Standing Alone
What if the people you loved left you? What would you do to learn to stand on your own?
Chapter one: Twenty-one and Counting
As I walked about the kitchen preparing my dinner, the piano music blared from the living room stereo. I loved this artist. but this CD in particular held great meaning for me. None of the songs were tied to an event or memory, but the music itself reminded me of people long gone. It was an exercise of will, a trial by fire. To see if I could, over time, survive the pain that it brought. I needed to know I could someday continue on and stand alone without them.
The first piano piece on the CD reminded me of my once hoped for mother and father. It was gentle and guiding, understanding and kind. It tickled with affection and love and generosity. Though I had two loving parents of my own, they were somewhat different in that though they loved me, I was more a parent to them than they were to me. His parents were the first to ever try and care for me instead. Well, he had been the first to try that, but I didn’t want to think about that.
The next piece was the musical representation of my would-be sister. It was happy and flighty and made me think of the pixie she was, dancing about the room as was her way. It held a peaceful joy that communicated with laughter. It made me smile at the image that appeared in my head, as if I could reach out and touch her again. The final note fades gently, and in my mind it is the good-bye she never gave me. The pain was less than it was the first time I heard the music, but only from constant exposure to it. Maybe it wasn’t better at all - perhaps I had simply become accustomed to the pain. It was ritual for me to come home from work and put it on while going about my life, forcing myself to confront the pain daily in hope that I may someday obliterate it all together.
Her husband and my hoped for brother came back to me in a piece of music that was a calm and mellow walk that wrapped itself about you in comfort and strength. Protective and patient, soothing but cautious, it reassured you that there was little out there to be disquieted about.
Track number four was a love story, sweet and pure in its intent. I never listened to track number four. Well, almost never. It was banned from my existence, until I had a weak moment and would deliberately seek it out and embrace the sharp and searing pain that was him. My one love - lost to me but not to my memory. He was wrong; I had a long memory and it never faded. I had, after a time, come to hope his words were true that the memories would fade to black as if he had never been.
In college, I socialized as much as any other student, but had drawn clear lines around myself that only I could see, and I rarely crossed them. I called several people friend, but in reality, they were no closer to me than acquaintances. They knew I was originally from Phoenix but had lived most recently in Washington State. They knew I was an English major and read almost obsessively. I loved music but could not dance. I was friendly, with a sense of humor of the sarcastic persuasion. They also knew that clumsy was my middle name. Very few were allowed into my private world. It was too sad and tragic to expose mere mortals to. One such exception was Raquel. She was the type of individual that picked her friends while they really had no choice in the matter. She had decided we would be friends and proceeded to burrow her way in. No amount of resistance was effective or tolerated. Her charm was infectious, and eventually, I surrendered. She was also shockingly astute. She asked me who had broken my heart so badly when no one else thought there was anything out of the ordinary about me. Eventually, I once again waved the white flag and confessed of my high school romance gone wrong. I left out key details, such as, well, the fact that he and his family were vampires.
It was she who had introduced me to this music, this artist who unknowingly told my story with each composition. It was my birthday and she presented me with a CD burned off her computer. She had stumbled across it while on the internet and had thought of me. The artist is apparently an unknown who promotes his music off his own web page. I visited it once. This is his only album. The site was fairly generic: an image of a piano and a rose, a small bio about the artist that said nothing of any great detail. There was virtually no other info on the internet about him. Raquel had wondered why I had almost become obsessed with finding out more about him. I would have, too, if it were only one or two songs that spoke to me so strongly in memory of a life that was no longer mine. But it was the whole CD; it cried out every detail of the moment in my history as if he had been there. For one second I had thought… No, I would never revisit that thought.
