Love With An Asterisk*

Clause 5: Heap

Clause 5: Heap

Cianna’s POV

When you make a choice, stick by it, don’t look back and don’t think about it, or else you’ll end up in a heap on the floor of the hallway after you leave the love of your life.  You make the hard choice, the one you know is the best, and the one you know will be the least heartbreaking in the end.

That’s the choice you make and when you make it the last thing you do is look back. 

More importantly when you love someone or something, I mean really love them with everything in you set them free before they outgrow their cage. You do that if you’re smart. You take the cons and put them next to the pros and you come to the conclusion that if even one of those cons could hurt the man you love, or cause him to have to sacrifice anything he’s been working for that you would rather sacrifice yourself. Your dreams. Your desires.

I chanted this to myself over and over and over again until I started to believe that one day I would actually believe that I would start to believe it was true. Maybe that’s the day I would begin to be able to withstand this heartbreak.

This was bound to happen. I didn’t expect it to be this soon. Not in a million years did I expect it, but it happened. Maybe if it happened later we would both be different people, at different points in our lives and make different choices.

But that’s not what was happening right now. In this moment.

I had to make a choice. I could sacrifice. Or he could sacrifice.

One was undeniably out of the question.

So here I was, in a heap.

******************

A Few Months Later

Being with Louis was good for me. I had been spending days with him just to pass the time. I'm not sure if that made me a bad person, but these days I had neither the strength nor the energy to care. He was fully aware of the situation. He understood that it was better for me to simply not have emotion, but I'm sure walking through life emotionlessly wasn't good for my cause.

I was only glad about one thing and some days even that was barely enough to overcome the pain inside. It was the one thing and one thing alone that made me get up everyday and put one foot in front of the other.

On top of everything I was feeling, it didn't help that every one in my life wanted me to give him a chance. In my mind, they were asking me to give him a chance for him to learn to hate me for holding him back. No one else saw it that way though.

They were still supporting me in my decision, but to be in a situation like this and have no one agree with it was tough. Always looking at me with eyes that spoke volumes. Every silence was loaded; it was too much for me to handle at the moment, at any moment.

I could, however, admit to two things. The first was that I wondered everyday if I made a mistake. Maybe I should have given him a chance. Maybe I should have just seen what his reaction was. Maybe I should have trusted him. But maybe was such a scary word for me because maybe if I had trusted him things would have still turned out the way I predicted they would.

Second was that there had been thousands of times when I thought about simply calling Monroe and begging him to take me back. For every thousand times I thought about calling him, the phone was in hand with his number ready to dial 999 times. But I wouldn't do it.

It was especially hard in the first weeks because he came to my parent's house every day. I would stay hidden in my room and my mother or father or Gloria-our housekeeper-respected my wishes and told him that I wanted nothing to do with him. The messages started out easy and then progressed.