Chapter 32
Magnolia
Me:
Are you free tonight? Can we talk?
Me:
I should be done with class any minute, maybe you could call me before work?
Iscroll up, rereading all of the other text messages Lukas and I have sent over the last few months.
Well, that I have sent, I should say, because most of my messages go unanswered.
Or he will promise to call, but doesn’t.
Then there are the messages that come after a night of drinking.
Sometimes, they’re garbled voicemails, mostly slurred words trying to tell me what he’s thinking.
Sometimes, they’re streams of misspelled text messages, and I spend the mornings sipping my coffee and trying to decipher what he meant to say.
I thought the deployment was hard. I thought that thousands of miles between us and limited technology was going to be the hardest part of our relationship. Silly me thought that once he was done, life would fall back in place and we’d pick up right where we left off before he went to boot camp.
But the Lukas that came back from overseas isn’t a man I recognize. He’s loud. Angry. He drinks until he’s stupid, and that’s the only time he seems to want to call. If I do catch him sober, he’s somber, uncertain of what to say, and I can’t figure out which version of him scares me more.
I swipe at a lone tear that breaks free, catching it as it runs down my cheek.
I was a stupid, stupid girl to expect everything to go back to normal.
But never in my wildest dreams did I expect this.
I didn’t expect him to make excuses on why he can’t come visit me, or why I can’t go to him.
He didn’t go back to Iowa to see his family, either.
In typical Lukas fashion, he’s pushing all of us away.
Except this time, I can’t seem to get through to him, and it terrifies me.
I can categorize my life in two segments, the before and after.
The before—when I was a child, before I met Lukas, and after meeting him.
The memories before him are fuzzy. I have a few fond memories of birthday parties and Christmas and running around the yard at our old house.
But the day I met Lukas, it was like … like a part of me was born.
There’s the part that’s holding onto him so tightly it hurts because of how much I love him.
But there’s also a smaller part that is terrified to let go, because he’s all I know.
Every memory I have for the last seventeen years is tinged with Lukas.
Stained with his smile, his smell, his sleepy morning voice.
The way it felt to be dancing on stage knowing he was in the audience.
The way I’d fall asleep while he massaged my aching feet.
The way he’d hug me when he was scared, how he’d bury his face into my chest and neck because he didn’t want me to see him cry.
The way his head would fall back, throat bobbing when he laughed.
Lukas:
Sorry, tonight isn’t good. Extra training going on. Talk tomorrow?
I toss my phone on the table and it bumps my coffee cup, brown liquid sloshing over the side and splashing on the screen. Tears burn my eyes, and I shake my head to no one, wondering when it became so easy for him to lie to me.
Letting go of Lukas would mean letting go of all of those parts of me that I know so well. And as much as I don’t know the person he’s turned into, I’m terrified to meet the person I’d become without him.