She had given it to me during class since we would have to wait for the weekend to celebrate, and she could never hold on to a surprise that long. In the car, I popped it in the stereo of my second hand Honda Sudan. She would never know I had almost run off the road once the first song had finished. I had to pull over into a vacant lot. My eyes had been blinded by tears, blearing my view of the road. By track number four, I was dying inside, reliving every moment from his first astonishing appearance in the cafeteria to the day he walked away from me in the dark that eventually consumed me. Track number four was our love, the way I remembered it, before it was bloodied by the reality that it was just a distraction for him and he moved on. It had faint echoes and eerie reminders of another song I never allowed inside my head.
Silly Bella
I heard the voice in my mind of another lost brother, teasing me once more, tawny eyes filled with mirth as he gave a loud belly laugh while he tried to squeeze his love into me with a big teddy bear hug. The next track was filled with mirth, a teasing laughter and naughty innocence. They were all accounted for, each receiving a chance to visit me on my nightly jaunt down a painful memory lane. But ultimately, they all made an appearance because I could not think of one without thoughts of all the others coming out to play. As in their existence, they were usually inseparable.
Even the sister I had feared was present, and I wholly embraced her as well. My heart was her home, too. I often wondered, had I been given the chance, if I would have won her over in the end. I had no idea of the answer to that question. She was a puzzle I could never solve; even with his explanations, it never seemed to fit. The track told it all without being verbose. She was anger and strength, vanity, pettiness and strife, but underneath was sadness for things lost and never regained, for tragedy and immeasurable pain. Then there was her love, her devotion to others, that was blanketed beneath all the other attributes. Underneath were the things she would gladly give up her existence for.
Other tracks on the CD were reminders of a cloudy, rainy place that was joy and sorrow mixed together, adventure and home rolled into one, all under the façade of a quaint ordinary town on the west coast. Yet another told of dangers unseen until it is too late, another about a journey from north to south, from cold to hot and comfort to pain, another encompassed a rescue and of a chance missed. The last was of a bitter-sweet conversation, a blue dress and copper hair. In all there were seventeen songs on the CD, each composed to destroy my heart. Yet, I lived on.
So there I was trying once more to purge the pain. Promising myself that the day I could listen and not feel the shards that sliced through me, would be the day I would stop listening to it and put it away with the few mementos I had left to me of them. He had taken most of those, too. I shuffled around my cozy little kitchen, preparing a meal that I would do my best to enjoy. That was how I lived, doing my best. It was what I had to do to keep Charlie from sending me to Renee for good. I picked myself up the day they had tried to pack my bags and promised myself to live this charade to the best of my ability. I went to school, talked, walked, ate and socialized, all the while living in secret hope that he would walk back into my life as suddenly as he had the first time. It was a hope unfulfilled.
He was wrong about another thing - I am a great actress. I could convince them of anything. And I did. I finished my senior year near the top of my class with a full social calendar. I refused to sit by an open window waiting, well, after some time anyway. If he showed back up, I’d find him there on my bed or in the rocking chair he had so often inhabited. Each night after dinner or after coming home from some distraction or another, I would meet disappointment at a well worn window and stare off into the night, wondering where my heart had gone.
I went to Dartmouth the following year on scholarships, grants and work study. I told myself it was to spite him, but really it was in hopes that I might see a flash of copper hair in the distance one day. The day I received the CD, I decided to stop making decisions based on the hope of a chance encounter. Chance had nothing to do with it once the Pixie was involved. All it took was one flash in her eyes reflecting my presence, and they were sure to stride gracefully into the opposing distance. I would go about my life as if he had not been the center of my universe, always. He still was, but I did not have to acknowledge that, right?
So off I went to the brightest spot in California that would give me a position in publishing. No sparkly vampires here. No. None. Not one. How sad.
How did Alice feel after stepping through the looking glass or after the rabbit hole? Did she go back to her common, run of the mill tea parties and forget the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat? The mad queen bent on her destruction? There would be no magic potions proclaiming drink me! She would not be physically changed after all. How did she go on after that wonderful and maddeningly dangerous experience? Where was my sense of relief at finally being home from Wonderland? I loved Wonderland and would grasp the chance to return with both hands. But no one was offering.
