The Delivery Boy(boyxboy)

Chapter 11: Car Rides and Blood Types.

I will not make
The same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself
Cause my heart so much misery
I will not break
The way you did, you fell so hard
I've learned the hard way
To never let it get that far

Because of you
I never stray too far from the sidewalk
Because of you
I learned to play on the safe side so I don't get hurt
Because of you
I find it hard to trust not only me, but everyone around me
Because of you
I am afraid

-

Axel

You cannot hate someone, until you know what it might be like to love them.

All the memories I had of my mother smelled like alcohol- even the good ones, when she was bending down to kiss me goodnight and her breathe was a boozy breeze on my face, or when she was straightening my tie on my first day of school. Her disease was a perfume, one I used to lean into when I was a child and one I itched for when I grew up. If anyone asked me for the five concrete recollections from when I was a kid, chances were that all of them would involve some fiasco based on my mother's drinking: the time when it was her turn to be Den Mother and the Boy Scout arrived to find her completely lit and dancing in her underwear, the track championship she slept through, the sting of her hand on my face when she all she wanted was to punish herself.

Those memories were the pillars I built my life on. But hiding behind them were the other memories, the ones which peeked out only when I let my guard down: that hazy afternoon my mother and I sat down with our heads bent over the sidewalk, watching ants construct a mobile city. Her voice, extremely off-key and incredibly pitchy, singing me awake in the morning. The summer days when she stashed trash bags on the lawn and ran a hose, a makeshift Slip-N-Slide for the two of us. Her inconsistency, in a better light, became spontaneity.

And I hated her, precisely, because I knew what it was like to love her.

I knew what it was like to have her love me.

And I wanted nothing more in the world- not the grades, not the scholarship, not the friends, not anything, nearly as much as I wanted my mother.

But she was the one thing I couldn't get.

She was the one thing that was out of my reach. She was the one thing that no matter how hard I worked for, I would never get. She was the one thing that could never love me, even when I loved her.

I thought a lot about her, which was why I always had to keep myself preoccupied. When I was free, dangerous thoughts and past memories tortured me from the inside out, the emptiness threatening to destroy me in the cruelest ways possible.

I wondered if she had dimples, if she could bend her thumbs all the way back, double jointed like Abby and I. I wondered if she gave me my blonde hair or the fear of arachnids was something I adopted from her. I wondered if she remembered me, as much as I remembered her. I wondered if she missed me, as much as I missed her.

And the worst part of it all, the possibly worst part of the worst was the fact that I already knew. I already knew the answer. I had known it the day she had hit me so hard my ears had rung, I had known it from the day she had smashed the bottle of bourbon right above my head, I had known it from the day she had looked at with those cold, cutting green eyes of her and she had given me the most sadistic smile which had told me everything I needed to know, which had made me drop to my knees right in front of her and cry until my screams echoed off the walls. I had known it from the day she had chosen the drink over me, I had known it from the first time she hadn't come to my parents teacher conference when she promised she would, I had known it from the way my father looked at her, because she looked at me exactly the same way.