Strings Attached

Chapter Eight

Not a day passed by in which I forgot about my dad's departure, but at least being with Theodore could make me forget it for a little bit, though reality would always hit me in the end.

***

That night I went to the beach in an effort to forget about the conversation that I had with my mom. I just wanted to forget how painful being left behind was. I wanted to drown my demons, to forget that my dad was just a jerk who did not care about us.

Just staring at the waves made me wish I could be as wild and careless as the ocean. The sea did not care about whether it could kill people or not. It only did what it was best at: it went wild. The ocean went wild without even bothering to care about others.

I sighed and placed my feet on the sand, feelings its warmth. The sand was calm. It did not even try to fight the sea. The sand, though beautiful in its own way, could never be as powerful as the water was. The sand and the water coexisted to create the ocean, but they were very different. The water was wild and careless, and it could kill anyone who got in its path. The sand was calm, and as long as you stayed in it, you were safe from the water's danger.

I tried to think of myself as the sand: calm and harmless, but it still did not make me feel any better. It did not make me feel any better because I wished I could be wild and careless, just like the water. For only a moment, I wished I could be as powerful as the ocean itself was, but that would never happen.

Great, now you're just wishing for the impossible, I thought, rolling my eyes. Jeez, Christina, why don't you have normal dreams, like being a doctor or a lawyer?

I had always been that way. I had always aimed for the impossible. I had always wished I could leave a mark in this world, even when I knew that nothing made me special. I always thought of myself as a hopeless dreamer, and that made me very pathetic. I would always hope for the impossible to happen, wish for something extraordinary to occur to me. But who was I, in this huge world, to leave a mark? I was only a girl with a dream. I had never felt so small as I did when I stared at the ocean and thought about how immense it was. Who was I, in the middle of the gigantic ocean, to make any difference at all?

Perhaps I was being negative, but it was the truth. I would never be able to do anything significant with my life.

Louise was the valedictorian; Theodore was the salutatorian; I was just a nobody in school. I was only a girl who was not even able to keep her grades up to get into her dream school.

I was only an abandoned girl, whose father had decided that he could acquire a better family than the one he already had, whose father thought of himself as too superior to even consider giving his only daughters a call.

Dad had not called ever since his new son was born. Perhaps having male heir made him think that he did not need his daughters anymore. Maybe his new wife had convinced him to leave us behind and start a new life with his new wife and baby, forgetting he ever had another family, forgetting how much of a failure his first marriage had been.

Dad was probably sleeping like a baby, next to his new wife and his new perfect baby. He was probably having beautiful dreams about his new family, while I was here at the beach, unable to sleep, while my eyes were becoming more watery every passing second, and my heart was becoming emptier every day. How could he sleep at night knowing what he had done to us? How could he see his new wife without remembering that he used to have another woman by his side?

Maybe Mom and Brianna were already over it, but I was not. How could I ever be?

I still remembered Dad telling me that I was his favorite daughter. I still remembered how he had wiped away the tears when I had confessed to him that I felt out of place whenever Mom asked Brianna to go shopping with her.