Butterfly Weeds (12 page)
Dead seconds went by and neither Will nor I said anything. Then, Will finally spoke.
“What does that mean for us?” he asked as straight-forward as a person could say those words.
His lack of passion stabbed my heart strings yet again and forced me to try out another set of words for the first time. I almost hoped, in a weird way, they would somehow salvage our past or, at the very least, fire up his fervor.
“Maybe we should take a break or something,” I replied.
“You mean break up?” Will asked me firmly.
“Well, just to give us some time to think about it,” I offered.
“Julia, you and I both know that there is no such thing as a break. There is only a break up. Is that what you really want?” he asked me sternly.
No
, but that word would never reach his ears. My heart was breaking, but I remained confident in my confessions. The past several weeks had been hard on both of us. I knew this. Life had torn us into two, different directions and only because I felt I had already lost him, I found the nerve to fight against almost everything in me and answer him bravely.
“Yes,” I stuttered finally, after a long pause.
My eyes began to fill with tears and the back of my throat ached now even as I tried to remain strong in my persuasions.
“Yes,” I said again softly but with more conviction.
I had come too far to turn back now. The truth was that I wanted to see what life without him would be like – no arguments, no missing him every day, no letdowns when he had to change weekend plans with me last minute. I hated the words that rolled so easily off of my tongue, but I sensed again a small bit of freedom in them as well now, and I held onto that freedom for courage, even while I secretly waited for him to convince me that my imagined liberty wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Well, I guess that’s it then,” Will said resolutely, without a waiver in his voice.
There was silence for a long second. Was this really it? Was this really happening?
“I guess so,” I said in an almost whisper, responding to what I saw as his final, white-flag surrender to our relationship.
“Take care,” Will said softly, yet his words still cold.
“You too,” I whispered.
I pressed the red,
END
button, set the phone down gently onto the surface of the wooden desk and stared at it vehemently as if it were a ticking time bomb and I could deactivate
it if I weren’t careful enough.
Years in the making, and that’s all it took. Sad and angry, my heart ached and stabbed at the walls of my chest. He had not fought for us like I thought he would have, and I was crushed. I wondered if he had thought less of me than I believed he had. What did I really mean to him after all of these years? Why wasn’t he calling back and apologizing?
I sat there surrounded in my swirling thoughts, not able to escape the fact that now, suddenly, my world was eerily different. It was almost as if someone had put me in an unfamiliar room and had turned off all of the lights. What happened to growing old and wrinkly? What about the fairytale? He was the one that made me believe that a fairytale even existed. He was supposed to always be there, but now he was nowhere to be found, and I was left imagining a world without him in it. It all seemed so cold and sad, and I blamed him for it.
I fought back the tears that welled up behind my eyelids as I picked up my pencil again. A piece of my heart wished that I had time to sort through the conversation that I had just had with the boy I had loved unswervingly for the past several years, yet that piece of my heart nevertheless could not outweigh the whole of my head that told me that there was no time to think about what was the past now – what wasn’t probably even real in the first place.
My head forced my thoughts back onto my economics homework in front of me and back onto the sociology test I had the next day,
for which I still had to study.
And with a single tear winning the battle and dropping to my textbook below, I turned the page and began to slowly read its blurry words. At the same time, I slid off the grass ring that had for so long graced my finger and set it carefully next to the ticking time bomb.
I
threw my lip gloss and cell phone into my dark brown, leather purse and flipped off the light to what used to be my bedroom. Now, it hardly resembled anything that I would call mine. My mother had, just months after I had left for college, converted the room into a “guest quarter,” as she so blissfully called it. The “quarter” even came complete with its own theme. Yes, what was once the shrine that paid tribute to my entire childhood, had now become “the country room,” painted light emerald and decorated with white, lace curtains and a mammoth picture of a field of purple flowers that hung over the bed. It was as if she had been planning it for years. I could even picture her dancing about the room and listening to some old, 60s record as she stuffed my prized 4-H trophies and band posters into a box and hid it away for good. I cringed at the thought of my precious bands being wrinkled and crammed into an eternal box as I made my way down the hallway, anticipating ea
ch creek in the hardwood floor.
