Chapter Ninety-Two
SUNNY
The clock ticked out and the days on my calendar were etched off. And suddenly, I am out of time. My world here in Boston has come to an end.
Saying my goodbyes was more painful than I care to describe.
So I won’t.
All I can say is it was filled with a lot of tears. And my heart broke apart, leaving a big portion behind with each of them.
This family taught me how to love after loss. I didn’t just learn how to love romantically again. I learned that love is so much more than that.
It’s with each of them.
Love and healing isn’t just a boy and a girl, man and woman who find one another. It’s friendship turned into family. It’s coffee at Betty’s Beans. Nights in one another apartments, cooking dinner, picking out bad movies, laughing around a table as we share a meal.
It’s pool tournaments at Martha’s and dancing even when you don’t feel like it. It’s painting in the art studio and sparring in the gym.
It’s walking along the harbor, watching the city as the sun shines down on my skin to a paint class that I didn’t realize would alter my entire life.
It’s exploring Boston at midnight, running wild around the city, finally feeling some semblance of recklessness and freedom as the rain hits my skin after an almost kiss.
It’s a couch that was once empty, but somehow overflowed with people who were strangers mere months ago but are now the closest thing I have to family, and the ones making me question any plans I’ve had for months.
It’s finding home when you have to leave yours behind.
But Tyler and I’s love…
Our love is late night kisses. Foreheads pressed together. Watching one another from across the room, staring at the other, only to catch the other staring, too.
It’s a hand on a thigh. A finger tracing our features. It’s a place between comfort and chaos. Safety and danger. His nose in my hair, mine in his neck. It’s matching scars because my pain is his and his is mine.
It’s a reminder you’re living. It moves and exists with each breath we take. Echoes each heartbeat.
It’s the little infinity we somehow sit in together in our minds where the night sky and fiery daylight meet. It’s endless. It has no beginning, no end. It simply exists.
And it’s ours.
It’s something that will find us through our lifetimes, timelines, dimensions, worlds. Just as it did here, just as I’m sure it has before. Even if only for a glimmer of a moment. Not a lifetime, but a moment that I will remember for my entire life.
Maybe we won’t get this entire life, but I know damn sure we have before, and we will again. We will find one another again. We always do. We always will.
And I try to make peace and comfort in that, even if everything in me tries to tell me otherwise.
I walked home in the dead of the night, silently crying the pain out, hoping it would make it easier.
It didn’t.
But we fell in love. No matter how or when, we still did. That’s more than most people ever get.
Over and over my mind screams the same thing; this is not what I want. This is not what I want. But life grabs me by the neck, suffocating the hope I once had and says, but this is what you need.
I spent the rest of the day finishing the packing and loading up the U-Haul I rented to drive to Colorado.
I’m grateful I chose this route. I’m even more grateful Sam let me rent it in her name to avoid anything else Ryan could track, despite my name being legally changed. The extra precaution makes me feel better.
The drive will give me time to process everything that happened over the course of the last six months. It’ll give me time to grieve and try to move on. Move forward.
He broke his promise, and it snapped me out of my irrational thinking and back into logic. Back into my original plan – running.
There were instincts I thought I’d built up over the years of working in healthcare. But after Ryan, it was hard to accept the fact I’d been wrong about the one person who was part of the foundation of my life. And I’d been so foolish to let it happen again.
I kept the couch.
It’s my reminder that even on the days it’s empty, it was once filled with people I love. It’s my reminder that nothing is forever, and change is ever present.
I walk into my kitchen that is now scattered with boxes, glancing around the growing empty space. I’m going to miss this apartment. This city. It’s healed me in ways I never expected it too, and clearly it gave me a life and friends I never anticipated I’d have.
I let it serve as proof that I’m capable of starting over again.
If I could have such a great experience here, I can have it wherever I go next, too.
I sip my coffee, looking around my almost empty apartment, imagining the day I’d picked it out, so scared, thinking life is so unfair.
Some things don’t change.
Because that’s life.
So fucking unfair.