|CHAPTER FOURTEEN|
On the day Bash was returning to Ashwood Creek from L.A. I went to his apartment to meet him. I found the extra key in the snow dusted hanging pot where a leafy plant had been that summer and let myself in.
He hadn't called, hadn't returned my calls. It scared me how concerned I became that my piece of grey had just disappeared. It was like being allowed to peak into heaven but never getting to live there. Frustrated with my own attachment, and angry that he let me believe he was in love, I locked myself in my bedroom to wallow in my foolishness for the remainder of my break. But, now that frustration had slow-burned its way to anger and I felt this nagging urge to confront him.
He wasn't there. When I stepped through the door, Greg scuttled out of the kitchen to find, to his disappointment, his roommates girlfriend standing where his roommate should be. Recognizing me, his expectant expression fell flat and he turned back into the kitchen.
"He's not here, yet," he called out to me in a deadpan voice.
Groaning, I stepped out of my snowy shoes and pulled off my coat and scarf. "When is he supposed to get back?" I yelled across the home.
"Now," Greg answered.
"Have you tried to get ahold of him?" I asked critically.
Greg sauntered out of the kitchen again with a reheated plate of Chinese food and sat down on the living room couch, nodding. "Three times. The library called...and there was a small fire here at the house..."
My eyebrows hiked up my forehead and I glanced around the room.
"Settle down, Sherlock. The Cigarette Graveyard sort of went up in flames. I took care of it-nothing got damaged. But, anyway, he hasn't been in contact. I'm a bit worried, but..." He shrugged. "His parents would have called if something happened."
My shoulders sunk and I let out a deep breath. Maybe it wasn't me. He hadn't been in contact with Greg, either. But, it didn't matter. His lack of contact was taking its toll. And, I couldn't bear it, anymore. This wasn't Bash. And, this annoying buzz in the back of my mind was making me feel more and more terrible by the second. I hated that feeling more than anything. It wasn't a feeling I was used to and it wasn't welcome.
I sat with Greg in silence for what felt like forever before a taxicab pulled up before the apartment and Bash was dragging a suitcase through the door, looking drained and miserable. Both Greg and I stood.
He seemed so very far away from where he were, and didn't notice us right away.
"Bash?" I asked so quietly one might have thought I was reaching out to a skittish baby deer. All the anger I had stormed to his house with had extinguished with a single glance at the pain he evidently carried with his suitcase.
His dull blue eyes lifted and he plastered on a smile for me. "Jovial, I wasn't expecting you. How was your Thanksgiving?"
Greg and I shared a questioning glance.
"Same as always...I missed you," I replied carefully.
His smile twitched and a small scowl replaced the comically high brows he wore only a moment before. His fingers fussed with the hem of his coat and he glanced down at his shoes a bit uncomfortably. I felt myself tense.
"I saw you called-but I had turned my phone off for most of my visit...and I apologize for my negligence. I feel awful about it, but...I had a surprise waiting for me when I got to L.A."
"It's fine," Greg and I said simultaneously. I pursed my lips in annoyance at Greg jumping in, but I kept my mouth clamped shut since he too had been ignored the entire week by the person who shared rent with him.
"Are you alright, or do you want to be left alone to settle?" Greg asked in a curious drawl.
Bash ran a hand through his messy snow-flake covered hair and looked between us.
"I think I just need a bit of time to settle, if that's alright." He said it to the both of us, but he stared only at me, like a private message that I should leave.
I cleared my throat, feeling a pang of hurt swell alongside an insulted bruise. In an attempt to disguise my own injuries, I smiled. He held more power over my emotions than I realized, and I couldn't let him see that.
"Yeah, of course. You probably need some time to recover and...uhm, just call me? Maybe? When you're up to it?" He nodded in reply.
It was an awkward exchange, so awkward in fact, that Greg left the room. And I was left alone with Bash to stick my feet back into my shoes and put my coat on. He handed me my scarf and helped tie it around my neck-planting a short kiss in my hair to walk home with, to melt away with the flurries.
I understood where Bash came from. I too shut everyone out when I was in pain. I walked away from everything to clear my mind, to balance myself out. I could see, now, in his expression, in the way he carried himself that something had happened-something that wasn't my fault that he needed to sort out. I put him on the backburner, now it was my turn.
What I didn't realize about my methods? It hurt to be on the other side.
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Bash didn't call for three days. I went back to school, tried to focus on things that mattered, but my mind kept going back to him.
