Aberration

how many nights does it take to count the stars?

As a girl, I remember how foolish I was.
From a young age it was a habit of mine, to blush at so much as a tip of a hat. My mother used to read me stories of happily ever afters and of love defying all, but my mother never told me that the real world was nothing like the storybooks had made it out to be.
When I was a girl I'd pull my heart out for anyone who would glance at me twice. As I got older, it was a second nature; to meet men in bars whose names I didn't know, slurring hushed promises in my ear that they knew they couldn't keep.
I don't remember when I met George Wilson, the man whose name I carry.
For the third time that weekend I found myself in the passenger seat of a car next to a driver whose name I couldn't quite remember. He was blond I think, blond with dark observing eyes that scrutinized my every move. They were cold, unsettlingly frigid against the humid evening air.
It scared me how distant he came off as, how out of tune he really did seem with the world. His eyes were glossy, jagged in a way that came off feral. He drove like a maniac to arrive somewhere that he could get gas, mumbling something under his breath about how he should've done this before he went out.
For a few minutes we were driving against the wind, hair blowing loose around my head and the sand flying into my eyes. I gave him a quick glance while attempting to fix my hair, hoping that at least if I looked a wreck by the time we got to his place that he would look one too. But even as his hair flew in different directions, he didn't seem to be bothered at all.
He was gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles and a champagne smile, fluttering his eyelids closed to breathe in the fresh summer air. This wasn't exactly the time and place to be stopping to sniff the roses, here he was with a pretty girl beside him and he hardly paid any mind.
A pretty girl sat beside him with my lipstick shamelessly smeared, and she couldn't even remember his name.
We stopped for gas on the way back from town. The bumbling fool had so much to drink that he couldn't even open his wallet to pay the man. He had refused my help when I offered it, so for a few moments he stood there slurring and grumbling angrily as the seconds ticked on, cursing under his breath.
His cologne suffocated the night's breeze, and suddenly it was difficult to breathe in anything except him, anything except this reality that I built for myself.
I remember George had stood patiently beside the car for him to pull out his dollar twenty five he had owed.
He stood there for a minute, leaning against the pump with sleep ridden features. Occasionally he would glance up at the sky and stretch his mouth into a wide yawn, probably wondering when on earth this guy would hurry up and pay him already so he could crawl back into bed. Even if that might have been the case, he never showed one sign of ill manner. There was something humble about George Wilson, a type of kindness and patience I had never seen in another man.
The next day I found myself at the very same spot to fill up my own tank. As expected, he was there, next to the gas pump where he had stood just the night before. His cheeks were redder than I remembered them to be, but maybe it was just the heat of the hot summer's sun. We spent the afternoon together, in a café down the road towards the ritzy part of town, laughing about nonsense like a bunch of fools would. He was a charming man, mild mannered but always polite.
I don't know if I ever loved George Wilson. I spent more nights with him sober than I had spent them drunk in a long time.
I found it refreshing, for the first time in a lifetime I felt like the world wasn't against me. I felt like could breathe again.
Wilson was the first man to make me feel like a respected young woman. I was never just a drunken flapper to him, I was his wife. And by golly, what a feeling that was.
But life has a funny way of catching up to you, it's a reality that's hard to
grip onto, and there's some people in this world that never do.
I met Tom Buchanan knowing he was married. He was persistent on taking me out to a bar, regardless of who waited for him at home. He was a schmoozer, that man, he always knew how to win a lady's heart.
I was hesitant. I was a married woman now, and we were finally starting to be okay again.
We had just gotten out of a rough patch, to the point where we'd fight only to forget what we were fighting about in the first place. Just the night before we had an especially bad argument, worse than it had ever been. I didn't sleep that night; I don't think either of us did. We laid on our backs to stare up at the ceiling over our bed, silence filling our ears. Our voices were hoarse from yelling, and the vase that I had broken in my rage still lay on the kitchen floor, shattered into far fewer pieces than my heart had ever been.
This was real life, and real life has its ugly moments. This was different, though. I didn't want to be having these fights and enduring those silences afterwards, a true Prince Charming and his bride always get along, right? Or maybe they don't, and those are the parts that the storybooks leave out.
Why would they include them, anyway? No one wants to hear about the prince who drinks until he can barely stand in the kitchen when everyone's gone to bed, or the princess who sees that her husband is struggling but instead of staying to fix it, she runs off with his enemy to the countryside.
People want to read about the happy things, but I was living in a fantasy world in the hopes that it would stay that way. This world was too harsh for me and I only wanted to be blissfully aware of the things that had gotten ugly again.
And then I was thinking: Tom was a well respected man in town, he wouldn't dare to slander his own name if he didn't have a reason to, right? Maybe he wasn't happy with his marriage, either. Maybe we could find peace in each other out of a world that was growing on chaos and cheap liquor, and with this in mind I climbed into his car to drive away in a cloud of dust and adrenaline.
His wife had always nagged the back of my mind, it didn't stop until he left in the morning. What would she think, if she found that her husband had been unfaithful? Would she cry? Would she curse and scream and demand why it was me, why it had to be her that was fooled so easily by a man she believed to be trustworthy? Why would there be a need for another woman? That's all I would ever be, I knew it from the beginning, but I still chose to lay with him at night.
On a particularly hot Summer's day, he and his wife turned into our gravel road to fill their tanks coming back from the city.
They drove a beautiful yellow vehicle, one that I had never seen before. It was stunning, catching the light of the sun in just the right way. His wife was sat between him and another man, perched comfortably on the plush leather seats donning an elegant sun hat that had blocked my view from her face.
If I knew men like Tom, she was probably delicate. She probably had round stunning eyes and a dazzling smile. She probably had pink dainty lips and not a wrinkle or frown line in sight. If I knew men like Tom, and in fact I had many times before, she was probably ignorant to anything less than perfect around her. If I knew men like Tom, she probably felt the same heavy feeling in her chest when he announces that he's off to poker with the boys, because even though they never mention it, she knows that he's certainly not going off to play poker.
That was a talent of his, to make the most confident of women begin to doubt herself. He was an expert at it, and I had known that just as everyone else in town did. There was a woman before me I knew for sure, he would trade in his mistress every year or so for a fresh face. Tom was difficult to ever really call him yours.
I didn't really know anything about him at all. I was a separate part of his life that held the mask to his alter ego.
The thought infuriated me.