Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 345(@200wpm)___ 276(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
My hip hurts a little bit this morning, but it’s more stiffness than pain. I’ll have to take an extra fifteen minutes and do some stretches. I ignore the twinges for now, powering through it in favor of finding Ephemeral and telling her everything that’s on my mind.
I slept like the dead. It’s amazing how being held and mattering to someone on a personal level can do wonders for insomnia. I’m turning into one of those clichés, the man who falls for a woman and finds himself, but I still can’t summon up enough fucks to give, fuck you very much. Proper fucks. Not just regular fucks.
I check her room first.
I expect to see Peach Lips on the foot of the bed, probably on her back with her belly in the air, her lips flapping to the side, or her tongue hanging out like a dog’s while she’s in mid-dream.
But the only thing I find is a white piece of paper at the foot of the bed.
My heart pretty much stops dead and restarts with a burping lurch, sending shivery pangs of pain through me that hurt so much more than my hip. I snatch up the note with an uncharacteristic tremble. I’ve faced down most of my life with steady hands, but not this.
Thorn,
You opened part of your heart to me last night, and I truly hope this doesn’t cause you to regret it or to regress back behind hard stone walls.
I don’t believe in systems or putting yourself into a box. Life should be lived by the rules you make, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. That said, our worlds are so different. My number one rule is to do less harm wherever it’s possible. I don’t want to hurt you, and I’m honest enough with myself to say I don’t want to be hurt either. Thank you again for everything, including opening your house, making Peach Lips comfortable, the incredible cat posts and the grade-A litter boxes, the marketing makeover, and giving me the financial freedom to start my life over.
I fell asleep right away last night, even with my worries mounting that we’d only hurt each other if we continued forward. I wanted to tell you this, to try to explain myself. I thought we had an understanding when we talked, but maybe we didn’t. If that’s true, then I’m so very sorry for not being clear again. In my head, I knew it was one night, but maybe you thought it would be more. Again, forgive me if I caused you a single second of stress by waking up and not finding me here this morning.
I woke up before you, and all I could think of was that we didn’t have the right tools for the job, and trust me, that’s vital. Once, my mom and I grew Concord grapes in the backyard. We harvested them and boiled them down and then realized we didn’t have a proper strainer. My mom thought of poking holes in a sandwich bag, but it didn’t work. What a mess. We laughed about it long after we went and got the silly strainer. It’s just proof that one thing can’t serve in place of another.
In short, I’m not a strainer. I’m the bag where the holes don’t work, and then all of a sudden, it bursts and lets all the puree and seeds and old skins through.
I’d probably just wreck the grape juice.
Grape juice being life, and life being both of ours.
I truly do wish you the best. You deserve every good thing. I hope you see that and that you can believe it.
Best wishes,
Ephemeral
I do my best not to be an over-dramatic child who crushes the note in my fist. Best wishes. Like a damn Christmas card. How could she not have stayed and talked this out? I know what happened last night was an unexpected development, but is that really the worst thing that could have happened? Was it a no-strings-attached, nothing-going-forward understanding? I didn’t feel that way, but I can see how she would have.
Unexpected developments don’t change the facts. Ephemeral is right that we live two separate lives. We’re both busy and quite…entrenched. She’s got a schedule of cat conventions, and I have a company to run and a merger I’m supposed to be following through on.
Unexpected developments are what I control. I don’t allow for the unplanned. I’m all for tightly controlling the variables. Because if you don’t…disaster.
But that’s work.
I’ve thrown myself into my business, building a professional life and never knowing when enough was enough. There was never going to be an enough.
It took a crack in the wall of perfection to show me that maybe I was building in the wrong direction. Maybe cracks are okay. I do realize I was trying to buy my way into redemption. If anyone else had told me that all I had to do was pick up the phone and call, show up, and make contact, I’d have rolled my eyes and been mildly annoyed. I would have told myself that they didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s not as simple as just picking up the phone. I had to get to a point where I…where I was…