Had I done something wrong? He left shortly after saying he loved me, when I hadn't said it back. When he got to L.A., he didn't stay in touch. How else was I supposed to interpret this? I knew how I was, I knew I pushed people away-that I couldn't get too fond of people who were temporary. Had he figured that out? Had he realized something when he went back to L.A.? Had the dreariness of Ashwood Creek finally lifted from his mind to realize how ridiculous it was that he stayed with me-that he loved me?
It felt like walking through thick molasses. How had I gotten this deep? How had he gotten me this deep? Usually I was shallow enough to get out quickly, to wander about and get lost somewhere else. But, he had slowly pulled me in after him, and I was stuck now, desperate to get out even though it stuck to me and begged me to stay. It wanted to drown me, suffocate me, and I was fighting. Not me. Not me. This wasn't me.
I needed to pull myself together. If this is what people who felt too deeply felt every day, I couldn't afford staying. Algorithm machine. Find the simplest solution. Follow through. If he was releasing me-I was pulling away too.
I gritted my teeth, and pushed on.
Angry.
I didn't understand. I didn't want to understand. I just wanted out. So, I went to the library to release him.
Through the giant weighted doors, past the librarians who had gotten to know me so well they greeted me with my name-smiled brightly, offered a book. I ignored the bubbler and started up the stairs. The building was so dark now due to the snow buildup on the skylight. Every speck of dust seemed to disappear; bright yellow paint turned a moldy color. I didn't waste time losing myself among the books, I simply sat down in my usual spot in the leather chair by the window overlooking the park and waited.
As usual, he silently rolled to a stop beside me and sat down. His tired eyes and mismatched buttoning on his shirt pulled at my sympathies, but I knew I couldn't let that get to me. The nervous flutters were building up inside me, my ears were burning, and I scooted forward in my seat, prepared to leave in a rush.
"Hi," he said in his low slurred voice that now sounded weighted in an unusual way. His eyes stayed trained on the snow covered bridge outside, the same bridge he asked to meet me at for the first time months ago. My fists clutched the armrests tighter.
"I just came to say," I began in a sharp voice that rang loudly in my ears-sounding familiar in some way I refused to recognize, but he cut me off before I could continue.
"What's going on right now has nothing to do with you," he told me in a pained way, as if he knew exactly where this conversation was leading. "Like I said earlier, there was...some bad news waiting for me back in L.A., and I got there just in time to see everything...end. I've been in a state of existential trepidation, and I just needed to sort myself out alone. I thought you would understand because you've left me for ages at a time to work out your problems, but..."
I shook my head vigorously out of nervousness. "It's so out of character for you to disappear-and I didn't return your...sentiment before you left..."
"No, and I said it was okay, Jovie. I know this is one-sided in nearly every way-"
"This is not one-sided," I argued in a voice that rose above the hum of the library whisper. "This is..." I struggled to find words to explain how I felt-how it killed me to know he thought that, how selfish it made me seem, and maybe it was. I was everything I feared, how could prove otherwise if I couldn't explain my own complexity? I bit my lip and covered my face in my hands.
A torturous silence settled between us that said volumes more than our words ever could. Unanswered questions drifted between us, misunderstandings got tangled, my own fear of falling so evident alongside his ambiguous pain. Where had all of this come from? So suddenly we were off course. He had put up with me too long.
"I'm off in an hour," he announced when I glanced at him through my fingers. "Come home with me. We need to figure this out. I'll tell you my pains if you tell me yours-that's how relationships are supposed to work. I can't keep wallowing in my own mess, and I need to know that this is real, Jovie. You don't need to love me, but I need something tangible. I love you, truly. I feel everything, and it's exhilarating and exhausting and terrifying. Am I alone?"
My hands fell away from my face and I slowly shook my head without thinking first. No, he wasn't alone. I felt a hundred new things I had never felt before. And he was right, it was exhilarating and exhausting and terrifying and I had no idea what I was doing. It made me want to run, but his slow-melting chocolate voice could convince anyone to stay, to brave this uncharted territory together.
"Come back in an hour, then," I said, shaking a little. Emotionally, I was everywhere, and none of this was logical. Every step I would have taken, he erased before me. Now, I followed his path.
He nodded, his sunray hair bouncing before his eyes. He leaned forward in his seat and pulled a book from the cart to hand to me.
"Letters by Lamplight," I read. "What's this one about?"
"It's a biography. I picked it up at the end of the shelf down there," he told me, pointing to the row beside us. "I haven't read it, so let me know if it's worth reading."
