Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Jaq
I was beating myself up, replaying how differently I could have handled things so many weeks after being estranged from Graham. Asking for space from him a week before his father passed? What the hell was wrong with me?
The least I could have done was stay for the funeral. I can't believe my actions caused him to experience that by himself. Well, not by himself. He’d still had his loving family surrounding him. I can understand though, why he felt abandoned. Even until the end, he'd been so kind.
Everyone could easily distinguish my ability to sabotage my romantic exploits, but I knew most things didn’t always last, even if you wanted them to.
It'd been weeks since we last spoke. No communication whatsoever. Maybe he had finally moved on. Things were better this way. At least now, he could be with someone who could give him the future he wanted.
***
A little spring cleaning was in order, which consisted of a combination of making playlists, dancing to said playlists.
Then maybe, maybe, if I fell up to it, getting to that cleaning.
I may have listened to punk on a regular, but I was a child of the 90s.
A teen in the 2000s. And you can't get your girl to sit down when Old Town Road came on, whether I messed with country or not.
Halfway in, though, I couldn't prove it, but a rat must have died in the wall because something didn't smell right, and I couldn't find the source. I had to open a few windows just to minimize the smell. If I had to smell something that rank, the least I could do was find it to discard it.
Rewarding myself with the fifteenth cleaning break, I collapsed on the couch, ready for slumber to take me. Was it normal to get this tired when you're supposed to be doing something?
Not giving it much thought, my phone notification went off, and I almost didn't reach for it, but my curiosity got the best of me.
Mom: You dad’s taking me on a cruise this summer. Don't be surprised if I come back brand new.
If anything made me less skeptical about the future, it was my parents. Granted, when they got married, wasn't none of this red pill/pink pill, high value man versus what do you bring to table conversations. People chose each other, got married, and just dealt with the rest.
Not that I'm saying that made things easier, but not having to worry about who someone voted for, it definitely sped things along.
I couldn't model what my parents had with this particular climate of dating and hooking up, but I could still be hopeful that if love was meant for me, I wouldn't run from it forever.
Come to think about it, I hadn't seen my parents in a while, and if they were going on a cruise, I may not see them for a while. I think it could do a lot of good to catch them before they were less reachable.
Me: Think you’ve got time to host your daughter for a few days? You know? Before you start acting brand new?
Mom: You might be a thorn in our side, but you're still our baby. We'll prepare your room. Bringing any company?
Which meant was I entertaining anyone?
Me: No, Mom, just me.
Mom: Just checking.
It was last minute, but maybe a time away from the city could do me good. Spring cleaning wasn't the answer, because nothing I could get rid of would stop me from being reminded of him.
Not that I wanted to forget him; I loved him too much to lose so many amazing memories.
I just needed a break from walking by a couch that reminded me of when we would binge watch TV.
Or skipping to a room where we'd always lose and gain back control of each other. I packed a suitcase three times as fast than any spring cleaning I’d gotten done, but when I contemplated packing another sports bra or two, I was reminded where I’d left Graham's gift I’d never got to fully read through.
1000 things I love about you.
I'd probably only read about ninety of them, but he always been firm that he didn't want me to read them all at once.
Read them when you're having a bad day, he would say.
I want some of them to surprise you. Picking out a random one, even in my disarray, the thought of me making someone feel this way did put a smile on my face.
#831. When you're silly, even in chaos
Flipping closer to the front, I read another.
#17. Your smile, half my problems seem less serious after that.
Between heading to my parents for a detox, without even thinking, I decided to pack the gift, even if it stayed in my suitcase.
***
“Hey y'all,” I yelled from the front door, refamiliarizing myself with their Hillcrest home. Rolling my suitcase into the kitchen after seeing no sign of any intelligent life, I learned why they'd been less responsive.
They’d just come from a grocery run and had their hands full doing so. “Now that you're here, how about you help put this stuff up?” My dad teased.
