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Fifteen
BJ
Today’s always rough.
Weird mix of emotion.
An old kind of grief for someone I’ve never even met. Someone I wanted to meet though.
Someone who’s changed my life anyway.
Maybe it’s more the mourning for a life we imagined.
It’s gotten easier over the years. Funny with pain, how it propagates itself, grows into you, becomes a part of you. Shapes you a bit.
It kind of hits different for Parks, I know — the D&C fucked her up for a while. Broke her more than she said, I could always tell.
I’m always grateful for the tree. Something to point my grief at.
There’s no ceremony to December 3rd, but maybe the ritual is we’ll always find a way to hold each other.
Sometimes it’s overt — she’ll just take her hand in mine, kiss it.
Sometimes she’ll come and lean her head on my arm. Won’t say a thing.
That’s what she did the year she was fucking around with Christian. Just wordlessly leaned against me.
We steadied ourselves against each other how we’ve done all our lives.
The tree’s a bit of a hard reset for us.
I’d be a liar if I said a part of me hadn’t wondered whether Paris was just a cover and she came up here early — that’s the kind of shit she’d pull to be alone with me. I know it is because I’d do it too to get her to myself for a day or even a half of one.
I thought about it, just coming up early in case she was there, in case she was waiting for me and she didn’t just fuck off all over again without a word. Hard with Jordan though, she’d ask questions. Fair enough I suppose, she should be allowed to ask them. But whatever she’d ask, there’s nothing I can tell her that won’t just prove to her that I haven’t changed at all, that won’t let her down, because I will. I’d let the whole world down to keep Magnolia afloat if I had to. Or I would have before. Not now, I tell myself. But I know it’s a lie. Try to convince myself for the two hundredth time this week that Parks is nothing except the hardest habit I’ll ever have to break.
Jordan’s going to have questions about today as it is. I just left. Told her I couldn’t stay over last night, felt sick.
Up at 6am and gone.
Pretty eager of me, even though I was angry at Parks for leaving early, no goodbye and shit. That embarrassing part of me thought she still might have been there.
Wasn’t, obviously.
Cried a bit on the way home, not at the tree. She isn’t buried there anyway.
It all happened so quickly and we were so young, we didn’t know what to do. As soon as she was in the clear after the operation we just left. She’s always regretted that part.
We don’t talk about it much, but when we do she usually just goes quiet about it.
Quiet is her way of talking about it.
Jordan’s called me a few times today — ignored them — because what do you say?
It’s why I’ve never told anyone, not even Jo.
At this point it sort of all just feels like a fever dream that’s tied us together for the last nine years.
I pull up outside me and Jo’s place; it’s evening now. I’m ready to crash out for the night. Sleep it off. Sleep off losing the only girls I’ve ever loved.
