Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. I just borrowed them for a minute.
AN: This is a little something that popped into my head last month. It's just a chance to get some of my own thoughts out in Gilmore Girls form. Enjoy.
She hardly ever thought about him anymore. What used to be a physically painful longing had dulled to mere curiosity now. Except on nights like this – estranged from her mother for the moment, holed up in her grandparents' pool house, ignoring her boyfriend's calls. On nights like this his memory reared up from the dark corner of her mind where she thought she had tamed him. The what ifs of their relationship leapfrogged through her thoughts, like sheep she counted with less soporific effect.
In the first weeks after he left, thoughts of him had been her constant companions. When she woke, she remembered his first visit to her room, the wicked gleam in his eye as he stood poised to escape through her window frame. When she stumbled into the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, she remembered him bringing her dinner and needling a sour-faced Paris. The recollection almost made her smile, or maybe cry, but then she would steady herself resolutely and move on. Walking into Luke's was like running an emotional gauntlet; the moment she opened the door she was hit with the full weight of their relationship and the barely concealed pity in the patrons' eyes. All too frequently she would escape to the bridge – their bridge – to let the memories bombard her in private. In her solitary moments she couldn't shake him; his memory was attentive as he had never been.
Her thoughts regularly took her back to their last – albeit one-sided – conversation, when she had stood in her graduation gown and rambled into a silent phone line. She had lied to him that day, or at least equivocated, as though adding a rush of qualifying words between "I" and "loved you" could somehow stem the tide of feelings in her heart. She had loved Dean; she had been in love with Jess. Though at the time the use of past tense had been false, now she felt fairly confident that it was true. Even a year ago, when he had returned to shock her with his own declaration, her overwhelming emotion had been anger, not love. How did he always manage to pick just the wrong time to declare himself? She had finally been getting over him when he showed up to shatter her fragile equilibrium. She had rejected his offer out of anger, yes, but also out of a strong sense of self-preservation and even fatalism. A love that incendiary could never last.
Finally, this year, she had begun to shed his constant company and reclaim her own mind once again. There where days when, while focusing in class or editing a particularly tricky article for the paper, she would belatedly realize that she hadn't thought of him for five minutes, or ten, or an hour. And when she brazened her way through that seduction at her grandparents' vow renewal, she barely thought about how this version of herself compared to the one who had melted into him outside the gas station one quiet and long-awaited night.
He hadn't completely left her thoughts, though, and she began to wonder if maybe it was okay to have him there. She questioned too, whether it was possible to love him and love another at the same time. Not that she was there yet, with Logan, but it seemed possible, as though if she just relaxed enough and didn't try too hard to block the past from her heart, she could ease into a new love with enough room left for the old. She thought it might not be fair to either of them, but she couldn't imagine her mind, her heart, any other way. His memory was a part of her, her very own version of him that always knew what to say. She was beginning to realize that his presence didn't have to diminish her new life at all. She felt guilty, sometimes, as though she was cheating on her boyfriend with a memory, but somewhere, in the part of herself that had never truly been naïve, she knew that their histories were the one thing that would always stand between them.
On nights like this, her memories were a security blanket she could pull out to protect her from the chill of her own bad choices, by giving her something to obsess about that she could no longer change. It was strangely comforting to turn their history over and over in her mind, wondering fruitlessly how she might have done things differently. The no longer viable possibilities were an escape hatch from the very real decisions she needed to be making; their constantly revolving options kept the past alive if only in her mind. In reality, when she allowed her thoughts to wander there, she knew she was leaving him behind her more every day. She almost dreaded the day, nearer now, when she would see him again and feel nothing beyond friendly curiosity. She wanted him to leave her alone, but she didn't want to let him go. Letting him go would mean that she was growing up, that all her choices mattered now, that she could no longer escape back to a time when her biggest decision had to do with which boy to kiss, not which life path to follow.
Reluctantly, she let her responsible side pull her back to the present, where she had choices to make and relationships to rebuild. Jess had been so important for so long, but now he was just an excuse to hide behind when the world seemed too frightening to face alone. She hoped one day to smile at her memories of him with the healthy distance her own happiness would create. In the meantime, she was stuck wading through the messes she had created instead. With a resolute calm she didn't feel, she picked up the phone and dialed familiar numbers.
"Mom? It's me, Rory. Can we talk?"