To Keep You

Thirteen: Olive

Deep wrinkles formed on Roxelana's skin as her eyes clouded over with worry. Her features told a story of a woman torn between crying and running, the thought of reaching out to pull her into a hug danced among my thoughts, but the fear of rejection of a friend-like jester chased it away, like wolves after a lamb.

My body shivered as a chill began to fill the air as the early evening wind engulfed us with it's full force. Automatically, my hands tightened around the coffee cup in search of it's delightful warmth. Even though I wore a sweater, the garment was nowhere near thick enough to shield me away from the wind's rippling cold.

As the silence surrounded us, I did not dare push for Roxelana to speak for I knew how hard it is to speak of the past, because to speak of the past is to relive every moment of it. The good and the bad. The happy and the sad. Even the moments that killed parts of your soul that you'll never get back.

Even as I felt so dead inside and overwhelmed with grief that words can not even imagine describing. I know many years from now this very moment will be apart of my past that I'll never wish to relive. Because to relive such a moment as this, would be to feel every emotion again. And why would I put myself through that? I can barely survive them now. For they are like the ocean and I, a ship at the mercy of it's wrathful waves.

The sudden feeling of skin upon my own pulled me from my thoughts as Roxelana gently took hold of my hand even as her eyes remained cast elsewhere.

"I've spoken briefly with you about my parents and brother, Liam." Her voice was soft, and many emotions were hidden deep within it. As numb and zombie-like as I am, I felt every one of them as if they were my own, and in a twisted way, they were.

Sadness, anger, and such great brokenness...

"As I told you before, when I was sixteen, my parents finally decided to be parents... only to Liam, though." She bit her lip as her eyes locked onto Rah'chayl's form as she slept peacefully in the stroller. There was great envy in Roxelana's eyes as if she envied the infant for simply having parents.

I knew that feeling all too well. When I was a child, I would too look upon others with great envy, for I could not fathom how the other children at school could have both parents. When the daddy-daughter dance would happen, a great wave of drowning sadness would overtake me for my child-like mind couldn't understand why other fathers loved their daughters so much and yet, mine couldn't even stand to be in the same room as me.

As if an axe were cutting through wood, Roxelana's voice broke through my thick thoughts.

"Liam was so young that I shielded him from our parent's neglect-fullness. The only parenting they ever did for us was financially make sure we were taken care of."

As simple as her words were, they were drowning in sorrow that even a child could feel.

Exhaling a great sigh, she continued with a stone-like face, "When my parents re-entered our lives, they began spoiling us in the most moderate ways imaginable. Trips to the zoo, after school ice-creams, and vacations to theme parks."

I nodded along with her words as my eyes were fixed onto Rah'chayl. As a mother, I wanted her to experience life to it's fullest, starting with having grandparents in her life. But as a daughter, I may have forgiven my father, but that does not mean I have to endure his presence for the next century.

"Liam loved the attention, he was too innocent to see through their fake love and pathic acts of parenting to see the truth...They were trying to buy our love, the love that takes an enter lifetime to earn."