Chapter 25 #2
“I applied for that job over three months ago. And I will tell you exactly when I did. It was after the first time we went to the gardens. I felt something for you so strongly that it scared me. And I suspected you may have felt something too. I didn’t want to stick around and hurt you again, so I thought it was best if I left. I now know that was stupid.”
She couldn’t look at Rowan. “Are you taking it?” She asked with no inflection.
“Of course not. I want a life with you, here. I’ve never felt so sure of anything in my entire life.”
“Don’t make that decision because of me. You make that decision because it’s what you truly want. Take me out of the equation. I’m not going to be the reason why five or ten years down the line you lament the fact you stayed here.”
“Juniper, will you please look at me?”
“Rowan, if I look into your eyes, I will start crying again. And I really, really don’t want to cry anymore.”
“I understand. But Juniper, please don’t run away from this because you’re scared.”
Juniper sighed, and she flicked her empty ice cream stick into the grass. She’d pick it up later, but she couldn’t resist the urge.
“I will not make it through you leaving again. Not after this time.”
“I would never, ever do that again. I can’t help that I applied for this job before things changed between us. I am not taking that job. I only wanted another chance to talk to him to see if I could work something out remotely, very part-time because the work truly interests me.”
Juniper finally looked at her. “You know what I thought about all afternoon. That you moved back here, made me fall in love with you again, just for you to leave again. It’s so fucked up, it almost feels like you planned it that way.”
That sentiment looked like it hit Rowan like a sack of bricks. Juniper almost felt sorry she’d said it. But it was the truth, and she’d said it.
“Do you really think that little of me, still?”
“It’s more that sometimes I think that little of myself. That it would be easy to do something like that to someone like me.”
“That…” Rowan shook her head in disbelief, “that is really hard to hear.”
“I didn’t have the opportunity to go off and make something of myself the way you did.
I saw the way you are when you’re with your friends and former colleagues, how happy and complete your life was.
You’ve had every opportunity. This thing I’ve created here – that is my opportunity. This is all I have.”
Rowan looked down and paused to pinch the bridge of her nose. When she finally looked up, Juniper could see the wetness in her eyes again. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”
“Didn’t you, though? You’ll always have other options – clearly. I won’t. And I worry that even if you promise me it’s not now, it will be someday that you finally decide this place isn’t enough for you. Or what we built together. Or that I’m not enough for you.”
“What makes you think that? I could never in a million lifetimes think that way about you, or what you’ve done, or what we’ve built together. I didn’t leave before because you weren’t enough for me.”
“I think you can see why I would think that though.”
None of these confessions made Juniper feel better, but she continued with a voice shaken by her truth finally freeing itself after so long.
“I’m just… I’m just going to say exactly how I’ve felt. You obviously saw what I experienced as a child. You saw it all. Everything. The tears, the bruises, the abandonment. You held me so many times while I cried.”
That’s when the first tear from Rowan’s eyes fell. As much as Juniper wanted to look away, she held that painful gaze. Rowan didn’t say anything. She just nodded her head.
“I spent so long thinking that if I could just be smart enough, clean enough, do enough, be good enough,” her throat seized on the last thought.
“Junie,” Rowan softly started before Juniper cut her off.
“Turns out I was never enough of any of those things. Well, you know how that story ended. I’ll spare us both re-living any more of that.
Even after lots of therapy, I still have this thing with abandonment and not being enough.
Is it so wrong to want to be claimed by someone?
That someone would show up for you day after day, be on your team for every curveball life throws at you, love you unconditionally? ”
“No. It’s not wrong at all.”
◆◆◆
Rowan sat and held her head in her hands for a long while.
She had always known, deep down, that that’s how Juniper would interpret the way she responded to their love finally coming into the open and then shattering when she left.
She couldn’t reasonably be expected to heal the effects of generations of trauma that impacted Juniper as a young eighteen-year old.
Especially not when she had her own shit to deal with.
But at the same time, she knew that wasn’t really what Juniper had expected of her anyway.
She wasn’t asking to be fixed or saved or validated.