It was New Year’s Eve. The holiday had never really been my favorite, mostly because it was at the wrong time of the year. How were you supposed to get excited about starting anything when it was ten degrees outside and all you could really think about starting was a vacation in any place south of where you were?
Christmas had been alright, though. My mother had decorated the place to the hilt, as usual, right down to the little ceramic Christmas mice that she would adhere to the banisters. Each mouse extended across a tiny sled and donned a miniature stocking hat and colorful mittens. The figurines made the normal and natural walk down the stairs awkward and slightly dangerous, but through the years, I guess I had come to look forward to their meandering presence during the holidays. With the mice, came Christmas.
Thinking about how I had grown to love the expected consistency of my Christmases at home, my thoughts turned to the one, obnoxiously missing piece. It had been my first Christmas without Will in years, and I had found it cruelly evident that he had not been by my side. I had survived, however, and now, I was just the tiniest bit excited because this New Year’s Eve would be different too – a good different or at least I hoped it would be anyway.
It had been a couple of months since I had last spoken to Will, and though I didn’t expect a love reconnection, I was excited to catch up. I missed his friendship, and honestly, a piece of me still hadn’t healed from our last conversation. He had been my best friend for more than three, amazing years, and now, where his friendship had been was left a void that I had not even thought about filling yet.
After forcing my limbs through the arm holes in my favorite, worn-in, ivory wool coat, I jumped into my jeep and turned the key. I hated the months from December to February with a passion. Last night, it had dropped to a very unpleasant 14 degrees, and now, the air temperature pierced the thinnest parts of my nose and ears. My teeth chattered as I struggled to pull my pale pink scarf around my neck, waiting impatiently for the heat in the vents to grow warm and then hot. It very rarely occurred to me to warm up the jeep before actually getting into it like everyone else in this great state did.
I’m on a beach. I closed my eyes and rubbed my hands briskly together. I’m basking in the warm sun. It’s 85 degrees and perfect.
I opened my eyes and caught a leafless tree glaring at me from outside my so-called beach. Long ice sickles clung to its branches – they too seemed to be mocking me. The world out there looked dead and lifeless. I was surely in a British film.
Who was I kidding? It was cold out there, and it was cold in here, and even a warm image was
too hard to conjure up tonight.
After several, painful minutes, and when the inside of my jeep was at least bearable, I forced it into d
rive and made my way into town.
When I arrived in town, I could see Rachel waiting for me at the place we had nicknamed
The Elle
years ago. It had gained the name because of its most eye-catching feature. A big
L
in the lumber yard’s sign, nailed across the front of the building, had obnoxiously overshadowed the rest of the letters in the business’ name for decades. The
L
gleamed bright cherry red, as opposed to its counterpart letters’ deep chocolate brown. Further, the big
L
had always been slightly crooked, in contrast to the painstakingly straight let
ters that followed it.
I slowed the jeep and pulled up next to Rachel’s deep emerald sedan and motioned to her through the sealed passenger’s side window to get in.
Rachel grabbed her purse and gloves, crawled out of her car and dove into my now, warm nook on wheels.
“Hey! How was your Christmas?” she excitedly shouted over the drone of the heater still on its highest setting.
“It was good,” I answered, omitting some of the truth, as I pulled away from our meeting place. “It was pretty much the same as usual. Uncle Ben wouldn’t stop talking about his awful Jayhawks and Aunt Sharon and Mom spent half the night exchanging recipes of miracle creams that promised to fight aging and the other half of the night trying to get Uncle Joey and Uncle Mark to stop talking about football.”
“What about yours?” I asked.
