He and my mom never tried to change me. Never told me to go to sleep when they found me wandering around a quiet house in the middle of the night. They accepted me.
I came from a loving and supportive home.
Had great friends.
My health.
A roof over my head.
Food in my belly.
I shouldn’t have these demons.
Yet here they were.
Heartbreak was so much uglier than whatever movies portrayed it to be. There was no carton of ice cream, bottle of vodka, one-night stand and an amazing rebound guy type of combination that worked to cure that ache in your chest.
And it wasn’t an ache. It was a sharp, stabbing, consistent agony. And it wasn’t in the chest. It was everywhere. You ached for the person who hurt you. Who ruined you. Who broke down every part of what made you you. Craig did all those things and it was horrible and painful and so soul destroying that it took a punch in the face to make me leave, but still, there was the pain. The agony.
It was that much worse because now, I knew all of this, what a bad person he was and I still loved him. I couldn’t just turn something like that off. The violence, the ugliness of his true character was enough to make me leave him, but that wasn’t enough to make me forget him.
When you give your heart to someone, it remains in their possession, at least a piece of it anyway, no matter what they do afterward.
So I was here, curled up in the bath, not cradling wine and listening to empowering music and reading Eat Pray Love. No, I was clutching my knees to my chest, curled up in the darkness of the room, sobbing violently and silently. Pain wracked every single cell in my body.
And in that moment, I wanted him to save me from this. Not Craig. Not the man who’d punched me in the face that I still loved with a part of me. But Heath, the man who’d punched through my soul when I’d torn his apart. Who I still loved with every aching cell in my body.
I stared into the water, my eyes swollen.
My fingertips trailed over the surface of the water, thinking about how such a thing could give us life, something we needed to continue living, could also kill us if we completely submerged ourselves in it.
Much like love.
My finger froze atop the water.
That had been my problem. Not just with Heath or Craig, with every man I fell in and out of love with since I grew boobs.
I had been looking for someone to save me. Not from dragons or villains, just from life. From loneliness.
And I hadn’t realized there was only one person who could save me.
She was sitting in the dark in a lukewarm bathtub crying over the husband that beat her. Crying because she knew that she made a mistake on her wedding day. Walking down an aisle. Saying I do.
Walking away from a man who kept promising he’d never come back to her, but who always did, a little more broken and crueler than before.
* * *
“Hey Dad,” I said into the phone, exhaling with the force my pseudo cheerful voice took to create.
“Polly!” he shouted into the phone like he had for the past year. Though every single conversation, the connection had been fine, he seemed to be of the opinion that the technology required him to shout so he could be heard across oceans.
“Where are you now?” he demanded. “I’ve had no pictures in days. You know the whole reason I don’t go all Liam Neeson is because you send me my adventure updates.”
I smiled.
“That’s why you’re not going Liam Neeson?” I teased.
My father was the furthest from Liam Neeson than any father could get. Yes, he was protective of me, of our entire family. But he didn’t communicate this with threats of violence or curses.
I had no idea where Lucy got her genes from.
Plus, when it became apparent I was going to have a new boyfriend with every week, he didn’t sit on the proverbial porch with the proverbial shotgun. He was actually nice to the “poor bastards,” this was because “they are only going to get a handful of heartbeats with the most extraordinary girl on this earth because they’re too ordinary for you.”
It was safe to say he doted over me.
Because I was the youngest, obviously. And because I was a total daddy’s girl. I adored my mother more than anything too, but it was a connection with my father that was something different. He got me. In a way most of my family didn’t.
They accepted me.
But they didn’t get me like my dad.
Never in my life had I seen an ounce of disappointment in his eyes when most parents would have an ocean of it.