Chapter Twenty-Five
I don’t need to do this any more. Weird that, huh? After all these years, these letters are now redundant. I can say this to your face, if I want to, but old habits won’t die unless you shoot them in the head and . . . yeah, I guess these serve a function. Stuff that maybe I wouldn’t say, couldn’t say to you. Jury’s out as to whether I’m even going to show you this pile of writing . . . maybe I’ll get a book out of it, hey, there’s a thought. ‘Writing to my Mother’ . . . but then there’s the pat little ending to get over, ‘and we met and we liked one another and the previous thirty-six years of misery and wanting and lonely nights and sabotaged relationships were all forgotten’.
Won’t happen. I’m preaching forgiveness and opening up and catharsis and all to Holly but it’s harder than you’d think to let go of all those years. They stain you so deep that it’s part of your soul, part of who you are, me and her. I’ve been made into this social outsider, this guy who stands beyond the crowd and watches and I don’t know that I’m ever going to be allowed to come into the firelight, while she . . . Holly . . . she’s spent so long protecting herself from that pain of having someone she loved turn underneath her from fun brother to this guy she’s had to protect from the world . . .
But together — ah, together we are something more. She takes the pain away. Somehow, being with Holly makes me feel that, hey yeah, I deserve a life. Spent so many . . . so many years believing that I was this lowlife piece of shit, something even a mother couldn’t love. So, QED, anyone who loved me must be fucking deranged, need a lesson in never trusting, never loving, and, oh yeah, I gave them that lesson.
And now I see what I did, how I humiliated those women to try to bring them down to my level. To show them how it feels to be less than human, to be this discarded, worthless thing not worth loving, not worth even so much as casual pity, and I’m sorry. I thought I was doing it to get myself away, give them a lesson in objective reality — don’t get attached to this guy, he’s no good — but what I really did was try to make them feel just one tiny atom of what I felt.
Okay, so I’m shit on a stick. But Holly doesn’t care. She knows what I did, she knows why. I’m not saying she understands, but she tries to. From the first she’s seen through the image and she’s not scared, even when I peel back the layers to show her what’s underneath it all. And I love her for it. Love her for her struggle to come to terms with the fact that she’s stifled her life for twenty years to care for her brother. Love her for the way she’s letting her inner craziness come up from where it’s been weighed down with the pragmatism and the logic. You know something, I even think she’s starting to believe in all this ‘magic’ stuff? Mind you, even I am beginning to wonder . . .