Chapter 12 No Show
It was twenty-five minutes past their planned meeting time and while it felt silly, she recognized a familiar pang. It hung low inside of her where disappointment liked to hang out until it grew into a large animal inside of her causing chaos.
Disappointment, she knew, could lead to a rolodex of questions about herself that she knew were not fair to be tied to someone else's carelessness, and yet were tied all the same.
Those questions could lead to anxiety about her life decisions.
And from there, well, it was like a ping pong ball bouncing along self-doubt, her age, where she was in life, what she valued about herself, the color she chose for her curtains.
Why she believed she was the kind of woman whom a man would show up for.
It was interesting, the mental gymnastics of a woman when she was disappointed; gold medal ability. To go from: he didn't show up to I am worthless.
She took her bagged food and looped it over her arm, deciding to take it to The Lost Souls Graveyard, where she could eat in peace and amongst the souls of women who understood being turned into ghosts.
It was there that she sat, the ground softened by thick Kentucky bluegrass and curling ferns sprouting up like lovers pressing themselves against the black gravestones.
She speared her fork into Greek chicken and roasted tomato, twisting warm cheese around the tines, watching the tomato bleed over the chicken.
She felt that way sometimes, like her mind was being controlled by the turn of some invisible hand, wrapping it around and around until it was on its way to being taken; consumed.
How could one person, one flippant gesture of passivity, take her back to a place where she felt like she was losing the careful control she'd curated over the last few years?
A marriage that nearly wrecked her, she had survived. Sometimes she thought it had saved her. There had been something about sitting at the bottom of a well of pain where she felt everything too much. It was the catalyst for knowing that was no way to live.
That, and a gold and black tarot card she'd found tucked into the pocket of her jean jacket hanging in the closet where she had hidden that early morning, after she'd set him into a rage.
Promises and threats had been hurled at her, and seeking a dark place of quiet where she could sit without his dark spitting rage, with nothing and no one to save her because he'd made sure of it, she'd whispered words of pleading.
She hadn't been sure what she wanted to say or hope for.
But there had been a spark of light, which had been quite like an explosion in that small space of darkness, and after a moment of gasped shock, she reached into the pocket to find the card.
She didn't know what it meant in that moment, but when in her palm, there was a feeling that surged through her.
It didn't usually happen with inanimate things, mostly people, but in that little coat closet, Tilly felt a childlike moment of hope; it was getting cotton candy, bright pink sugar spun in a cloud and grabbing at it, fearing that it would disappear on her tongue too quickly.
She saw a cat with one golden eye and heard deep, feminine laughter that could only belong to a woman who had harnessed joy.
A canopy of trees covered her in whatever place was in her mind, and she could smell woodsmoke, feel thick grass beneath bare feet, hear a screen door close, and smell cinnamon and apples.
She couldn't explain it, but it all felt real and like the home she needed.
And the next day, she got a dove grey invitation on thick cardstock and blue glitter trailing over it like a starfall.
On it was simply a place and time for an annual blueberry picking festival.
She'd gotten it by mistake, surely. Her name wasn't on it.
And yet, she thought of that cotton candy moment of joy in the closet and knew she had to go.
She ripped off a piece of croissant she'd made a snap decision to purchase as Michelle was closing up shop, and threw it on the ground where the crow was perched on Coraline's gravestone.
Tilly had become enchanted with trying to find everything she could once they had been able to identify each person buried here.
For some, there was enough information that a small book could be written with blanks filled in for detail.
Yet for others, they hadn't lived enough years in this world for their story to turn into more than a poem.
Coraline Frasier, eighteen years old, from a family of power and high regard in Salem, but impregnated by an unnamed lover.
She had been sent by family to a convent where she was abused, and in the near end term of her pregnancy, she'd run away and found this house where she had the baby.
Next to her black gravestone stood the one for her three-year-old child, Lola.
The day their names had been etched into black stone, Tilly's hand on the child's gravestone burned as the tears filled her eyes.