“Might as well,” I swayed back and forth in a happy dance. “This is about to be a week where I'm gonna eat up all y'all food. Use up all y'all toilet paper and toothpaste. I'm gonna be using up all y'all electricity, turning om all these lights—”
“Girl, you're not gonna be running our light bill,” my mother scolded.
“I mean, I might not turn on all the lights. But best believe this about to be my staycation,” I corrected.
“What brings our darling daughter over, when she could be sitting pretty in the city,” my father teased, his island cadence in tow.
“Hearing you both might be gone for the summer, I wanted to make sure I actually saw you before you left. Anything could happen.”
“She's just trying to get good to ensure she makes the will,” Mom joked.
“You ready for my famous pepper pot stew?” Dad announced, a little bit too excited for my response.
“Actually, if y'all got any cheese. Or oatmeal. Even yogurt, I don't have much of an appetite for much else. Maybe later, but something about it is too aromatic for me right now,” I confessed.
“You all right, baby?”
“All right enough to kick your butt at Candyland,” I taunted with a karate chop gesture.
“All right, now,” Mom warned, holding the carrot toward me like a weapon. “You ain't too old.”
“Yeah, well, I'm gonna go unpack since most of the exploitation child labor you got outta me has been performed. I'll take this,” scooping up a single serve container of cottage cheese.
Lugging my modest suitcase up the single stairway, I hoisted the weight of it on the last step, hightailing to my old room and sunk into the mattress. After what felt like a hard day's work, my parents must have recently cleaned in here, because the smell of cleaning products still lingered.
To save on electricity, I opened a window to give me much needed air circulation. Devouring the cottage cheese in one go, once I had the energy to, I emptied out my suitcase to figure out how I'd spend this week.
I packed pajamas more than anything else, because a bitch was about to be a summer bum, but there was more than enough outdoorsy, gym wear, and day wear, just in case I needed to leave the house.
Without a child in the home my parents definitely didn't go all out, which was fine because they did so much during holidays.
By the time we met back up, my parents were on a rewatch of Greenleaf, a show I took to be one of their modern-day stories, and sandwiched between them to join. It wasn’t normally my kind of show but who could turn down Keith David, Lynn Whitfield, and all Black cast?
It was so dramatic, it wasn't hard to go from instantly annoyed to straight up invested, as the days that passed followed that similar formula. Only some would consist of childhood favorites, us switching between board game nights to themed movie nights.
I by no means had the perfect childhood, but I know I’d had the best one. I was always eternally grateful I’d been raised by parents who actually wanted kids.
Realizing why I had come here made me step in Graham's shoes. If someone had asked me for space when I was losing or had already lost one of my parents, I can’t say I wouldn’t be consumed by hurt and resentment, too.
Halfway into my trip, I found myself rummaging through the old room's closet, wondering why it’d been so easy to organize this closet, over the one in my own home.
I came across old photo albums, as my parents captured milestones no matter how old I was.
My first concert had been in here, me graduating for college, at every college I attended.
My first year as a news anchor. There were so many memories in here.
Some amazing. Some not so much. I held my breath a little, flipping through the pages with Hudson.
It was hard to tell what type of man he would be now.
With help, he could have been his best self.
Sometimes I wondered if we hadn’t dated, if he would have been willing to live if he had had no one to siphon from.
What I confused for love at the time had just been anxiety, intensity, and codependency.
Sometimes I question whether we were actually in love, because for as much as I could remember about him, I doubt if he were here today, he'd remember anything about me.
Not being able to handle much more, I put it down for my mental health, but couldn't help but feed my curiosity when an album that hadn't existed before, held the current year and beyond.
A lot were of me when I'd first gotten back to New York, as I sent my parents pictures all the time for their phone albums, but they were old school and corny enough to get prints made from them.
There were pictures of my unofficial housewarming with Carly and Yenory.
Pictures of me at Noir Noise. But what really brought me conflicting feelings of joy and sadness were pictures of my friends and family at my book launch.
I didn't realize how many pictures they had taken from it, or how many they had captured of my reaction to Graham surprising me.
Or even how Graham's presence had shifted the entire aura of the night, at least for me.