Never Is a Promise

Still editing and likely adding, but you are all welcome to read in the meantime. -JRH

--

He was the boy, mysterious and sullen.
He liked the things the other boys didn't, drummed to his own beat.
He was the boy with the scruffy chin, wearing it proudly before we girls realized we kind of liked that.
He was the boy with the voice that didn't match his face, always surprising to hear.

She was the girl, lonely and yearning.
She had never truly been in love, loved in return.
She was the girl who gave away her soul, asking for nothing but consideration in return.
She was the girl who lost it all to a boy she couldn't change, a heart she could never know.

---

Absentmindedly, I let the door slam behind me as I stepped into the apartment I shared with three others. The lights were dim, a movie playing on the minuscule television screen. One of my roommates, the only one of us engaged to be married, was curled up on our castaway couch, mostly ignoring my presence. Bed of Roses again. That movie made me want to stab myself in the eyeballs. I'd watched it once and only once, and I'd immediately tried to delete it from my memory. The pain I'd felt deep in my stomach, even deeper so in my heart, as I watched made me almost crazy. Never, ever, would I find someone who would care for me in that way. Ever.

He'd called that morning while I was in between classes. I'd instantly recognized his voice when he asked for another of my roommates. My heart sank to my shoes, and probably would have gone lower than that if it were possible. Either he didn't know me well enough to know the sound of my voice or he purposefully was trying not to talk to me. Either way, I was devastated to the very core. How did he not know? Or care? He'd taken so very much, caused me to lose more than I'd ever imagined.

A seemingly endless row of lines and crosses flash and repeat in my mind. Pregnant. My, doesn't that change everything.

The day before me is a blur. The world is stuck in slow-motion, and I move through it, leery, like an ocean vessel through the thickest fog. I am numbly absorbing the places, the people, the experiences I know that will quickly be banished from me. I know I cannot stay, but only God knows how fervently I am not ready to go. Leaving brings reality, that the world is a colder, harder place than I had ever known it to be. Leaving means I must lose it all.

In the evening, I attended the last celebration of my college career. I walked from room to room to room, passing by carousing party-goers engaged in one forbidden substance or another, barely registering that another roommate had just slid her car into the side of my brand new car in the icy driveway. I. Didn't. Care. Not in the slightest. In fact, it made my urgency all that more intense. I was looking for my best friends, my boys. The house could have crashed down around me and I wouldn't have been more surprised or even the slightest bit deterred in my search.

My boys found me as I was heading to the door to make my retreat, my hopes of locating them having waned. Oh, my brothers from different mothers: One with chocolate-colored skin and bright eyes, the other with yellow skin and warm smile. We were the unlikeliest trio, but I had for them the deepest of love. My brothers. Relieved but still broken, I wept into one's shoulder as the other put their arm around me. I was losing my brothers, which was almost more than I could bear in addition to the rest of my troubles.

The following morning, I waited, heart in my throat, stomach churning, for the apartment to clear. Privacy. She answered the phone on the first ring, as if she had been waiting for my call, which I wasn't sure was good or bad.

"Mom..." I croaked, not even able to get through a greeting before tears rendered me speechless. I didn't have to tell her, she already knew. Immediately there was an edge in her voice that I had never heard before, and I knew our relationship had changed forever. I had lost my innocence, in my parents' eyes.

Listening and re-listening to the same song on my CD player, I penned a letter to the baby in my womb. "Daddy loves you, little one. He's just scared right now," it promised. Who was I reassuring? Myself? I had given far too much credit to a guy who lacked the decency and concern to return phone calls, to step up to the plate, to... even recognize my voice on the phone. He had taken what I hadn't given, and then I was telling our unborn child that this was a person capable of loving anyone but himself. I had lost my sense of reason.

Only days later, my life as I had known it was over, packed up into as many boxes and plastic storage tubs as I had access to. I stood by myself in the center of the apartment. This place was no longer my second home and bore little traces that I had ever inhabited it. Self-pity welled inside of me and I wondered how quickly, how easily I would be forgotten from other places, other people here. What hadn't I lost?

At the table in the dining commons, with my parents impatiently waiting in the parking lot, I rested my head on my brother's shoulder, my arms wrapped furiously around his neck. We stayed that way for several long minutes, savoring the bitter-sweetness of it all, so seemingly free and easy for the very last time. Afraid to leave, afraid to stay, terrified to lose more.