Blank Pages

by Alice Darlington

  “I’m scared,” I admitted. “What if I stay here, expect him to be in my future, and then we break up? What do I do then? I can’t bank on that.”

  “That’s true in any relationship, Lex. You’re right—you can’t base your happiness on him. You can’t base it on anyone but yourself. You have to do what makes you happy, Ben or no Ben.” Her eyes bored into me, demanding my attention. “And can I point out the fact that you never wanted to go into journalism in the first place? It’s a job, yes, and better than fast food, I agree, but it’s still not what you want, and I know you aren’t thrilled about living in such a big city. Do you want to stay close to Ben? Yes, but I think even if you were single, you’d still have the urge to turn it down.”

  I wondered how long we’d have to sit in silence before she’d give up and leave. She wouldn’t. “Maybe you aren’t ready to be happy yet, but you have to quit with the sad playlist. For real. This music would break anyone’s heart.” She got up to shut it off while my lips involuntarily formed a pout. I liked my melancholy music. It played the melody of my sad soul.

  Okay, maybe that was a little dramatic.

  “I know it’s scary. Relationships are, at least any relationship worth having. The unknown is scary. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it,” she continued, plopping herself back onto my bed.

  Sometimes, I hated when she made good points. I liked being the one making points. The receiving end was not as fun.

  “I like him a lot more than I planned to,” I admitted. As soon as I said it, I realized it did feel a little better to open up, lighter somehow, less pressure holding me down. So I kept going. I let the words flow. “And I don’t know what to do with that. I’m the one who insisted I wanted serious, and I do, but now that I’m having to make decisions, I don’t know how to make them.” I felt like I could breathe, and that was what I did: breathed in, breathed out, slowly, taking in oxygen like you’d expect a person to do after a weight has been lifted off their chest.

  “And how does that make you feel?” she asked in her best representation of a therapist voice. When I scoffed at her, she followed it up with, “Seriously.”

  “Hypocritical,” I answered without even having to think. “I got mad at him for not dating me earlier even though he liked me, but all he was doing was making sure he had himself figured out first. Now I’m trying to figure myself out without him, but I don’t want to be without him so I can’t figure out what the right decision is, not that I’ve been particularly good at that, anyway.”

  “Lex, you are an amazing person. If you think for a second you’d be my best friend if you were less than spectacular then you have clearly forgotten how selective I am.” It was true—she didn’t get past superficial friendliness with most people. “But I have to say, you’ve become very insecure lately, and I don’t like it.”

  I’d never thought of myself as insecure, but standing next to Ben, I did feel it. The self-doubt creeped in and the vulnerability took over. “I think it’s cause he’s way out of my league. He’s the kind of boy people write songs about.”

  Jules waited an agonizingly long moment before she responded. “Yeah, maybe he is with his stupid-good hair and stupid-toned abs, but he’s just that one song, that feel-good song that hits number one and fades out like it was nothing at all. You always remember it, but you don’t carry it with you day after day. You, though, you’re the girl people write books about, the girl remembered between the pages of a bestseller.”

  I didn’t know if she really meant that or if she was just using a book reference to try to make me feel better, but either way, it worked.

  “What if I want more than the bestseller, though? What if I want to be more, the classic spanning generations and generations?” I was really just joking, playing with the metaphor she’d started, but my best friend was ready with an answer.

  “Lex, your life is your life, your choice. You can be that bestseller without a man. But, if he makes you stronger, if he makes you happy, if he makes you a better you, he’s not going to stop you from being the classic. He’s going to help you be the masterpiece.”

  CHAPTER 38

  THIS WAS MY story. These were my pages. If Ben and I had been two characters in a love story, our eyes would have met across the crowded room, unable to break away. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were outside climbing up the fire escape or throwing rocks at my bedroom window, maybe showing up with a boombox and a lawnmower. The only problem was I didn’t know if this love story was going to have a happy ending or not.

