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“Because I love you. I don’t want to, okay? I think there are some things that are so hard, you shouldn’t have to do them, only no one can take them from you. There are feelings so sick, so obviously unhealthy, you shouldn’t have to feel them. But there they are. I still love you, and I’m not ever going to see

you again, not ever. You did that to us. Not your dad or your family, just you. So I could hit you. I could rage at you right now, and call you every ugly name I know, and I know a lot. I could tell you how much I’m hurting, or I could get out of the car, slam the door, hitchhike to the airport because fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, West, how could you do this to me? How?”

He wipes his palms up the back of his head. Drops his forehead onto the steering wheel and covers his face with his forearms.

“What I can’t do is pretend I don’t know what you did,” I say. “Or pretend I don’t still care about you.”

I look one more time at him. All of him. His lowered head and his shoulders, his torso wrapped in a blue T-shirt, those long legs sticking out of his shorts.

We’re so far from where we were when we met.

Lost in the wilderness, and there isn’t any way back.

“Don’t waste your whole life,” I tell him. “You’re not going to get another one.”

Collapsed over the wheel, he turns the ignition.

I can hear him breathing. Thick, deep breaths.

It’s five full minutes before he’s got it under control.

I’m calm now. Emptied out.

When he lifts his head, he flips open the glove compartment, careful not to touch my knee, and extracts his cigarettes. The lighter is out of reach.

I pluck it out and give it to him.

I find his bracelet in my purse and leave it in the glove box while he watches. It looks like a child’s token.

“Give up the fucking cancer sticks, too,” I say.

When he exhales smoke out the window, I watch it disappear into the sky.

I remind myself that this place we’re in now—every green thing I see—all of this came after the fire and ash.

There’s hope in the world.

I just have to find it.

West

Fade to black.

That was my plan.

Some fucking plan.

Caroline left the morning after my dad’s funeral. I spent the next four weeks in Silt, and the screen of my personal Wild West movie was supposed to darken from the edges to the middle until there was nothing left but a quarter-size hole, a nickel, a dime, nothing.

Show’s over. Welcome to the rest of your life. Enjoy your time in this paradise of emotional numbness.

Drink some beers. Fuck some chicks. Rock on.

I was delusional. I can only guess, now, that my delusions were supposed to protect me, because it’s not like any part of my life had given me reason to believe awful shit gets less awful through repetition. Worrying you’re not going to be able to buy groceries—worrying your baby sister’s going to cough her lungs out from the croup—worrying you’re going to die alone and never again make love to the only woman you want—it always fucking sucks.

It sucks and sucks and sucks and sucks, and it never stops sucking. There’s no end to it. No bottom. No black curtain that falls down and makes it so you don’t have to feel it.

It’s like Caroline said. There are some things so terrible you shouldn’t have to go through them, but you do have to. They’re yours to feel, yours to put up with.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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