After the Blu
I close my diary when I hear mom stir in her bedroom.
It’s just Davis, her sponsor, helping her back into bed.
“She’s okay!” He calls out, and I nod, returning to the book in my hands.
God, lifting my eyes from those words feel cathartic, like shedding a skin I thought I would be wearing forever.
And yet, here I am.
Beatrice Blu Henderson.
A daughter. A dreamer. A fighter. A lover.
Every story that I survived will live long inside of me –
A flashlight in the dark, a beacon of hope.
This is me. All of me.
Beatrice. Blu. Henderson.
I call Cole. He answers on the third ring. “Want me to come and get you?”
I nod. “I think I’m ready to come home.”
I feel him smile, and he says, “I’ll be there right away.”
And I know, with certainty, that he will be.
I stand up, look around the room. The poison apple, the blue walls that kept me enclosed for nearly three decades.
I fold my fingers over Cole’s ring.
This is not your life anymore.
You have built better.
And I know, with certainty –
That I have.
Certain, certain, of so many things these days.
There are fragments of him, but they dissipate, much like everything else – everyone else, who has lost their significance –
And where their spaces were filled with someone better.
I walk out into the hall, shutting the door to the past one last time.
“She’s asleep,” Davis says. “I’ll check in on her in a few hours.”
“Thank you,” I say, grabbing his hands. “For all that you do for everyone.”
He smiles. “Making the world a better place means starting small.”
I refuse to cry. “This is not small, Davis.”
He shakes my hand, and exits the home.
I glance at Mom, her face so peaceful at rest, and lean down to kiss her forehead. “I hope you find Dad in those dreams of yours,” I whisper, and slip out the back door.
There’s a gust of wind that carries from the trees, filling me softly to enter my lungs.
Inhale. Exhale.
So much has changed.
Some bad, all good.
Inhale. Exhale.
I think about Blu.
She stands beside me as if I could touch her. And when I run my fingers over scarred skin, I can.
There you are.
Here I am.
But she’s quiet, quieter than she’s ever been. No longer waiting for some bomb to go off, no. She’s just –
Waiting.
For Jace to come back?
For Cole to return?
I don’t know.
But I’m not hiding anymore.
I walk towards the front of the house, leaning against the gate. It’s open.
It has always been open.
And I stand in the space between leaving and staying, and I just breathe.
In.
Out.
I feel it, I do.
Everything before, and After the Blu.
The sharks are still out there, circling the current I came from.
But I’m not in it anymore.
For now, everything is water –
And I, Beatrice Blu Henderson, am the shore.