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Though another part of me thinks maybe who I really wanted to remind was myself.
chapter thirteen
Bishop
“Thanks for helping me with this,” Gabi says as we push open the door to The Vault on Wednesday morning, the warm air from inside a welcome reprieve. “I’ve been so wrapped up in work I completely forgot about Leah’s birthday.”
“No problem. You know I love looking at records, and it’s been way too long since I’ve come in this place.”
Four years, probably. I think the last time I remember visiting Cedar Point’s vintage music shop was sometime during my senior year in high school, when I brought in all my dad’s old CDs to exchange for store credit.
“The idea that these are vintage is laughable,” he’d told me. “But if they’ll take ’em, great.”
Makes me wonder if I still have that credit.
We cross to the record section, which takes up the entire back half of the store, and we each start at opposite ends of the alphabet.
“Anything in particular you’re looking for?”
Gabi nods. “She likes old folky stuff. Think like…Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel.”
“On it.”
We spend a little while perusing, each of us selecting a few options to choose from, moving closer and closer to the center of the alphabet.
“Talk about a blast from the past.”
I look over and find Gabi smiling, holding a record in her hand, and then her eyes fly to mine before she spins it around so I can see what it is.
“Nice,” I say, crossing toward her and taking the Best of Mumford and Sons album from her hand. “God, I haven’t listened to them in forever.”
“Right? I mean, we have to get this.”
I look up at her, finding Gabi watching me with one of the biggest smiles I’ve seen on her in a really long time. I’ll agree with anything that puts that smile on her face, though buying a record certainly isn’t a hardship.
“Absolutely.”
We check out, using my remaining store credit to purchase our selections, including a Cat Stevens album for Leah’s birthday, and then head back out to the street.
“Did you want to come over and listen to it?” Gabi asks as we come to a stop next to where her car is parked. “Mumford and Sons, I mean. I’ve never heard these songs on vinyl, and I feel like all the snobby music people I know say it sounds completely different.”
“I actually have my first PT appointment in like, twenty minutes, and then I’ll need to head to the school for practice,” I tell her, wishing that wasn’t the case. “But maybe we could do something this weekend? If you’re not working. I don’t want to get in the way of the creative process.”
Gabi gives me a small grin. “Yeah, that could be fun,” she tells me, holding the records tightly against her chest.
I nod. “Great. I’ll text you about it soon?”
“Sounds good.”
We stare at each other for a long beat before she hops into her car, and I continue walking down the street toward the doctor’s office.
Gabi’s been opening herself back up to me in these small pieces, these moments of togetherness that demonstrate we still have a closeness even time and pain from the past can’t shatter entirely. It makes sense that she’s been moving so slowly. Gabi doesn’t let people in very easily. She’s dealt with plenty of hurt in her life, and trust is a hard thing to come by. When we were younger, it was hard not to notice that she had built up a fortress around herself, a garrison with cannons and a moat and barbed wire, and a little army of words designed to protect her from being hurt again.
As someone who loved her, though, I wanted to be the person she let inside her heart, so I never gave up. I tried and I tried and I tried until she finally let me in. It was hard work, crawling through the barbed wire she surrounded herself with, but it was worth every single cut.
When we were talking at Cedar Cider last night, I was filled to the brim with this…memory, though I guess it’s more of a feeling than anything super concrete. I’ve always known I missed her. I’ve always regretted how things ended between us, the fact that I lost my best friend and the love of my life in one fell swoop, but I didn’t get it until we started spending more time together.
Now that I’ve had a hit of what it’s like to be near her again, I’ve been dealing with a rush of memories and emotions and reminders of who we used to be back when we didn’t have such a chasm between us. That’s what I’m facing now, trying to figure out how to bridge that gap, how to scale that moat and find my way back inside the space she protects so fiercely.