"Everything is worth reading, to you," I replied, cracking a slight smile.
He wound a finger through one of my short locks and smiled softly. "I'll be back in an hour."
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We walked back to his apartment hand in hand, saying nothing. He seemed to disappear in the flurries and white light. And, when he did say something, the breeze carried it away from my frost-burned ears. I was happy to finally reach his apartment.
We stepped out of our wet clothing and took in the silence of a Greg-free apartment. Then, he was leading me to his bedroom and pulling stacks of notebooks from the piles on his desk.
"My grandfather died while I was in L.A.," he said numbly as we sat down on his bed. "But, not before contracting Alzheimer's. It wasn't too bad the last time I was there. He could recognize me, but didn't really know where he was. Sometimes he thought he was back in the eighties, you know? But, uh, this time he was...wild. Terrified. He didn't know who we were. He kept asking for my grandmother, but didn't recognize her. His liver was failing...and, I just watched him completely vanish. We were all a wreck. And I thought, what if this happens to me? What if everything I've ever known fails me? What if my memory fails and I can't remember what I've done, who I am, where I've been? What if everything I worked so hard to experience leaves me?"
I swallowed thickly, feeling guilty for believing Bash's distance was due to me. I ran a hand through my hair and shook my head. "Bash, I'm so sorry. I had no idea..."
"I didn't tell you. Of course you didn't know." He sighed. "It was a personal issue. My grandfather and I were close-he's the one who told me writing and reading was the best use of my time. He said it was the best way to leave my legacy behind: journals, stories, poetry. Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath...Give the world something to think about-that's your contribution, that's what we're all here to do, that changes the world. But, who was he? Who was I? Who is going to go through my journals, my short stories, my poetry, and odd musings when I'm gone? Somebody is going to toss all of this out." He pointed to his notebooks. "I was the only one who offered to take his journals. Everyone else was ready to get rid of them. Who cares, Jovie?"
I stared blankly at him, at the distress written across his face. He groaned and fell back against the sheets. "In the end, does any of this matter?"
I looked down at his stack of notebooks and pulled the first one off the pile. It was a black composition book with the title Sebastian Daley III #12 written on the cover. I flipped it open.
The writing was illegible for the most part, messy cursive and question marks scattered down the page.
"If I were to wake up with amnesia, this is how I would relearn myself. Every book review, every heartbreak, every mid-life crisis, every urge to escape a place where I'm too small to be heard..."
"Bash...you're anything but small. You free fall through life. You take whatever comes at you yet you chose to live here in Ashwood Creek where nothing ever happens."
"You happened, Jovie," he argued. "Nobody breaks my heart more than you, nobody challenges me more than you, and nobody makes me crazier than you. I know, because you take up three of those notebooks. If I got amnesia and tried to relearn myself, you are the person I would crave the most-and I wouldn't be able to remember the feeling of our first kiss or the sound of your laugh, and that is the worst thing I can imagine. Jovie, when this is over I don't know if I'm going to be able to let you go. That heartbreak is going to fill three more notebooks. It's pathetic."
I tossed the notebook aside and sunk down onto the mattress beside him. He was a mess, truly-an emotional being that experienced things on a far more intense level than I could imagine. And, here I was, unable to communicate everything he was unafraid to reveal. I was the pathetic one.
"How do you do that?" I asked.
"Hm?" he wondered.
"Know yourself so well, say exactly what you feel...how do you do that?"
He took my hand and played with my fingers for a while, examining the creases that compose my fingerprints and softly kissed my knuckles. When he finally caught my gaze, he sighed.
"Jovie, I'm not any better at this than you are."
"You are," I insisted. "Don't try to make me feel better."
He turned his gaze to the ceiling and shook his head. "You have to accept the good and bad things about yourself, alright? Stop being obsequious to what you think you have to be and let yourself be who you are."
My eyes fell shut and pressure built in my chest. We were both a little misty before, but I reluctantly let a tear slide down my cheek. A tear of frustration. It was the one thing I had been trying to work out since I met him. Who was I? Meredith? Henry? Both? It could be argued back and forth. But, it wasn't truly me was it? I was someone entirely new. I used to think I had it figured out. I was wrong.
"I don't know who I am."
"Well," he said softly, "I'll love you no matter what you decide to be."
That's when I knew for certain I wanted to be his-even if only for a little while. Because we all bounce back to what is familiar when we reach a fork in the road. It doesn't mean it's the wrong decision, it might in fact be the best, but it's still painful nonetheless.