The smell of smoke broke me out of my melancholy. I gasped as I jerked the pan from the burner then gasped again as the oil splashed out of the pan and onto my hand. I would not go back to the ER this soon, I reassured myself, as I stuck the burned flesh under the cold rush of water from the faucet. Too bad I couldn’t outgrow clumsy. I had outgrown socially inept out of necessity. I had even begun to outgrow my Plain Jane status and embraced my inner fashionista. Okay, I wouldn’t really qualify for fashionista, but I had begun to pay attention to my clothes due to the fact that in publishing, everyone looks at how you dress and somehow equates it to your intellect and ability. I never saw the connection, and I am sure Einstein would back me up on that one. Regardless, my closet was nicely stocked to the point that even the Pixie would approve.
After bandaging my burn like the first aid pro I have been forced to become, I ate alone at my desk, shuffling through paperwork, hoping to make a dent in it before midnight. Soon, I was completely absorbed. Who said being a workaholic didn’t have an upside?
Before turning in for the night, my eyes fell across a sheet of paper that stood out like a sore thumb. It was a questionnaire for a gathering the apartment building was holding. It was supposed to promote a sense of community. I had yet to meet any of my neighbors, and personally I enjoyed the solitude. It was the one place I did not have to hide. I shuddered as the thought provoked a memory of the first time I had heard the phrase and moved on quickly as to not think about it. At work, I was a mask of perfection. I hardly ever tripped while in the building, my concentration on being in the here and now was keen there, not so much on the home front. Here I could cry when I wanted to and fall often with no apology. Here I could lose my mind slowly and quietly. I often slipped into memories without much preamble. It was getting better, sometimes. Other times it got out of hand, and they were all practically standing in my living room laughing at me as I tripped. This was the one place I could fight the good fight and lose badly and no one was the wiser.
I snapped my eyes back to the questionnaire and laughed at my answers, wondering if I would really submit it that way. I was not jumping up and down to attend, but I promised him I would live a human life, and that was what I was going to do - every boring, mundane minute of it. Why not submit it this way? It was one way to break up the monotony and, well, they were all very truthful answers. So, I took a note from the Grizzly Bear and answered in the way he would find the funniest, because they were all true.
Age: Twenty-one and counting, no really I am already counting.
Education: College graduate, with a head start in a Masters in English because the world really needs one more! No really!
Career: Newly employed assistant to an editor who is really the biggest pain in the… side I have ever encountered.
Marital status: Not interested !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yep, that pretty much sums me up in four questions.
Sighing, I turn out the light and stumble down the darkened hall to my room. It is quiet for once, hardly a car on the street below. As I push open the window nearest the bed, I assure myself it is for the fresh ocean air. Staring out into the inky blackness, from where the sound of the waves emanate, I close my eyes and rest my head against the coolness of the glass, enjoying briefly the chill it brought. I remember once more the chill of his embrace and pull myself away just enough to no longer connect with the glass, just enough to no longer connect with the memory. I stare once more out the window into the blackness of the ocean and let my mind wander. I think about the abyss before me and wonder what it would be like to lose myself there, as if in a dream, with no cares but the sound of the lulling waves and their gentle rocking to take me to a peaceful sleep. From the corner of my eye, I see a swish of long blonde hair as it disappears. As I turn my head to focus across the street below, it is gone, pulling away from the curb at a speed even the Germans would consider illegal. A sleek shiny sports car was nothing but a yellow blur, leaving behind the nagging feeling that I missed something.
I turned away and got into the bed, once more prepared for the dreams that never end. I slip quietly into unconsciousness with dreams of a copper haired angel who sang me to sleep with the sweetest lullaby. They usually aren’t this pleasant I thought, before I fell deeper into sleep, where the knowledge of being in a dream fades and they hold you hostage, no longer knowledgeable of an escape route.