“Pretty much the same for me too, except that Lucas brought home his pet ferret and Aunt Kim’s daughter accidentally let it out, and we spent half the night looking for Artie the ferret in the air ducts.”
I tried to hold back my snickers. My friend looked so disheveled a
s she told her Christmas story.
Rachel turned and looked at me with a scowl.
“Julia, it really was horrible,” she said with a perturbed look on her face. “It was Christmas, and I was looking for Artie the ferret.”
I tried to stifle my laughter still, but it only seemed to make it worse.
“You’re awful, you know?” Rachel said, laughing now as well.
Within a couple of minutes, I turned down a narrow, one-way street. I could faintly hear the voices and see the warm light coming from within the house, which looked to be full of life. I pulled next to the curb and put the jeep into park.
“Okay, Rach, we’ll go on three,” I said.
“Okay,” she said, squeezing her gloves over her fingers and taking a deep breath.
“One, two…three,” I counted.
On
three
, we both flung open our doors and flew out of the jeep as if our lives depended on our quickest exit. Stung by a frigid gust of air, we, decked from head to toe in scarves, coats and mittens, both sprinted to our friend’s house in a world-class-athlete kind of manner – or at least, that was the manner we were going for.
When we reached the wooden entrance, still bearing a festive holiday wreath, Rachel knocked on it. And within seconds, Kathy greeted us at the door.
“Come in,” she said cheerfully, giving each of us a hug. “Make yourself at home.”
Kathy had always been one of those people who was far beyond her years. She always seemed to know the right thing to say, and she was always, without falter, well-mannered and extremely polite. And could she throw a party? Kathy’s house had been the New Year’s Eve party every year since I could remember.
Rachel and I quickly stepped into the warm house, and it was just short of heavenly. Finally, my
beach.
I took off my coat, hung it on the wooden coat rack next to the door and made my way to the living room, while Rachel stayed behind in the entryway talking to Kathy. I didn’t have time to talk; I was on a mission.
I squeezed stealthily past the bodies that inhabited my path. I saw everyone but the person for whom I was searching. He’s here, I know
. I saw his SUV parked outside.
I continued to scurry through the horde, acting like I wasn’t on the quest of my life – only being stopped a couple of times. I did the normal,
Hi, how are you?
and kept moving.
I eventually made it to the living room, and when I looked up, I swore I had been transported to some romantic movie set – because our eyes met, and for a moment, we were the only two people in t
he bustling room.
He looked like his handsome self, although he had a strong five o’clock shadow now, and his hair had grown out just enough that small, wavy tuffs of it lingered on the tops of his ears. The look worked for him though. It was different, but a good different.
I stood frozen in the doorway.
After taking a deep breath and letting it out, I gradually made my way through the throng toward Will, but as I did, I noticed something else that was different about him, but this time, the difference was just short of unsettling. And immediately, I knew then that this couldn’t possibly be a romantic flick that I had just been transported
to – more like anything but it.
I swallowed hard, and restarted my heart. Whose hand was he holding? A knife had just pierced my body. I had not expected this emotion. I expected excited, ma
ybe even nervous, but not this.
I felt hurt and then awkwardly thrown off-guard, until that turned into a silent rage. But I knew I had no case on which to stand. That was the worst part. I could say nothing. There was nothing really for me to say. I wanted to turn around and walk back through the living room door in which I had just come. But of course, we had just had that weird, eyes-meet movie scene just moments before. And now, I had no other option but to move forward. So, I took ano
ther, cautious step toward him.
A couple more forced steps and I had already reached him and the unfamiliar one attached to him. I immediately introduced myself to the new, curly-locked brunette on his arm. I shook the girl’s hand, making sure I forced myself to smile and to be polite and friendly – do everything that I was supposed to do. The girl looked nervous, but she smiled as well. Then, after the brief introduction, I met Will’s eyes again.
“Hey,” I said softly. “How have you been?”
He looked nervous too. Good.
