ever since new york || h.s.

fifteen

I went back home for my mother's funeral without any thought towards Harry. I put on my black dress without him and I watched the casket that I didn't pick out be lowered into the ground without him. I rode the train back home without him and I settled into my home with a new life without him.

I'd called the office and they'd allowed me to take the few days off I needed, purely out of pity but I accepted them nonetheless. I wrote for some of the columns I'd fallen behind on and did a rather superb job of pretending like there wasn't a mound of papers that I needed to sort through for a story that would send my career soaring.

Without Harry. That was the entire point wasn't it? I could disappear back into my regular schedule, now motherless and entirely more fragile than I had been to begin with, but still somewhat regular. I could return to being shoved around by dimwits like Pollock and left to write about heat waves or contracting leases or whatever bullshit I was assigned. I could do it. I'd done it before, but it's so much harder to go back to a hell that you've already partially escaped from.

When I was alone and not being pushed around by neighbors and distant family members shoving their condolences down my throat amongst a sea of black and plastic flowers, it was harder to forget him, to push the thoughts and memories and possibilities to the back of my mind. I'd believed that he was my silver lining, the one chance I'd been given to make something of myself, the only man I'd ever known who refused to let me down. Then I realized that they're all the same, every single one of them. In all actuality, Harry wasn't too far away from being Pollock. He took credit for Jessie's work, even if only from me, and he allowed me to helplessly depend on him as though I'd eventually let him crawl into my pants. He wasn't different, wasn't some glorified beacon of hope like I'd painted him to be. He was painfully the same.

I hated him for it. I got angry, threw glasses at the wall, cursed his name, promised to bathe in his blood, but none of it helped. My mother was dead, which no one could change, and my career was at a standstill, which I had not fully decided whether or not I should change. So, the anger didn't do anything other than make a mess out of my house and myself.

I cleaned up the broken glass before falling into a hot bath that I decorated with a candle left over from my mother's wake. I wondered what she would tell me to do in this instance, if she would've told me to silently let it go or if she would've insisted upon getting revenge. I couldn't decide and cried for a long time over it.

I dried myself off and slipped into a pair of silk pajamas that were the same pink color as my cheeks were when I had been crying. I looked in the mirror and I didn't feel ugly, just tired and figured that that was a start at the very least.

I fell asleep with the window open and the cover barely draped over my body, letting the barely there summer breeze graze over my skin and the sounds of the city lull me to sleep. It was nice for a while, the best rest I'd gotten in a week or more, but then I was jolted awake with the sudden realization that I knew exactly what I needed to do, had known it all along. From the moment I heard his voice over the crackled phone lines, I had known what my goal was. He had tried to scare me away from it by overloading my brain with so much information that I couldn't pick it apart, along with a few threats. He even went as far as trying to make me fall in love with him, as if women were just susceptible creatures that craved any sort of seduction. If I didn't write about him, I would be exactly who he thought I was. I would be a pushover, easily resolved, a whisper into the night. I, unfortunately for him, was not any of those things. I was about to be the personified and materialized character of his nightmares, the final push that his career needed to end with a blaze of riot. I was Penelope Chambers, not Pen, and I was woman.

"We learn to love from learning how bad it feels to hate." -Jessie, 1959