Falling For Casual

Chapter 23

I hadn't meant to hurt him. If anything, that was the farthest thing from my mind. Every word that had been fabricated wasn't just for my benefit. Honestly, I don't think it was for me at all. All of it had been for him. Texas. Theo. I'd wanted to be different for him, something better than who I'd been my entire life because my life had been ugly. Deep down, I was that. Ugly. Hideous. Fucked up in every aspect I could think of. It was ironic how my exterior never portrayed that. How, even when I was younger with eyes a bit too big for my face and limbs that were too long for my frame, you still wouldn't be able to tell that I was this unsightly thing.

   No one would call me unpleasant to look at. At least not to my face. But that didn't mean it wasn't true. The fact of the matter was that my body, the ninety pounds I'd been when I was fifteen, the hundred and thirty pounds that finally filled me out when I'd reached adulthood, held something disgusting.

   While I'd gone through the awkward phase of my life, I'd tried to reason with myself. It wasn't just me out there who felt like this. This had to be girlhood. Something that you just had to grow out of. The anger. The possession. The obsession. The yearn for a love that I had never felt growing up. The lack of empathy. The hate for anything human. Anyone human. It had to just be those weird heightened emotions women always mention they had when they were younger. Just something I had to shed my skin of, and eventually, I'd be normal.

   Yet as my feet grew in size and my hips widened, that feeling stayed. It blossomed. The flower of my innocence bloomed deep in my pelvis. The problem remained. Even after other girls around me became softer while the world became harder for them, my petals never drooped. They never fell one by one with every situation that tried to break me down.

   That's when I realized my flower wasn't the ones that grew in the fields that people ran through. It wasn't the one you picked and handed to someone with love in your eyes. My flower wasn't the one you placed in room temperature water to allow the sun to kiss it's silk petals and show off to the world.

   My flower was carnivorous. It had teeth. Maybe that was the reason why after all these years I still felt out of place. I couldn't understand things like compassion or show a softness or forgiveness. Maybe that was the reason I felt so hungry for violence. It needed to be fed, and what's more mouthwatering than wrath?

   Was it my mother's? Had I inherited my mother's anger and lack of forgiveness? Or had it been my father's? The one who walked out on not only her but me too. The man who I called my father now had always been that to me, but it wasn't biologically the truth. It was just another secret given to me by mother to carry. A secret I was too young to hold with the weight of it. How could she expect a little girl with such small arms to hold my biological father, a stranger, with me when the man who had brushed my hair for school picture day and the one who sat me in his lap to read his car magazines was the one I'd thought was mine all this time?

    I should've told him that I knew. That my mother had spilled it all to me when I was nine. But I held it from him. I'd thought it was too much for his heart to hold, and so I'd have to grow mine a bit bigger to trap it for the both of us. In hindsight, maybe that was the only compassion I'd had. Though now thinking back, it wasn't because I didn't want to see him cry. It wasn't even because I'd loved him so much that I knew he'd be devastated to find out that I saw him as someone other than my father. That I would now look at him in a different light. That in my head, he was now my stepfather.

   No. It was the secret that I held for the fact that I could squeeze it in front of my mother with my tiny hands. That I could use this to make my mother sing and dance whenever I needed her to. That flower in me had always been something else. Something painful both to me and the outside world. So maybe it was my biological father who left me with that seed. It was possible he'd planted it just like he'd planted me in my mother's womb. That he was the dark and hideous thing that had sucked the life out of my mother.