cringing and relenting love
(how they fall in love, and how they never fell in love.)
"Love is patient, love is kind…"
When Carol starts high school, there are smudges of ink on her fingertips. Her bag is tight with homework she knows she won't do, and books that she'll devour as soon as teacher's turn their backs.
They call her strange. Constantly scribbling away nonsense and lies and garbage into beat up notebooks she slipped away from classrooms when she could. They call her desires to be a writer strange.
She gets it. She's different. She has sleepless nights rimming beneath her eyes, and smile that doesn't quite exist and long hair that tangles too violently.
She meets a boy though in Biology, and she falls hard for the boy. They manage for three long months before he has raspberry lip gloss against his neck-
The exact type her (ex) best friend used. Carol knows, because it's the same type she picked out for her birthday present.
Everyone had known. Everyone and no one told her a single thing. Just gave her long stares that were crossed with pity, laughter and knowing. He was a joke. They were a joke. She was a joke. The joke everyone laughed to, and jeered at.
So she burns at the thought of the way he smirked into their kisses, and how his eyes were always open. She becomes livid at the hollow care her friend had devoted. The way she bristled and cringed away from Carol. The way perfume like vanilla and raspberries clung to his body, the type she never wore.
He had told her he loved her smile. The smile she never gave anyone but him.
She wrote fierce holes into her journal, and scratches our words that once meant something. That was something. Carol steals a bottle of her mother's wine when she doesn't look, and drinks it down like water.
She's angry for exactly two weeks after she finds the two tangled up in each other at her friend's house, and she ends her rage by hacking away her long hair into something short and spikey that her mother cringes at. It hurts, losing her long hair. It feels like saying goodbye and forcing life into dead bones.
She just wants to let go and move on. She stops crying and carrying on like a child, because she wants to be better than the rest of them.
Carol still wears his sweater to school the next day, because something's are easier to let go of than others.
It's just he transferred into her school almost a month after the disaster that was her broken heart, and he didn't know about any of it. So he sits down next to her in English, because no one will sit next to her. He looks at her ink stained finger tips, smirks-
"You're eyes are nice."
That's all he said to her for the first few days, before he starts nudging his elbow across the forbidden line that divides the two desks. He's clumsy with his pencil as he scribbles down notes, and she just sits in the dark classroom, fingering worn out copies of Great Gatsby and the completed works of Emily Dickinson.
His name was Edward.
Ed Peletier.
"How do you do that?" He asks as soon as the teacher leaves to go grab a boxful of books to hand out to the class.
She's confused, looking at him. There's a faint shadow of a bruise haunting his pale chin, and he's studying her intently. "Do what?" She asks dryly. She thinks she sees a smile catching at the corners of his mouth, sort of like the one she used to give the stupid boy she fell head over heels for.
"Read those books?" He pokes one dog eared copy with his chewed up pencil. There's an honest look of confusion on his face that warms her heart violently.
She laughs, and he stares at her. From then on, they wiggle their chairs a bit closer together. Elbows brush shyly when they take notes.
This is how it begins. Starting at the ending of a relationship, and ending at what could have been the beginning.
"It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud..."
No one seems surprised when Edward takes Carol out to some coffee shop a year later.
They had both known, really. It was something that was going to begin between the two, and Carol accepted it without hesitation.
It's dark inside the coffee shop, with shadows clinging to the corners. Quiet to, with the one girl manning to counter by herself. A few adults linger at tables, bent over newspapers or drinks. She thinks she recognizes a girl from her history class tucked away in the back with another girl.
They sit by a fake fireplace, next to a large canvas with paint splattered on violently. He gets her a tea and himself a coffee black.
They talk, and she asks nothing about the rough marks and cuts that he carries defensively. He doesn't demand to know what she writes about in her notebooks. Sometimes they sit in silence, stealing glances at each other. The tips of his ears burn red and she feels her hands shake.
He wants to be an engineer, he admits. She wants to just do something, she sighs with frustration.
Sometimes through the evening, she looks at his neck for a sign of raspberry lip gloss sheen that shouldn't be there.
It isn't there.
They leave the coffee shop, laughing. He tilts his head back and laughs deep and rich, and she smiling wider than she can remember. Her heart pounds a little harder as the get closer to her sagging house with the streaked windows. His footsteps sound heavier as they approach the divide. She's waiting for him to tell her, no. This will not happen.
It's only when they stand on her porch together beneath a flickering light, and he brushes his lips against her cheek-
She thinks this could be it.
But it wasn't. Not right away.