She wanted to be seen, to have someone consistently show up for her without question.
That was the unconditional love Rowan had always provided for her, platonically, well before they had romantic feelings towards each other.
Juniper deserved someone who told her they loved her to not vanish in the middle of the night.
Rowan had unfortunately been the second person in Juniper’s life to do that to her.
“I don’t need any of that anymore. I don’t need to be loved like that anymore.
I have cultivated an environment of love around me that’s so dense it’s all I feel.
But now it’s what I want. I want to be in love with you, and you with me because it feels good.
It feels happy. It feels purposeful. It feels like nothing else I’ve ever felt. ”
“That’s exactly how I feel too.”
She gathered the strength to pull her head back from her hands.
She gazed at Juniper, who had tucked her arms around herself and was staring off into the horizon.
She wanted, almost overwhelmingly, to reach out and touch her, to feel her skin under her hands, in a way that loved her with the tenderness she deserved in life.
“Juniper, everything I’ve ever wanted is you. You respect my deepest vulnerabilities, but you also push me to feel brave and alive. I’ve always felt like two people trapped in one body – one masculine, one feminine. But with you, I was always made to feel whole.”
Juniper’s eyes darted to hers in concern. “Of course I’ve always felt that way about you. I love you for exactly who you are, Rowan.”
“So when I felt like I was finally being cleaved in half by all of the pressure around me, it’s like I blacked out on life and disappeared.”
“What pressure? What are you saying?”
Rowan blew out a breath. She prepared herself for what she was going to say next, the real reason she’d left, and the events that led up to it.
“Why do we cut our hair? What are we taught about that?” She asked Juniper.
“We cut our hair when we’re in mourning.”
Juniper’s eyes flickered up to her hair and back down to her eyes.
She was smart. She was probably figuring this all out before Rowan could even express it.
But Rowan was committed to getting it all out into the open, like Juniper had.
It was the only way they could move forward.
And she hoped more than anything, they’d be able to move forward from this moment.
“Why though?” Rowan found the courage to ask.
“We’re taught we cut it because we carry all of our memories in our hair. We cut it to move on and let go.”
Rowan looked down and studied the splintered board beneath her feet. She saw her tears wet the board before she felt them fall. Then she felt Juniper’s fingers swipe tenderly across her cheeks as she directed her face toward hers.
“Hey, look at me. What did you grieve?”
“Me.”
She could tell through Juniper’s intense gaze she was ruminating on what she’d been told, what to say next. She was still holding Rowan’s face in her hands. Now it felt more out of comfort, the need to touch and be touched in moments of vulnerability.
“I never told you about when I cut all my hair off.”
Rowan remembered that day like it was yesterday. The edges of that memory still imprinted so firmly on her mind, even though she wished she could crumple it up like a piece of scrap paper and throw it away.
She remembered her dad driving her to the powwow, their Tribe’s powwow that happened at the end of every summer, which also happened to be the day after she had admitted she loved Juniper.
That night she knew she’d fucked it all up with Juniper.
Even though she was scared that she was leaving for school, in a different state hundreds of miles away, she knew she couldn’t stay either.
As soon as Victor parked, Rowan’s eyes found her.
She was with a group of girls their age, including Wren.
They were singing along to some song by The Pussycat Dolls, playing with each other’s hair and putting on makeup.
Rows of brightly colored jingle dresses hung on hangers in the back of the open van.
She looked in the backseat of her dad’s truck to her dress.
The last thing she wanted to put on the body she didn’t yet understand was a dress.
Anxiety bubbled up inside Rowan so ferociously she felt like throwing up.
She flipped the visor down and looked at herself.
It was the final culminating moment where she felt completely physically unrecognizable to who she was inside.
She looked down to watch her hands fidget in her lap, picking at the snags in her basketball shorts, and her long hair cascaded over her shoulders.
It almost felt like it was mocking her. Either that or enshrouding her in shame.
She barely mustered enough strength to give voice to her plea. “Dad, can you take me home?”
Her eyes darted over to her dad, who looked back in concern.