When had I become my mother?
There were so many questions, and I didn't have any of the answers. I spent the whole weekend waiting for Derek to call, refusing to call him, and basically studying my own journals and my mother's, trying to find the pages where we both must have gone off course.
My conclusion was that there had been no big moment for me, no red flag that should have gone up. Somehow, Derek had found a way to sneak into my heart, completely without my permission and before I could have noticed.
That's the only way I could have allowed myself to fall in love—that most hated and feared state of human emotion.
The one day –in my studying—that I did find myself pulled back to was the day that I found the letters from my mother in the copy of Wuthering Heights in Mike's bedroom. I had such clarity that day when I came home and wrote about it in my journal. At that time, I had not forgotten that love was a bad force, wreaking havoc on otherwise placid lives, turning otherwise intelligent women into big emotional lumps of stupid.
It wasn't a position I had applied for, that was for certain.
But somehow I must have lost my way, because as I stared at my phone for the 800,000th time that weekend, I was definitely filling the position of Big Emotional Lump of Stupid.
When I thought about everything without all the emotional implications, I felt completely disgusted with myself.
When I thought of seeing Kayla's car in his driveway, I felt an emotional mix of anger and guilt—guilt at not trusting him and at overreacting, anger at being lied to and yelled at when I couldn't have known any better.
I spent the whole weekend fighting the urge to call him and apologize, and the only reason I was able to stop myself was because I couldn't come up with a plausible excuse to apologize.
The only reason I could come up with for wanting to apologize was: "I love him, and I just want everything to be good again."
But apologizing wouldn't make Kayla un-pregnant, so it couldn't truly make things good again.
By the weekend's end, I felt a melancholy kind of acceptance that our situation was probably just going to suck for a little while, maybe until we figured out a way to successfully deal with it, or maybe until it got to be too much and one of us just gave up.
Even though I was losing self-respect for every moment that I tried to rationalize what I had become, I never intended to be the one to give up. I loved Derek, apparently more than I loved myself, and I just wanted more than anything for us to work out, to be together no matter how difficult it may be.
The clincher was Sunday night when I tossed and turned all night, and finally fell asleep only to have a completely terrifying and realistic dream in which I was driving down a dark road, not even understanding why I was on it, and all of a sudden I saw Kayla's car coming in my direction from the other lane. I couldn't control myself, I just got flushed with emotion and then my foot was pressing down on the accelerator, faster, faster, straight at Kayla's car. I realized, before I hit her, what I was doing, and I tried to stop—panicked, hit the brake, screamed.
I woke up before the collision, but in the moment before the dream ended I could see Kayla's horrified face through the windshield as my car came flying hastily toward hers, and the second before I jerked awake, I realized it wasn't Kayla in the car, it was Sarah.
I didn't go back to sleep after that, and it definitely wasn't a dream that makes you wake up to peaceful thoughts.
I was appalled.
When I first woke up, tense with fear from the incredibly realistic dream, I actually wished momentarily that I had someone to go crawl in bed with.
Someone to make the monster go away.
But only I could make the monster go away.
For just a moment, I didn't get out of bed. I lay awake in the dark of my bedroom, for the first time in years having a memory of when I was four years old, hiding under my covers at night and trying to sleep, knowing that the monster was there every night, and only morning would make it disappear. I could still remember that feeling of fear. I remembered lying in my bed, helpless to make it go away, hating it for making me so feel afraid.
When I was four, the monster was something I just had to live with.
It was 3:48 a.m. when I pulled myself out of bed, because I couldn't even try to go to sleep after that. I was haunted by the dream, by the feelings that it stirred within me. I went through the trailer turning on all the lights, refused to look out the windows, and absorbed myself in doing laundry and cleaning the kitchen. The dream had actually upset me so much that I couldn't even journal, because I didn't want to ever see what I had seen in that dream again.
I waited until 5:04 to go wake up Alex.
As consolation for waking him up at "the ass-crack of dawn," as he muttered at me, I made some breakfast.
We sat at the table in the dead silence of morning for a good ten minutes, cutting up French toast, listening to the sound of the knife grating across the porcelain surface of the plate, the only sound either of us made as we cut up our food.
"So, not to sound ungrateful about being cooked for or anything, but is there a reason you pulled me out of bed at this ungodly hour?" he finally asked me.
I had spent every second since 3:48 thinking about it, but I still couldn't find the words, so I just nodded.
"Are you okay?" he asked, a frown marring his brow as he froze for a second, fork suspended in the air.