She could feel the strike of a mother's pain, the crippling effect of losing a life too young to understand evil. It had taken two whole days for the grief to loosen its hold on Tilly, and she'd nursed the pain alone in her apartment with ice cream, frozen dinosaur nuggets and television.
Perhaps she would never have a child. Perhaps the time she lay curled up in bed nine years ago, holding her stomach and crying, was the closest she would ever come to carrying one.
She had made peace with that. But where she sat now, eating Greek chicken on the forest floor, looking at the gravestone of a child who unfairly lost her life because a world decided secrets and propriety were more important than her story, she mourned again.
Her crow, she was thinking of the black bird as hers now, jumped down and ate the croissant before sitting herself once again on Lola's stone and cocked its head.
A caw of thanks filled the forest, and Tilly smiled.
"You're welcome. I'm going to call you Portia. You're beautiful and austere. If you hate it, let me know."
But then, as she was feeling sadness and that old friend anxiety slowly filling her up, a warm breeze floated around her, a cascade of summer bonfire, smoked marshmallows, and sunlit greenhouses poured over her.
She could feel the freedom of the season in this wind that wrapped around her like a gently lapping wave, reminding her to breathe and slow her thoughts.
She loved summer. Its syrupy closeness felt intimate.
In a family where intimacy was shunned, she rather liked the way that the air tended to cling to her.
She didn't even mind her thick black hair sticking to her neck when she was walking in the sunshine.
The smells of summer made her happy. Even now, she could smell the wild onions and thick patches of grass being stirred by the breeze.
She closed her eyes and imagined the collaboration of scents that would explode at the Fourth of July festival: sunscreen and bug spray, berries folded into pastry or sitting on pillows of whipped cream, the metal powder of sparklers, the drifting brine from Salem harbor.
She let out a long, slow breath, her love of summer battling with the darkness in her mind.
For her thoughts weren't always her own; sometimes they were leftover voices of those who had tried to imprint a different and darker message inside of her. Don't become too much, don't be a problem.
She understood at a young age, too young, that expressing herself had been seen as a burden. Unfortunately, she had been too young to know that it had been a lie creating the foundation of her anxiety.
And here was the truth about anxiety: it sold the lie that setting boundaries would make you an unkind person, and then it fed off the exhaustion an unbound space created.
And now here she sat in a summer-kissed forest with gentle, lost souls and a crow whom she started looking for every time she left her apartment or the inn, wondering why she wasn't enough. She wondered how she had forgotten all she'd learned when she moved here to heal.
Tilly looked up to the moon, ripped fractions of it visibly glowing through the trees.
"The world is a lot right now. It's all a bit heavy.
" She clasped her arms around her bent knees.
"Do you ever feel like you're too much, but at the same time that you don't have much to offer?
I think I've felt this way my entire life," she rested her chin on the tops of her knees.
Ghostly souls settled around her. The moon pressed closer for her moonlight confessions.
"There are moments where I want to scream, begging for someone to love me the way it's supposed to be.
No grey area, no guessing. Just complete love.
Rudimentary, even. So easy to spot a child would know it's a safe love. "
She thought of her friends, the family she'd created here.
It was a kind of love that just...was. It was asking about their flare-up of heartburn and checking in on how much or how little they loved their work over pasta.
Flowers picked for each other, and sitting through uncomfortable moments after feelings get hurt.
It was apologies without fear of exile and taking off your mask after a long day.
The women in her life had done something rather special: they created a place where you had the energy to fall in love with yourself.
She didn't need the moon to grant her someone else offering her honest love. She had that. But still, there were wide-mouthed moments that felt like they were going to swallow her when she was alone, and left with enough self-doubt and time.
She had boundaries and a readiness to love herself now that she'd never had before moving here.
The first time Ronnie left, she'd spent more time than she wanted to admit rebuilding those boundaries.
Was she doing it again?