  In my story, I was the main character. I was the protagonist. Only, I felt like the antagonist, too. What are you supposed to do when the war is within yourself? Victory’s not gained without casualties, and a civil war always ends in tragedy. Maybe I wasn’t the villain in my story, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t the villain in his.

  With that in mind, I wrote from the heart. The article was both excruciating and numbing. Recording the heartache on paper separated me from the stinging, demise of my own relationship.

  I had planned for this article, the second-to-last one I’d ever write for The Dixie Chronicle, to be about all-nighters. When I sat down to write it out, though, different words came. My fingers flew across the keyboard, releasing emotions I didn’t know how to speak out loud. I sat at my computer and purged the hurt from the most tender of organs, imploring readers to be diligent in the pursuit of their hearts.

  In the end, I wasn’t completely dissatisfied with the article. It was genuine and relatable. Once it was finalized, though, once I was staring at it in column form on page three of the newspaper, it seemed insufficient.

  The words, meant to flow together perfectly, didn’t do the hurt justice. I couldn’t convey the extent of my pain in black ink. I couldn’t make readers feel how sorry I was about the offenses against my own heart, and although there were hundreds of students who would read my article, there was only one I was really worried about.

  It had taken great effort to take those words and piece together an article. It had taken even more effort to take the crumbling pieces and re-make a heart into a patched-up version of its former self.

  I had thought purging myself of the feelings was going to make me feel better, but it didn’t. My heart was still broken. It was dull and lifeless. That infuriating organ is so essential to our health. Blood flows in and out of the chambers, refilling and supplying the body with vital nutrients. The heart is the core. Everything relies on it. If it’s malfunctioning, we suffer. Whether pressure, force, or speed, a fault in the heart breaks us down, and my heart was crumbling, causing all my other organs to slowly collapse. Soon I was sure there would be nothing left of me but a smoky pile of ashes and regrets.

  Okay, I can admit that’s a little dramatic, even for me. I knew my heart was functioning properly in the medical sense. I didn’t actually have a heart problem. That wasn’t how it felt, though. It felt like I was in heart failure, like the slightest stutter could put me into cardiac arrest. There was no more rhythmic beat. I had to remind it to work, remind myself to breathe. Something that had been so natural now required conscious effort. I was constantly aware of the ache in my chest.

  And yet it beat. It is the most resilient organ. When the rest of the body has long given up hope of life, it beats. When it’s broken, shattered, and has reached the pinnacle of irreparability, still it beats. It beats with reminders of regrets and mistakes. It beats in endurance. It beats in pain.

  It wasn’t even scarring, just an open wound refusing to heal, like my body refused to admit this could get better, refused to believe time could heal this brokenness.

  The love potion I’d been steadily filling myself with over the last several months had turned to poison. I need an antidote, needed to purge it from my veins. I was in desperate need of a cleanse. Ben had infiltrated every part of my heart, and it, the traitorous organ, had been pumping him through my bloodstream for months. Then I’d quit him.

  I’d though
t a lot about becoming an adult over the last couple of months. This was adulthood, when you want so bad to just lie down and forget but the world keeps turning. The sun rises and sets as if no change has happened. That was the hardest part of being an adult: finding strength in all the hard times. Moving on. Moving forward.

  I wanted to bleed it out. I almost needed to bleed to show some symptom of the pain besides the words in black and white now scattered across campus.

  “Have you talked to him?” Jules asked when she laid out The Dixie Chronicle in front of me, showing me she’d read my article. She left me alone when I shook my head.

  That night, surrounded by the dark quiet of my empty room, my empty bed, my empty heart, I spent an agonizing hour conjuring up words. I worked hard to convey my appreciation and refusal via email. I did not want a job in Chicago. I wanted to hold out for something that made me happy. I felt lighter, even with no productive plans to move forward in the search of employment.

