If you wanted the world, Rosenna… I would give it to you. I would give you fucking everything.
It still wasn’t fucking enough.
Footsteps echoed as someone approached.
“Glad to know you’re still alive despite not hearing from you in the last few weeks,” came my father’s voice. “It’s good to see you occupying your time with something productive.”
He stood beside me as I stared down at the caked remnants of clay on my hands. He looked at the sculpture I’d been carving for the past ten hours curiously as he rubbed his chin in thought. “Your fixations… have often worried me at times, Beckham. But I’ve never seen you this consumed by them. I’m sure you’ve recognized it, too.”
I could sense that he was struggling to find the right words. He was walking on eggshells once again, trying to keep me calm as he attempted to figure out what was on my mind.
“It was a bit concerning from the beginning, but I’m sure Ms. Hart means a lot to you, does she not?”
I shook my head as I stared at the sculpture. “She’s more than just my muse… she’s become my everything.”
My father looked at all the art surrounding us—all the art I’d made of her, with her—with a slight nod of his head. “Yes, it appears that seems to be the case.”
“She doesn’t see what we could be together. She doesn’t understand that what we have isn’t just in the heat of the moment or in the middle of passion.It’s art. It’s our masterpiece.”
“This feeling is new to you, Beckham… it may also be new to her. She may be scared of feeling this way, she may be afraid of the intensity of you two being together.”
“She wants to settle for her husband,” I uttered, almost in disgust. The words tasted like poison.
Her clueless, undeserving, spineless, weak, pathetic, useless, selfish, mediocre, idiot of a husband doesn’t see her brilliance. Doesn’t see her depth, her contradictions, her mind.
He doesn’t worship her.
I do.
“You don’t know that’s what she wants,” my father assured.
“She said it to me herself. She couldn’t accept my everything because she couldn’t give me hers.”
“Acceptance takes time.”
“How much time?” I asked, my frustration at an all-time high.
“Who knows? Look at her husband. He’s still waiting for her to accept his misogynistic and chauvinistic viewpoints…”
I sighed internally. There was no telling how long it would take Rosenna to accept me.Accept us.
“I can’t help but wonder how things would be if your mother were still around…” my father said into the silence.
I rose. “I don’t want to talk about Mom.” I couldn’t think of her. There were too many parallels between her and the woman I couldn’t keep out of my mind.
“Well, you never do…” my father replied with a slight shrug. “She would always blame things on your impulsivity but would never fault you for it. She wanted you to embrace the things that made you who you are.”
Clenching my jaw, I held my irritation at bay as memories of her began to surface. My father was right. My mother was the only person able to see past my obsessions and flaws.
She saw the beauty in what I hated about myself. The only other person who was able to see my art,able to see me, wouldn’t give me a chance to show her my devotion.
“You think she’d know how to handle this?” I muttered.
My father sighed. “In her mind, she would know the exact way to handle this. Unfortunately, much like you, her stubbornness wouldn’t allow her to recognize that she might be wrong in her approach. Whether or not she was wrong, she would still figure out a way to make things work. That was and still is one of the many reasons why I love her.”
I was silent. My father often remembered my mother, his first love, in contrast to my unhealthy coping mechanism. Sharing her stubbornness, my approach to processing her death was to process as little as possible.
My approach there wasn’t too successful, given my inability to grieve her loss in a healthy way… Actually, many of my approaches lately have been ineffective. My rejection from Rosenna seemed to be one of the prime examples of that fact.
