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“No, I suppose not. But I should have been more careful. I came back to New York thinking, ‘My heart’s ripped to shreds, but at least I have Keith. At least he’ll be there for me.’ But I was just a country girl in the big city, I guess. A cliché that was easy prey to a serial dickhead like him.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. I simply ceased to exist. I wasn’t the blazing talent I had been. I was a mess. A sleepwalker wandering around the school.” I shrugged, wishing my feelings matched the empty gesture, but then Noah couldn’t see it anyway. “I lost everything. I lost my seat on the Spring Strings, lost Keith, lost my brother, and somewhere in there, I lost my music too.” I wiped my eyes. “So there you go. My so-called-not-so-interesting-on-hold life. In a nutshell.”
Another silence fell, and I waited for Noah to lecture me again or berate me for letting a boyfriend screw up my life.
“He was an idiot, this guy,” he said finally, carefully, as if he were weighing his words before he spoke them.
“Or I just misread him. I was smitten and he wasn’t, and I got burned.”
“That’s why he’s an idiot. To have someone like you. To haveearnedthe time and affection and the…the love of someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“Yeah, Charlotte. Someone like you.”
I bit my lip, waiting for him to tell me what that meant and felt irritated with myself for not having the guts to ask him.
“Have you ever been in love?” I asked.
“No,” he said quickly. “My last girlfriend told me she loved me, but I was in love with my adrenaline highs. And I thought being with someone meant staying in one place. I couldn’t do that.” He made a sour face. “Oh, the irony.”
“I feel stuck too,” I said. “A different kind of stuck. Like I have some huge ball and chain locked to my heart, not letting me put myself out there or…love anyone ever again.”
“I think you’re too generous to be so jaded,” he said quietly.
“I don’t feel jaded. I feel like a dummy for being so trusting. Love taught me two lessons: it could feel real and still be a complete lie, and it could be ripped away, leaving you with empty, grasping hands.”
Noah’s expression suddenly hardened, and his voice became scratchy and tense. “Why did you tell me all that?”
“I seem to recall youasking.”
He gave me a look. I don’t know how—he’s blind, after all—but he did, and I felt a blush sting my cheeks.
“I don’t know. You’re a good listener.”
He scoffed. “So I got that going for me.”
“You have a lot of things going for you,” I said gently. “Your turn. Why don’t you want to learn to cope with your blindness?”
“If I learn Braille or carry a damn cane, then it means I accept that this is my life now. It’s stupid, I know. I’m blind no matter if I accept it or not, but I can’t give in. If I do that…then my old life is really gone.” His voice lost its edge at the end, like a frayed rope. “I don’t want to let go.”
I bit my lip, hesitant. “But…don’t you think that’s why you’re so angry? If you let it go, then maybe—”
“Then my life will magically improve? That I’ll get back a fraction of what I lost and be satisfied?” He shook his head. “Impossible. I want it all back.All of it.Not just my sight but everything that went with it.”
“You can’t have it back,” I said as gently as I could. “But there has to be ways to make this new life easier for you. There are technologies you could try, right?”
“No, Charlotte. My life, my career…none of it survived that cliff dive.”
“You could have a new career,” I ventured. “Maybe there’s something you haven’t discovered yet that you’d like to do.”
“Maybe. But how the hell would I find it when my old life still feels like it’sright there. Like it’s on the other side of this fucking black curtain, and if the curtain would justlift…”
He scrubbed his hands over his face and then rested his elbows on his knees, his sightless gaze cast down.
“I loved my job, you know? I loved writing and taking photographs and visiting every corner of the world, and losing all that…” He swallowed hard, a jagged lump of pain. “Losing all that is bad enough. But I lost something else, something I craved and lived off of, almost as much as I did air and food and water.”
