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That’s one of the things time and space can’t give us: a redo.
Eventually, they can ease the sting, if not eliminate it altogether. They can bring clarity and better decision making, but they can’t take me back to who I was at nearly eighteen years old, and teach me how to deal with fear. They can’t give me the knowledge and skill to look at the girl I loved—the too young girl who looked more like a woman than she had any right to—and gently tell her not yet. Notno, just not yet.
They can’t take me back to the young, scared and needy-as-shit asshole that I was, and show him how to explain to the girl he had no business loving that he saw her, and he loved her, but he couldn’t have her yet.
Someday, but not yet.
And because time and space can’t give me back that moment, it’s the one that haunts me the most. More than the punches from my father, more than being left by one mom I was too young to remember, and one I walked away from first. More than watching my abusive dick of an old man wither away from brain cancer while I tried to wrap my brain around the idea that it might have been the tumor that made him who he was my whole life.
More than all of the shit life shovels on us, what I did to Nala haunts me, because it was the first time, rather than fight back, I ran away from something that scared me. Every second since, I’ve wished I fucking fought back, told her, somehow, that she was the only person for me, and always would be.
I once thought it would be cruel to say someday, to give either of us hope because all I could see was that I wanted someone I shouldn’t. Not only was she too young, she was sunshine and light and air, and everything in my life up until that point had come from the dark.
But now, I see that life isn’t lived in just the light or the dark, in right or wrong, in yes or no. It’s lived in the moments between the highs and lows, the moments when we look at the person who taught our heart to beat, and say,in three years, I’ll still love you. I’ll still want you. And I’ll still be here, waiting for you.