They dance around each other, circling again and again for days. His bruises become darker, and he shows up one day at school limping. She makes the mistake of asking him once, and he brushes her off. He cringes from her for days before the wrong doing finally scabbed over enough to face her again.
They have fewer classes together, just English where it all started.
It's enough though. They don't need to push to emerge together. They need to just be ready for the other one to make a move.
Even if that move didn't come five months after the date and two weeks before the second.
It's blurred. Blurred moments sewn together drunkenly like the cut on his arm until she can't figure out who went first. Who snagged who's wrist, and devoured the distance whole. Who clumsily latched onto whom, and who cringed before relenting.
After, she thinks that this is it.
"Love is not rude, it is not self-seeking..."
He gave her flowers, once. Only once.
They were soft, yellowed roses caught with blossoming red ones. He tells her to be careful, pointing out the thorns roughly. His palms were swollen with cuts. Two days later she hears her aging neighbour complain to her mother about his prize winning roses snatched up.
Carol never says a word. Just keeps them, until they dry up. Then, she takes the dried petals and locks them up tight in her Grandmother's old jewelry box with a pearl necklace she knows she will never wear. Her mother peers into her room every so often to see if Carol's still breathing. Never asks about the strange boy that knocks, rather than rings the bell. Will never wonder where the odd bottle of wine disappears to. Doesn't bother about her daughter's life.
Whenever her father comes home, he doesn't look at her. All she can see is a dying figure whose life curls into the wisps of cigarette smoke and broken dreams. He's tired. Aging faster than he should, according to the women next door. He has some woman down on the other side of the city, another neighbour whispers.
(he has some pregnant woman down on the other side of the city, is the truth.)
Carol never meets Edward's family. Doesn't need to, according the Edward.
He refuses to let her. Claims she better off without stepping a foot in his house. She never sees where he lives. Only knows that his home is deep in the snarls of a trailer park with a tarp snug over a broken window. He gets livid when she persists upon the subject. Pushes her away.
He admits much later that he doesn't have a mother. She gets the missing pieces to the story quickly after that.
His father is the town drunk legend.
He doesn't want to hurt her. He tells her that, as her eyes pick out the fresh split lip. He holds her tightly-too tightly without meaning. Edward walks her home, bringing her straight to her doorstep. Sometimes she wonders if he does it for her, or for delaying the return home. Sometimes he grabs her wrist and leaves a red mark, but he always says sorry. She gets it, for the most part. When he slams her against his locker, she almost goes into shock. Cringing away before relenting to his words.
Doesn't mind the pain, because all she can think about is the first boy that broke her heart.
Her other neighbours all talk of course, hushing their voices when she comes by. Their words, however, all find their way to her in the end.
"What is that girl getting herself into these days?"
"He'll knock her up before she can even think about graduating."
"Bet you anything he'll cheat and she'll be a right mess again. Just like before."
It's her one neighbour that gardens who knows all the pieces to the puzzle. He stops her on her way to school one day, grabbing onto her arm from across the fence. He tells her to stay.
She waits, fiddling with the straps of her book bag until he returns hobbling on his bad leg. He clutches a rose, soft yellow like a morning sunrise. He extends it out to her as he tells her gruffly, "People will change. Best you know that."
The rose looks harsher though, than before. Its gift is tainted by his words. The truth ringing hollow in her mind. She read 'Great Gatsby' during Bio and lunch, but finds nothing more than hollowed people seeking something real.
Edward smiles at her as they pass in the hallway between classes, his black eye violent against his pale skin.
She wonders if she's still seeking.
(seeking what?
Everything.)
She gets pregnant after the fifth time he forced himself on her.
"Love is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs..."
She becomes an artist with concealer.
She can make a mask that isn't blemished or broken. Conceal the sleepless nights spent guarding her baby girl from the monster that made her. She tries to be smart. To make the right choices. Carol stops speaking her words, following her actions blindly.
She starts calculating.
How much he will drink before all he can see is red.
How long it will take him to lash out.
How quickly it will take her to push Sophia out of the room.
How much longer it will take before she shrivels up and dies in this hell?
Carol never went to university. Never left the city for someplace better. Never wrote a masterpiece that would grant her a gifted life. Instead, she becomes a housewife. A nurse. A mediator. A survivor. A wife.
A mother.
Sophia becomes her prize. She becomes the center of her universe, really. Her soft eyes that trust her, strangers and Ed. Her daughter's foolish, she thinks sometimes. The way she scribbles down unicorns and fairies on old butcher paper that Carol will later tack on her bedroom wall.
The way she smiles after the little boy who pulls her hair.