  When I was little, I had longed to grow up. I think everyone does. The world makes being older seem so glamourous. By eighteen, we’re all itching for freedom, and then we get there and realize responsibility comes along with the freedom. How quickly we want to backtrack, cash in on all those bills we didn’t pay and all those problems our parents faced for us. I have no idea why we’re all in such a hurry to grow up. The rules of the playground are much simpler than the rules of adulthood. The sandbox poses a much smaller threat.

  So, as I continued my search for employment geographically closer, preferably with reasonable pay, I widened my search parameters. I didn’t think I’d know what I wanted until I did it. When I had played dress-up as a kid, I’d put on the fake glasses and my mom’s high heels and carried an old leather briefcase around. My five-year-old corporate self had harbored high ambitions. Now, I had no desire to carry a briefcase, unless it was filled with cool things like gummy worms and hardcore stationary.

  The search for employment dragged on, and by the time my eyes were tired from straining and I closed my laptop, I decided that at the end of the day, if I made enough to live and went home to happiness, I’d know I had made the right decision.

  CHAPTER 39

  THE NEWSPAPER WAS set in front of me forcefully, giving me déjà vu of the way Jules had slammed it down the day before.

  “Lex.” His deep voice melted into me, like I had been cursed the last few weeks and this was the cure.

  My post-Ben wardrobe had been a little stinky and a lot dirty. Thankfully, today I was dressed in jeans and one of my favorite shirts. I also had enough concealer on to cover the evidence of too many days’ worth of crying. On top of that, I’d washed my hair. I’d gotten lucky, and by lucky I meant I’d had a feeling I’d be seeing him today.

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out the article was my form of an apology.

  “What happened, Lex?” He went straight to the point, and even though I’d dressed for the occasion like I was ready, I wasn’t.

  “I have a lot to say,” I told him honestly, “but I’m still working on the words.”

  He stared at me long enough to make me self-conscious. All the confidence I was pretending to have slowly drained in the silence.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” he said quietly. That wasn’t a bad idea. I had a feeling the tears I thought were all dried up were about to get a second wind.

  His hand didn’t touch mine as I followed him across the parking lot to his truck. I felt its absence more than I felt the chill in the early spring air. Neither of us spoke as we left campus from the east side.

  I wondered where we were going for the eleventh or twelfth time since we’d started the slow trek down the deserted highway. The dogwoods made for a pretty landscape, but my bouncing knee and fidgeting hands were inconsolable. When I flexed my fingers against my thighs to control their constant motion, Ben reached out. He held my hand as he continued steadily out of Sparksville. The sun was setting in the distance, but he still wore his dark shades over his eyes.

  When we took the exit ramp off the highway into a wooded area, Ben pulled the truck to a stop where the gravel met the grass. He came around to help me out of the truck and took hold of my hand once again. I couldn’t see anything through the trees, but he knew where he was going.

  We walked beside each other for a little while before the trees thinned and I could see our destination. An old wooden dock stood strong in the rippling water. The glow of the rounded moon was the only light in the darkened sky.

  We stood overlooking its reflection on the water for several moments before Ben pulled me down to sit between his legs. His strong legs sandwiched mine, dangling off the edge of the pier.

  It felt good to be with him, almost wistful, if you can get nostalgic about something that happened a month ago. It was familiar, but I saw the fear of rejection in his eyes. I’d seen the same look in the mirror for weeks.

  “We were getting really close,” I said breathlessly after it became clear that he was waiting on me to start. “I thought things were going good—great, actually. I was lovesick.” I had been; I was truly ill. My knees stayed weak and the butterflies in my stomach almost always caused some unease. I was unwell, in the best way.

  Every day, we had been growing closer and closer. I was past the point of trying to hide bowel movements and pretending I woke up with concealer on. I could call him to pick up tampons and he let me drive his truck. We had settled into a comfortable routine, and I had loved it.

  “We were close, Lex, and we were happy…or so I thought.” He didn’t mask his confusion.

  I nodded to him, my mouth ready to drop the bomb but my mind not knowing if my heart was ready for the answer.

