Meant for Me | ✔️

1) Learning to walk

Author note: This story goes between present time and two years ago. Be sure to take note of the dates.

Saturday, August 2nd.

A D D I E

When Margo, my big sister, was fourteen, she caught our father having an affair with my mother. She used to tell me how shocking it was, even if our father was a good-looking Italian man that had women walking through his restaurant doors in hoards, the question of his faithfulness would never have been called into question.

That was until Margo, who had never even held hands with a boy, walked into the storeroom to collect a pizza sauce and saw her father's pants around his ankles and a woman's legs around his waist.

He brought great shame on the Bianchi name and as I was told, he was given an earful from my Nonna who was appalled at his actions. She never accepted my mother who, while from Italian descent, was born and raised in America. She didn't like to cook, she was career focused, she didn't want a lot of children. This didn't sit right with Nonna, as if the fact that she was a mistress wasn't bad enough, she didn't equate to a good Italian housewife either. But she was beautiful, elegant, dazzling in diamonds and wealth. And she had a good heart, she was kind and welcoming.

Dad left Sicily with my mom, both heading back to her home in California and six months later, Margo was sent to live with them as her own mother fell deep into drugs and alcohol. A year and a half later, I was born. As I grew older, I asked Margo how she wasn't so angry and frustrated with my mother for tearing her family apart. All she ever said was that her father was happier than he had ever been and there were probably things that went on that she didn't understand because of her age.

Margo was like that. She tended not to dwell on circumstantial matters. She couldn't change the relationship that her dad had with my mom. So, she embraced it and she embraced me.

As I watched the expansive land from the train window, I tried to hear what Margo would tell me about this situation. What advice would she have for me now? She was practical so the first thing she would tell me was that traveling on a train from Beverly Hills to Austin, Texas was impulsive and stupid, and I needed to go home and deal with reality regardless of what I felt.

There was no chance that I could go home. It didn't matter what I had left behind, our shared event planning business, May We? didn't matter, the clothes, the shoes, the friends and clients. None of it mattered. I couldn't be sure of what pushed me into choosing Austin, Texas as the final stop, the city where my ticket would expire, and I would have no choice but to get off the train or pay for another leg of the tour.

Perhaps that was for the best, I could just sit on this train, in this seat, claimed as a traveler and hoping that we'd drive far enough that the oozing heart sized hole in my chest would heal the further that we got from home.

It was far fetched of course, for two reasons. The first being that the hole was here, and it wasn't going to close. The second being that this train would end up back in California at some point whether I liked it or not.

My head fell onto the warm windowpane and I watched the road beside the tracks whirring past, fast. So fast that the lines separating the lanes were a blur. The road signs were a blur. My fingertips touched the bottom of my eyes just to be sure that I wasn't sobbing in public again and that the blur wasn't gathered tears refusing to spill. Nope, not a tear so far. I thought that keeping it together would have been a lot harder, but I had a feeling that the hollow pit in my chest was a black hole, draining the emotion and pain before I knew what to do with it.

Instead, I had been on autopilot for the last week and I wasn't sure where the switch to turn it off was.

Even if there was a black hole in my chest, all of that pain and emotion had to go somewhere. The filtration couldn't have been leaving me. I knew that it would be manifesting somewhere, storing itself to spring load and appear at the most inconvenient of times. Perhaps one of those moments would be when I was starting to feel right again. Not that I was sure I'd ever feel 'right'.