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And who had been there for him? He gathered up his siblings and read to them while those fights raged on downstairs, so they couldn’t hear. So they didn’t know the things that he knew for as long as he could possibly protect them. And then what? She’d left, and all the violence had spilled over onto them. And he had tried. He’d tried. And he had loved everybody enough to put himself in between them. To be lit on fire. But who the hell had loved him enough?
Who the hell had ever loved him enough to protect him?
And he took that box of unopened army men, and he crushed it in his hands. The packaging splitting on the sides, tearing open. “Fuck all of this,” he said, throwing it to the ground and stomping it beneath his boot. “Fuck it all,” he said.
He shouldn’t have a kid. He shouldn’t have a wife. He should just have nothing.
Nothing at all. Because this rage and the sense of unfairness that lived inside of him was destructive. And he didn’t know how to make other things bigger than this.
Didn’t know how to change.
And he looked at that bed in the corner. Where he’d spent those months trying to recover. Dammit all to hell.
The pain was overwhelming. It was just too much.
And he let it close in around him. And he really let himself just wallow in it. And how fucking sorry he felt for himself. And she was gone; she wasn’t holding him up anymore. That’s what she’d been doing.
She’d been a balm for his soul, and she had covered this pain, and now she left him to bleed out.
And he had to feel this. This unending pain that he had been avoiding all this time. Because hadn’t he been through enough?
And who had been there for him?
She was just another person who would let him down... She was just...
She was there. She was there for him.
And it played through his mind like a movie. The joy on her face when he brought her candy. The way that she’d fought him when he pulled her out of the lake.
The way that she looked at him, and smiled and hadn’t recoiled at his scars.
How she’d taken rides on his shoulders. And made him feel like maybe he wasn’t a monster.
How even when she’d been a teenage brat who was too pretty for his own good, she smiled at him.
How she’d become his most cherished fantasy, because she gave him softness when no one else did.
She’s been giving to you.
And there’s this whole story about how you take care of her. But look at her.
Look at all she gave to you. She just wants you to love her. And you want to take from her. You want to tell yourself that taking care of her is just as good. That it’s the same.
But you aren’t giving her what she needs.
Alaina, bright and beautiful, who had brought him back to his humanity. Who had made him want to try. Had made him want to be more than he was. Better.
But in the end he’d fallen short.
She deserved more.
She was right to demand it.
You don’t think you should try to become more?
He growled and dropped down to the floor. Down to his knees.
What the hell were you supposed to do when everything just hurt?
