After leaving the bar with Damien that night all those weeks ago, I had gone home with him.
And no, perv, I didn’t sleep with him.
Yes, I had planned to originally but once I had gotten there I couldn’t do it.
Yay for self-respect!
Instead we had stayed up talking like we used to. And I was able to remember that aside from being my boyfriend, Damien had at one time been one of my closest friends.
After that, it became easier and easier to spend time with him. A drink after work. Studying at the library in the evenings. A lecture on environmental responsibility in the student hall. Small things that morphed into something else entirely.
Being around Damien again was like putting on a pair of well-worn shoes that had started to pinch my toes. He was still the liberal minded, environmentally aware, poetry writing, save the whales kind of guy. He still looked down his nose at people who didn’t recycle and easily judged anyone that didn’t share his single-minded vision of the world. At one time our vision had been one and the same. We were unified in our sneering, derisive judgments.
But I had come to realize it wasn’t so easy to sit on your soapbox when you scratched below the surface of what you were railing against. Because what you might find there could blow your mind
But now, even as I allowed myself to be pulled back into the way things were, it didn’t feel quite right. Even as I fought tooth and nail to make it all fit. Because I wanted something that was just as I remembered it. Before my life had changed too much for me to get a handle on. I craved the lack of emotional chaos and Damien provided that on some level.
Because lord knew, the rest of my universe was in a tailspin. First on the fast train to emo territory was the sad destruction of my family.
I had gone home for Thanksgiving break and it had been miserable. I had visions of creating new traditions; that somehow Mom, Gavin, Fliss and I would carve out a new niche after Dad’s death. What a deluded moron I had been.
While Mom had tried to put on a brave face, it had lasted only as long as it took me to unpack. Mom broke down and cried through most of my visit. There was no large family dinner this year. Instead, my mother, brother and myself ate a crappy meal at Denny’s before coming home and going to our separate bedrooms. My sister and her family didn’t even bother to come, claiming the girls were sick. I knew that they just hoped to avoid exactly what I had experienced, a get together meant to induce heavy drinking.
My brother was a mess. He had moved back in with Mom and it disgusted me how she was having to take care of him even though he was almost forty years old. And I was furious that she was enabling it.
When I asked her about it, she told me, politely and gently of course, to mind my own business and that everyone dealt with grief in their own way. This was Gavin’s way and I should respect that.
It had been hard, but I let it go. Hoping my mother knew the best way to handle the situation.
So after that depressing excuse for a holiday, I had latched onto school and classes as though it was all I had. And maybe in some ways it was. It was the only thing I had a hundred percent complete control over anyway.
And thankfully my desperation paid off. My midterm grades had buoyed my spirits. Straight A’s. I was hoping to be on the Dean’s List again this semester. And I could almost hear my dad telling me how proud he was of me. I felt obsessed with the need to prove myself.