❝In which two people call up a helpline in order to find someone just as broken as they are. ❞
"Does...does it bother you that my dad's in prison for murder?"
"Well, judging by the fact that I moved away from America to get away from the memory of a...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Isabella's thumb hovered over the delete button on her phone, uncalled for hesitation shadowing the action, lurking in the back of her mind as it clouded her better judgment. What should have been so simple had become ridiculously complicated, emotions so long and tired that they had become tangled within one another. And she would try to untangle them, of course she would, but it was such a mess that she had no idea where to start. Which made her want to collapse from exhaustion because deleting the photos of him and her was supposed to be the start. And now she couldn't even do that.
Which left her to question whether she really needed to untangle the thread of thought after all. Was there really any point in a hopeless mission, or would she just cause the string to entangle itself further? Unlike spiders, she was not well versed in the delicate profession of spinning a web, let alone untangling one, which was frustrating, because, just as a web allowed the spider to survive, the web inside her head was what kept her breathing. Spinning it off in the wrong direction could be fatal. But webs, no matter how beautiful, were fragile, broken by the single touch of a human finger. And strings were easily cut. The only thing keeping a string versatile were the knots. The knots that showed the story of the string and the stories that it had spun, sewn, and led.
Her eyes burned into the joyful image on the small screen, lips pressing together as all her facial features pulled into a creased garment of restraint, uniting in the faint hope of preventing the inevitable tears. Which was ridiculous, really, because there was no one to see her cry other than the four walls of her bedroom. But maybe it was just herself she was lying to. All this time. Telling herself that she was strong. That she was brave. But she was a coward. And no one could convince her otherwise. She couldn't even look at a picture without falling apart.
She had been so afraid of letting the past define that that was exactly what it had done.
She had been holding her thumb over the cuts of the past, refusing to let them bleed into her future. But she should have let the wounds heal themselves, because holding onto those blows had meant that she had missed out on the rest of the world.
So she would keep the pictures on her phone, as a reminder that the past still lived, the carbon to the future's oxygen as it breathed. Both just as necessary in the process of creating the present. So, as cheesy it sounded, she just needed to let it go. Let it be. Let it live and breathe inside of her. To become a vital part of who she was. And who she wanted to be. Because it would always be a part of her now, no matter how much she attempted to deny it.
But that didn't have to be a bad thing, not anymore, at least.
Choosing to let the past be a medicine instead of a poison was the difference between holding onto a balloon and letting it go. To hold on was to see it as a constant reminder, a shadow over the ground as it blocked the bright sun in the sky. Or, to let the balloon go and just know. That, somewhere, that balloon is in the sky for others to see. To land in their back gardens and grace them with the same lessons that it had taught before.
To let the balloon go, so it wouldn't carry her away from the world anymore.
