Life is comprised of moments, joyful ones and tragic ones. We all have two faces, but the lucky ones can merge both expressions, they can take the good with the bad and understand that life is sometimes not what you expect.
Sometimes life is more and sometimes it’s less.
Not everyone can be happy all the time.
And so we learn to hang on to the happiness and use it as a crutch to get us through the sadness that envelopes us and let it guide us back to the joy.
If you’re one of the lucky ones.
I stared at the two masks hanging from the mirror above my dresser. One mask featured a smile while the other displayed a frown. My freshman year of college I took a drama course, and the professor gave us these masks to use as a tool to summon the emotions of the characters we were portraying.
I dropped the class but kept the masks because for me they were so much more than a tool. Those masks are who I am.
The smile conveys how I feel when my maker is silenced.
The frown reminds me it will all come crashing down, and I was only smiling during a brief pause from my truth. My maker will return and bring me down from whatever manic state of happiness I was now experiencing.
I’m not one of the lucky ones.
Over the last month I have slept more than anything else because when I sleep…I dream and in my dreams I see him.
I dream of our story.
I dream of the smiles.
And then I wake, try to hang onto the happiness of the dream, pray it guides me out of the depression I am in…but it doesn’t.
I want one more chance to smile.
One more chance to be a girl in love.
One more chance to be normal.
It doesn’t come.
It never comes.
And so I close my eyes again.
Maybe next time.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I awoke to the sound of a knock on my bedroom door but didn’t bother turning around. I knew it was my mother and I knew the look on her face would break my heart—what was left of it. I kept my back towards her, laid on my side as she stepped into my room and closed the door softly behind her.
“Lacey, it’s almost noon,” she whispered.
I didn’t answer.
A moment later I felt the dip in the mattress as she laid beside me and wrapped an arm around my waist.
“My sweet girl,” she murmured, smoothing down my hair. “My beautiful, sweet girl. Please talk to me,” she pleaded.
“I’m fine,” I said numbly.
“You’re not fine and I’ve ignored it too long,” she whispered. “I know what’s going on Lacey,” she revealed.
Slowly, I turned around, brave enough to face her, wanting her to take away my pain.
Desperate for the love only a mother could give.
Maybe just maybe she could be the one to help me through this. Not that long ago I felt like I was walking in my mother’s shoes, falling in love with an outlaw, trying to see the good in him. She did it.
And when it failed when she was no longer his…she survived.
Maybe this wasn’t about the maker.
Maybe it was just about my heart.
I didn’t know anymore.
“You loved daddy didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“And it hurt when it was over didn’t it?”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“But you’re still standing. The world kept moving for you,” I murmured.
“And it will for you too,” she assured me. “You just have to let it. You have to realize you have nothing to be ashamed— ““I’m not ashamed,” I interrupted. “I fell in love and for two months of my life I had it all…everything I ever wanted. He may not have been perfect in your eyes or someone you or daddy would’ve picked for me but what we had was perfect.”
I watched as she blinked and tried to mask the confusion in her eyes.
“Two months?”
“Yes, for two months I was Blackie’s girl,” I admitted. “No one knew and now I’m wondering if I imagined it all.”
“Lacey,” she started.
“Please, don’t. Don’t tell me it was wrong because it was the only thing right in my life,” I argued.
She closed her mouth and remained silent.
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” I said.
“Talking about it might help,” she replied. “Lacey, I can’t sit here and watch you suffer like this anymore. I can’t sit here and go through this again.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s like watching it happen all over again, only this time it’s my child I’m losing and I’ve already lost one,” she gasped, lifting her hand to cover her mouth as she shook her head.
She knows.
She knows she’s stuck with the damaged kid.
Look at what you’re doing to her.
Look at her cry.
“What I’m trying to say is— ““What you’re trying to say is you think I’m crazy,” I rasped as I climbed out of the bed and stared back at her.
“No, Lacey, I’m not saying that at all,” she argued, getting out of the bed to quickly walk around it, grabbing a hold of my hands as her eyes pleaded with mine.
“I love you,” she whispered.