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12: Stay Humble

12: Stay Humble

 

        It had soon become unclear where lines were supposed to appear when it came to boundaries with everyone I knew. Charlie had been silent folding the rest of the tables, just like I had been, understanding it wasn’t the time the talk, nor was it the time to try and jump head first into our shallow relationship. Trust took so much time to build, and the diary wasn’t going to do half of the work for us, because the diary contained the memoirs of a dead girl, not the secrets of why Charlie and I’s relationship burnt and failed in flames which lash at my skin.

        Marie had come back with coffee for everyone, a grin on her face and hair just starting to kink from where she’d had it straight the night before. Marie was effortlessly good looking in the unconventional way that you had to look past and it earned her second glances and admiring looks, and I think thats why everyone loved Marie, because she set the bar for what you could have in life but wouldn’t have automatically. My hands had been in fists, nails biting my palms as I watched Marie hand out everyone’s coffee, congratulating the boys for the fastest clean up they’d done so far. Byron wanted money out of it, an award for getting him out of bed this early, but even if Marie had taken twenty dollars out of her purse, he wouldn’t have taken it.

        I watched her stand with her back to Charlie all the while, and look to the others like they were her sons and she was proud of them. For short seconds, I looked at Charlie’s face, and once he’d rolled his eyes at his Mom’s dramatics, his face had fallen like that of a dejected little boy who’d just been scorned by the person they looked up to the most. Marie’s stubbornness spoke volumes, as Charlie only got a view of her back, and everyone else was privy to her sense of humour.

        Then she’d turned to me, Marie had, running her nails across the last table standing in the room. I knew she was gearing herself up for words to say, the right tone to say them in and how I’d take them once they were released and hung in the air. There was always going to be a constant miscommunication between language and actions, and as an English teacher, Marie understood that more than anyone I’d ever met in my life.

        “Kasia,” she said, blue eyes locking me in place, and I held my cup of coffee tighter, closer to my chest as some sort of shield, anchor and distraction from the seconds ahead. I didn’t want to hear it, and I’d already told myself that I wasn’t going to listen, I was going to deflect, deny, dispute and distract. I was going to listen to the things I wanted to hear, disillusion myself into a sense of security which took me far away from Charlie Allen, and Caggie Jones and Devin Hill, somewhere other than Ohio, states away or even a whole country. I told myself the only reason my thoughts weren’t cooperating with what I was telling myself was that cup of coffee in my hands, and the blue eyes watching me like I was her daughter and she wanted to give me motherly advice.

        “I’m not going to go on about Charlie,” Marie finished, reading my face and knowing I wasn’t going to stand still and listen to the same crap that had been dribbled into my ears for months on end. No one understood it was a relationship between two people, not two people and everyone they’d ever come into contact with their entire life. At this, she finally looked at her son, and I was certain it was the first time she’d looked at him since last night, really looked at him and understood what her son had grown up into. I knew she did it all the time with Archie, it was hard not to, he was twenty-three years old, a cop, had a fiancee he brought back with him from Liverpool where they fell in love at University.

        Archie had the kind of life that Marie wanted Charlie to have; love to last a lifetime, a career he loved and life experiences people wished for. The weight of expectations placed upon shoulders from parents was the straw that breaks the camels back, and I’m glad that it’s not like that with Byron and I, and I wish sometimes that Charlie had the same kind of freedom that I did too.