  “Why didn’t you love me?” Earlier in our relationship, I had never imagined the words ‘you love me’ sitting next to the word ‘didn’t’ in a sentence. That’s the power of words. They have different meanings based on context. When you string certain words together, it changes meanings. ‘Promises’ next to ‘broken’ changes the meaning. The word ‘hope’ mingled with ‘lost’ fractures the definition. We use our words to warp the truth, deny the inevitable, and pretend. Oh, do we pretend.

  “What?” he asked, clearly surprised by my question.

  “Why didn’t you love me?” I repeated, wiping my nose. “You’ve been in more relationships than I can even comprehend and you spread love like it’s an infectious virus, and I just don’t understand why I didn’t get that side of you.” My breathing had softened, now almost inaudible, and my words were a whisper. “I had never believed in the fairy tale. You knew that. Most people aren’t capable of fairytale love, of that intense connection. Not everyone’s love story is an epic adventure. Love isn’t always once in a lifetime. I had never cared about having that, honestly.

  “It was different when I met you. I was fighting for the fairy tale, knowing it can exist, hoping it was us. When we were together, I knew I was capable of a love fueled by burning passion. I wanted those fairytale words, those once-upon-a-time beginnings and those happily-ever-after endings. I wanted the chaotic middle, the everyday struggle of good triumphing over evil, and love winning every. single. time.”

  The tears were fully coming now, my breaths getting harder and harder to process, snot slowly loosening in my nose.

  “And maybe it’s unrealistic to want my life to mirror a big-screen fairy tale, but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that it’s inevitable that I feel that. Our souls cling to hope without our instruction. It’s in our nature for our soul to believe beyond doubts, and mine believed in you.

  “I kept watching all these freaking Disney movies and all I saw was you. You were the wish my heart makes, my tale as old as time, my favorite day, my second star to the right, the one who fills my world with sunshine. You’re the one I’ve been looking for, my once upon a dream, my new dream. You will be in my heart always because you’re the one my heart decides. Love makes you do crazy things, and you are my adventure, to infinity and beyo
nd. This, to me, was a fairytale love.”

  Talking through the tears was becoming more and more difficult, but once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I just kept purging the hurt from my core like it was going to heal me.

  “Then I got insecure—really insecure,” I admitted. “You are way too good-looking, and smart, and funny—basically all the things women put at the top of their list. You’ve got the whole tall, dark, and sexy thing going on, while I’m barely going on at all. I walk around in oversized t-shirts while you look like you just starred in an A-list movie. Us being together is not a love the world tells us will last.

  “I feel things much too deeply in this superficial world. Love gets into my skin, seeps into my bones, and infiltrates my bloodstream, and that’s what you did. I’m very difficult to love,” I admitted. “I get that, honestly. I’m not a Sunday morning kind of girlfriend. I’m a three in the morning crying uncontrollably because I feel too much kind of person. I’m chaotic and crazy, and I like it that way. I give way too much and way too little and can’t explain the rationale.” My silence met the cool air and I shrugged. The tears had died down, almost in acceptance. “So here I am, crazy in love with you, and I get this job offer.” I took a deep breath, pausing to collect myself. “In Chicago.” I felt his forearms flex against my thighs, and in that moment, I was so glad I didn’t have to look into his face. “You’re the first person I’ve ever loved,” I admitted, “but I didn’t want just a fraction of my heart to be yours, like normal first loves. I wanted you to have my whole heart. Forever. Longer than forever.”

  “Lex,” he started, his shallow voice causing my tears to start up again.

  “But you didn’t love me,” I cried out in the loudest voice I was able to conjure up. The acceptance of rejection already tangled in my breath. “So I was torn because the only job offer I had was three states away, but I couldn’t understand why that even mattered because there wasn’t any reason for me to stay with you…because you didn’t love me. Why didn’t you love me?” The last words were just a whisper of a breath, almost like I really didn’t want to know the answer.