon for every other tour or job her mother got, where she would stay with her father in Astoria. Ozzie Kavner wasn't exactly ready to be a dad but quickly adjusted to life with a daughter when his old hookup called him one day, informing him of Delia's existence.

Despite his many hobbies and odd jobs, Ozzie was well-educated, and that was where Delia picked up her interest in literature and writing. Which was a bit odd, being that Diane was a journalist.

Delia's part-time childhood home seemed to fall apart a little more each time she visited. It was perched directly by the Columbia River, and the water created many problems for the house. The exterior was rough, but the inside was better than anything Delia could've imagined. There were so many books to read, so many things to keep her attention.

Ozzie insisted on doing every repair himself, making his daughter lend him a hand. He was who Delia looked up to the most, a funky, jack-of-all-trades man. His life stories seemed to be neverending, and each visit to the port city was never dull.

He also never seemed disappointed in his daughter, no matter what she did. That was because there was an assurance he had done something worse, pulled a crazier stunt. He took each mistake she made as a learning moment, sitting down by the river together as he went between philosophical and stern.

Even though, much like his daughter, he'd been in and out of addiction in his early 20s, he didn't have very much of anything to say to her when she showed up at the house. It was early July, before she'd gone to rehab. To her friends, Delia didn't look any different, because she'd slowly changed over time, but to Ozzie, it was a shock. She had short hair, her cheeks not as full and rosy as they always had been. There wasn't any light he could shed on the situation; there was nowhere to look except ahead, and Delia didn't have anything ahead of her if she didn't get clean.

So she did. Her health should've been enough to do so, but her father's true disappointment was what made up her mind. Growing up, he seemed to know everything, and that had held true into Delia's young adulthood.