Carol cringes at her daughter's smile. It's bright and full of life, and everything Carol can never be. It has more than a broken little girl with her spine covered in bruises. She loves everything.
Edward never wanted Sophia. Told her to fix the problem, before it became a problem. Forced her to drop out when it became the problem.
She never did fix it though. She had a scar jutting out over her hipbone, and a livid one across her shoulder. She had a record of wrongness across her body, and she wasn't going to add another one yet. Carol had let the creature form within her. Allowed it begin to take shape.
She had given birth in a tiny little hospital room alone, with a skeptical nurse taking in the livid cut on her thigh. She taken a cab home as soon as it had been alright for her to leave, holding her baby tight in her arms alone. Edward became Ed during this period. He had become sicker.
As Sophia grew, long legs and bright smiles, he began to watch.
Like the way he watched Carol after ripping her defenses apart.
"Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth..."
When the dead awaken, she prayed.
She plunged shoes and clothes into bags, tucking her old forgotten copy of 'Great Gatsby' into a side pocket.
"Put your shoes on, honey," she calls to Sophia softly as Ed storms by. The night is hollow with gunshots and the smell of smoke. Their house is being abandoned, like the rest of the neighbourhood. The bloodstain on the living room carpet and the creaky stairs will cease to be her home.
"You're not taking any of those damn books with you." He warns, grabbing Sophia by the arm. She cringes from his large hands, eyes glassing over with the tears Carol can't cry.
She says nothing, because she relents the way she always has.
She prayed though, to guard Sophia through the long days. To grant her a fast death, because all she can think about is poor Mrs. Fisher's children devoured violently. Little Betty Fisher's arm ripped out of its socket by the dead cashier who should be dead but isn't.
So she follows Ed out to the rusting car, buckles Sophia in it before can realize what is happening. She slips beside, folds her little girl to her side and prays.
Prays so hard she forgets to breath, and she wonders the fates of her old classmates and neighbours and that boy she once fell in love with. She wonders the way she wondered how Edward morphed into Ed, and how long it will take for Sophia to turn into a stupid little girl who forgot how to say no.
She prays so long it hurts.
Sophia leaves little marks on her arms, tiny hands grabbing hold to Carol. Carol tries to sooth her, tells her to shut her eyes and forget about the dead classmate on the side of the road, the little boy who pulled on her hair.
"You baby that brat," Ed scowls, turning sharply. She can hear someone screaming and the faint echoes of sirens. An announcement drones on repeat, directing the almost steady flow of the living to the city.
She says nothing, and Sophia wipes away her tears violently.
They pass a church burning, and Carol says nothing. Just closes her eyes and presses on, finding the words to pray her daughter to safety.
"Love always protects..."
She had never been stupid.
Carol had been smart enough for the most part, until boys came into the equation and messed her foundation up. Left her skewed and weak, and needing Ed.
So finds herself cornered, lost amongst a group of people so diverse the clash violently. A cop that stares too much at the angry words Ed spews, and a thin woman who's so obviously lost in the cop. There's an angry man with an angrier brother who makes her flinch.
She tries to keep Sophia near, keep her away from the rest.
Only, her little girl pulls away. Reaching out to the lost little boy who's numb to lose. She thinks maybe it'll be alright, that they'll scrap by an existence of eating squirrel and canned food. Beating clothes clean against rocks. Clamping together in sharp fear tanged with little mercy.
Ed is sour. He calls to the survivors and lashes out with words. They don't dare meet his eyes, and they give her long glances filled with pity.
The cop stares and speaks to her, but she doesn't listen.
All she wonders is if that little boy she fell for all those years ago survived the cities. Survived the fallout.
Survived.
She knows she really hasn't. Just waiting for her body to realize she hasn't got much of heart anymore.
"It always trusts, Love always hopes..."
He tells her, in the dim moments after he forces himself on her-
"I love you, you know that."
She trusts his words.
"It always perseveres..."
She stands at an open grave, her daughter wrapped tight in a tarp. She pulls away pages from what she thought she had forgotten, 'The Great Gatsby' until there is nothing left but memories unspoken.
She stands with her feet firm. A house rises in the distance, a barn swelling nearby. The sky stretches long and heavy, the hot sun burning wretchedly in the air.
She tries to remember her daughter's smile, her Edward's gentle words, that first time in English Class all those years ago-
She wants to take it back.
All of it.
She knows it's useless. She's already off, beating against the future with hesitance growing lesser and lesser.
Carol just wants the pieces that weren't wrong. The moment when Edward gave her roses. The stolen seconds where she would feel the flutter of life inside her.
She thinks back to the beginning.
"You're eyes are nice."
The very beginning.